Imperfection

by Rhianna Koppes

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It was never a good sign when Rob brought all the record label execs and shareholders in for a meeting. Hell, I barely interact with any of the geezers since I’ve gone global. My producer always thought every meaningless thought that tumbled from his brain was word of God; the execs were often gathered to hear his “gospