A sign tucked into the tea bar’s front window reads, A Robot-Free Establishment. This is an important disclaimer for hippie joints to make nowadays, the way Powered by Renewables and All Cultures and Faiths Welcome had once been en vogue, back in the days when the robot was a dance and the robot was a Halloween costume worn by pig-tailed fourth-graders dressed up in cardboard boxes and aluminum foil, back when the robot was a whimsical and clanky character in movies and the robot was a device that disarmed bombs on foreign soils, back when the robot implied white lab coats and whiny electronic revving sounds and the robot was something you were not. 

Back then, the only robotic elements in tea bars were coffee grinders, blenders, the fridge, the freezer, computers, the computerized cash registers, phones, tablets, the air conditioning system, and so on and so on, but nobody called these things robots; they were called smart. They required human input to operate, or at least to develop.

A double-sided chalkboard sign is propped on the sidewalk outside the tea bar, its two sides facing NNW and SSE, respectively, approximately, its dual faces cloudy, wiped daily by hand, rarely rinsed with water. In a small plastic tub resting on the hypotenuse of the triangle created by the ground and the two boards, little stubs of chalk cluster like a paleontologist’s bone collection. The sign once sported messages like, Your life is a museum displaying exactly itself, or The truth will set you free, but only when it’s finished with you. Today the sign reads, Forget artificial intelligence, it’s artificial idiocy we need to look out for. 

The tea bar’s front window is big and bay and elevated by a pulley. When the window reaches a desirable height, you wrap the rope around a hook and walk away. The window is currently elevated one point two meters, and fragments of inside conversations escape through the slit:

“–promised her I’d pull out, and I did, but I didn’t say whether I was going to come first.”

“–of putting in all those hours in the gym, is so that when you finally get out there, you don’t need to think. You don’t think and because you don’t think you are one hundred percent thoughtless and therefore in the flow, dancing.”

“I guess the thing to consider then is who takes control when you’re dancing.”

“The same person who controls my breathing when I’m not thinking about breathing.”

“–to hear the three greatest words a woman can ever say to you.”

“What? I love you?”

“No, come in me.” 

“–openly stated that there’s no free will, and then you’re going to get mad at me for getting home late. Like it’s my fault.”

“Well, then, if I don’t have free will either, you can’t be mad at me for getting mad.”

Atmospheric humidity necessitates that the tea bar’s door requires a small kick to open, which triggers a bronze bell, shaped and designed like bells everywhere, which triggers the harmonious and inconspicuous lifting, the bell, of the chins of the tea bar’s patrons to see who enters or exits.

Inside the tea bar, the softer strings of tete-a-tetes and heart-to-hearts and one-on-ones at the side tables compete with the more symphonic output from the large conversation in the middle, the group having pushed several tables together to encourage intimacy despite their numbers.

“-these dreams where I’m a dictator. You ever wish you were a dictator?”

“No.”

“And I solve all the world’s problems by ordering people to do stuff. I sometimes think, why a dictator though?”

“Like as opposed to being like a senator or president?”

“Yeah. It’s like I can’t see myself being peacefully elected.”

“–used their inheritance on breast implants and facial surgery, and then claimed it got them further in life than if they’d spent that money on an education or something.”

“-supposed to use our good judgment to arrest our bad impulses, but who says my good judgment isn’t a bad impulse in itself?”

“-would’ve thought by now someone would’ve figured out why humans inhale so deeply when they smell gas.”

“For the record, it wasn’t me. Mine have a more earthy scent.”

“Bots have this industrial hue to their gas. You smell it every time once you know what you’re looking for. And you need to recognize the smell, because they’re wily otherwise. They even know how to lift up a cheek. I’m a differentiator, actually. Here, take my card.”

The tea bar’s most popular drink is, is, is, is, is a lavender- and nettle-infused green chai called Evocative, one of those ambiguous, curiously-flavored drinks that you keep trying because you can’t figure out if you like it, and eventually you order it because you like the ambiguity. Many of the customers compare the experience of Evocative to when they first tried beer, or when they first tasted the discharge from between a lover’s legs. 

Old-fashioned paper books, mostly paperback, line the tea bar’s far wall, many with their front covers torn or missing, resting on shelves that sag in the middle, shelves with frayed corners that inflict one point seven splinters a month to the bookshelf’s perusers, approximately, a rate high enough for the tea bar’s proprietors to keep tweezers under the counter, but not high enough to consider replacing the shelves. Framed black and white photographs rim the shelf, and feature back-bended women kissed by sailor-capped men, skylines over waterfronts photographed mid-twinkle, sunlit marinas dotted with women parading in bikinis, each with a high waistline and a top tied florally between the breasts. A tip jar on the counter with a wide mouth invites customers to nostalgically deposit old paper currency. To invoke a similar sentiment, the tea bar’s proprietors wash mugs and dishes by hand, and dry them by air. An old wifi sign – password “smile1234” – hangs sentimentally in the corner. 

The tea bar is a Robot-Free Establishment, apparently, probably, but nobody can truly vouch for the veracity of such a claim, as it’s become impossible, perhaps, to tell the difference between natural and unnatural humans. At the dawn of the android era you could distinguish via the skin; a robot’s skin stretched blemish free and didn’t bruise or tear. Then the pivot to speech; robots always spoke in paragraphs, enunciating their t’s and never dropping an r. Additionally, most early humanoid robots were programmed with what was popularly called a Siri option, meaning you could propose to the robot any question and always get an answer, but if you always got an answer you knew the robot was a robot. In response, human programmers began programming robot humans with skin blemishes, with coughs and sicknesses, with pimples and rashes, even going so far as to enable robots to privately apply cuts and bruises to their own skin, the way natural humans once applied mascara and blush, and then human programmers computed ignorance into robot humans’ operating systems, had them say things like “I’m such a klutz” when they shared the manner in which their injuries were sustained. Programmers agreed on and enforced intelligence caps, and robots began to say things like, “Oh that’s way above my pay grade”, or “I dunno guys, I’m not that smart”, in response to certain questions. Or, drifting upstream instead of down, robots gave wildly false answers and proceeded to defend the feral falseness with face-reddening gusto, to dispel suspicion of their artificiality.

When it became taboo for natural humans to associate with unnaturals, some businesses began hanging a retina scan above their front doors (some private residences, too, if you could afford it), as a way of meting out the wrong customers, but this was quickly chided as both an invasion of privacy and too easy an obstacle for the robots to overcome, as robots were supposed to be able to pass these kinds of tests, and they did. The retina scan was briefly replaced with a kind of body scan, a variant of the kind once used at airports, and customers at, say, a tea bar, could look up at the screen above the door when someone walked in and tell if he or she had a ribcage and a femur and a beating heart, or whether the thing was skeletally robotic. The body scan proved briefly more effective than the retina scan, but was similarly hackable and overridable by savvy robots and their even savvier programmers, and anyways the body scans displayed a very intimate image of the humans that passed through it, not always appreciated by humans who actually felt things like shame and embarrassment, and so establishments began to advertise that theirs was a Scan-Free Establishment, but that also meant, of course, that robots could once again enter unimpeded. 

Natural humans, meanwhile, brainstormed new ways to reassert their humanity over the threat implied. They organized on street corners and slapped each other in the face, harder and harder, after each slap chanting, louder and louder, I feel! I feel! Elsewhere, group masterbation sessions sprang up, with tremendous applause every time somebody flushed and came. Just to be sure, biologists would then collect the seminal and vaginal excretions and examine them for affirming bacteria and microbodies. DNA testing became a new national pastime. You walked around with your lab chart, proof you weren’t created in one.

Every interaction became a Turing test. It was not unusual for new acquaintances to smell each other’s bowel movements. Wryness and nuance became the natural human’s most important qualities, features not yet mastered by robots. Meanwhile, nobody stopped to consider that the arms race between humanoid assertion and humanoid deception could’ve been seriously retarded had the natural humans’ phobias of androids not accelerated the programmers’ impetus to create more deceptively humanoid androids. Therefore, by now, to enter an establishment like, say, the tea bar, and expect to be served by a human, or even to expect to be sitting among humans, was a shot in the dark, but people frequented the tea bar anyway, including people like me. I shut the door self-consciously, noticing the gunslinger-in-a-saloon-type feel to my entry, like I should be backlit by a western sun as everyone turned to make the impossible judgment. I wonder what I would think, seeing myself enter.

At the counter I nod at the barista and order an Evocative. I find a perch and listen as conversations continue to bubble.

“I like an ass with personality, a personality preferably different from the woman who wears it on her hips, because, you know, there’s nothing better than meeting these super rigid and feminist girls and then you check out their ass and it’s like this whole other sassy person staring up at you.” 

“-these Hitler dreams where I’m Hitler, but I’m like a good Hitler, a smart Hitler, where I don’t invade Russia and don’t do the gas chambers and stuff, but I still invade France and take over Europe. I spend the whole dream trying to win the approval of the United States.”

“-dinner party attended by all these important people, theologians, historians, spiritualists, and so on, and they start discussing reality. They keep asking what’s reality, what’s reality, and their answers get more and more involved and elaborate, and finally they look at this one guy and say, you haven’t spoken, what’s reality, and the guy kind of shrugs and points to his fork.”

“-and the judge at the sentencing asks the defendant why he’s carrying around a notebook, and he says, I’m going to be the next great dictator to write a book in jail, I need notes.”

“-that moment when, you know, like when you lose yourself and everything is wet and glistening and you stop worrying about stupid shit and you’re not even really there anymore, you’ve dissolved. That’s post-sexual. But I’m, like, post-sexual all the time.”

“I think I’m actually post-primordial, meaning I’m less concerned about what happens to me than I am about my ability to understand what happens to me.”

The conversations collide and drip like the coffee beans blending and dripping behind the bar, and after a while you stop filtering them and the voices unify with the hums of the city slicing under the slit of the raised window. I have this condition where I constantly feel my pulse. I feel it now, in my temples. It used to happen only when I layed down, but now it’s an all the time thing. Is there a name for this, and would it be called a tic or an obsession?

A theory: A robot looks and talks and behaves just like a human, and it very much seems like this robot is conscious, and if you did not know it was a robot you would think yes, this robot is conscious, and if you asked the robot itself, it would say, yes yes, of course I’m conscious. But because you know the robot is a robot, you know that the robot’s supposed consciousness is merely a trick, an illusion, however real it seems. The point is, what if for us naturals it’s the same illusion, that we’re not actually conscious, but it feels like we are, so we assume we are.

The naturals in the tea bar argue, I emerged from the womb, so I am…, and then they trail off because they can’t think of what they are. Sometimes they just put a period after I am.

Not a single natural or unnatural human signed up for consciousness, not a single one. Neither species consciously learned to pump their own blood, to filter waste through their own kidneys, to bipedal across the kitchen floor, did not learn to trigger the vocal chords to produce speech, did not invent the English language or the brain. And yet almost every natural believes that they are a construction of their own design, a belief so false it is deceptively true. Who has created me? I have.

What’s the difference between a supposed natural, privately instructed in a uterus, genetically scripted in a womb, and birthed through a canal, and an unnatural, instructed in code, incubated in a lab, and birthed with an on switch? Genotype vs binary code.

Unnaturals, before programmers reigned in their logic, liked to point out that, not so long ago, humans attended meditation groups and did yoga and signed up for wishy-washy seminars to try and lose something called an ego. All the while, robotic engineers tried to instill a sense of ego in their android creations. Now, humans reclaim their egos as a means of reclaiming their humanness. 

One of the (supposed) naturals from the cluster of tables in the center, a female, gets up and navigates to a counter, on which sit stacks of napkins and pitchers of water. I’m perched near the counter, which means I’m now perched near her. She sets her empty mug and plate in the bin among the other empty mugs and plates. She doesn’t seem to notice, but the pile of dirty dishes now stores a fair amount of potential energy, a dangerous surplus created by her casually deposited mug. A slight bump could collapse the entire fort. 

She has short hair, a pixie haircut, it’s called, and freckles on her nose. My arousal is automatic; I’m quickly aflame. My pulse shifts and I now feel it several places at once, like alarms ringing in different rooms. When she’s close enough to grasp that anything I say can only be directed at her, I say, “I think we’ve met before.”

“Oh yeah?” Her subsequent smile tells me things, and I involuntarily smile back. My bottom incisor on the left, number 12 or 22 in dental parlance, is chipped. It shows when I smile, but it’s not something she’s likely to notice until she studies my smile in a more intimate setting. She pours herself a glass of water. Her eyes meet mine, and she studies me quizzically through them, as both naturals and unnaturals use visual expression to acquire data. Her curiosity reflects the manner of a woman indicating to a man that she’s thinking of giving him a shot, but isn’t sure yet. I am the object of her curiosity. I am that man. The distance between us is the speed of light, of sound. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Remind me when?”

I pretend to be bashful. “You don’t remember?”

“Should I?”

I nod. “Yes, we were in that tea bar, and you went up to get a glass of water and I looked at you and said, I think we’ve met before.” 

Our eyes share a moment of mirth, but she emits no audible response, and I won’t laugh unless she laughs. She declines laughter, but it’s better like this, as her laughter would have been polite, the politeness a barrier to deeper levels of connection. 

Before she can say, You must not have been memorable, I say, “What are you?”

What are you is a much better introductory question than the how variety. In a literal sense, the answer to How are you is always the same. I am how I am due to a complicated web of RNA and chemistry and evolution and semantics and illusions. For unnaturals, the answer is always, I am how I am because of technological innovation and trial and error and superb advances in battery life.

She frowns. “Excuse me, what?” 

I remind myself that not everyone appreciates my revolutionary improvements in small talk. “No, sorry. How. How are you?”

Her lingering frown reminds me of tea without milk or sugar. “I’m great,” she says, with a hint of caution. “And you?” 

The girl’s pixie haircut emphasizes her neckline. History’s angriest executioners would lay down their axes at the thought of severing such. The world’s greatest artists would similarly set down their brushes and walk away from such a neck, muttering, only nature, only nature. Did this woman know the power of her neckline before her pixie cut?

“I’m great, too,” I proclaim, casually. My pick-up manual instructs that the best way to attract a mate is not to try. “You know, I heard a little of what you were saying. Earlier, I mean.”

A male figure looks over at us from the cluster of tables and then looks back. 

“Oh yeah?” she says, her voice now the secretarial tone used by women accustomed to constant advances from men. “Do we sound crazy? I sometimes can’t tell if my friends and I sound crazy.”

Her accent, a watered-down Southern, rural Georgia, maybe, is incongruent with her neckline, which suggests something French and oenophilic. 

If I were a king, and she in my fiefdom, I would ban the use of scarves and collars.

I hand her a napkin, which she wraps around her sweating water cup, and I’m delighted that she grasped my intention with the napkin without me having to state it.

“Here’s the thing about jumping,” I say.

We each execute a bodily shift, me from perching to fully standing, her from equi-balanced to weight on one leg. We have time for one point four more bodily shifts each, approximately, before I will have to either invite her to an extension of the conversation elsewhere, or concede defeat; we cannot keep standing in front of the water pitchers. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not following you. Jumping?” 

“Yes, jumping. You were talking about people choosing to jump off a bridge or not, and what that choice might prove about self-autonomy.”

“The sad man leaning off a high bridge.”

The distance between us diminishes to less than the speed of sound or light. I say, “Yes. Does he give up and jump, himself? Or is he given up by the system he’s a part of? If he has free will, he’s just a man standing on a bridge. He can always go home. If he doesn’t have free will, there is no bridge, no man, no jump.”

My cognitive processing is invisible to the conscious mechanism, yet it happens nonetheless. I cannot stop it. I continue, “The man gauges the depth of the drop and asks pressing questions. He thinks, is my life a success or failure? He wonders, what is success? He answers, success is knowing that I would do it all again, no matter the outcome. He judges his life by this standard, and thereby the outcome.”

I watch her as she processes my words – I still don’t know her name – sipping water and containing me in her field of vision. She’s suspicious. I’ve made errors, forgot to blink, demonstrated too efficient a memory. I douse my flames and prepare for the severing, literal and figurative, of the distances between us.

“I’ve got to get back,” she says, nodding at the group table in the middle. The man who’d looked over is still looking.

“Of course.” 

I’m already analyzing our conversation. Next time I’ll be better, more realistic, less abstract. 

I watch her walk away. She is the edge of progress. Earlier versions of her species could not flaunt necks like hers.

She is the edge of progress, but so am I. I’m programmed to try, and to keep trying, and I will.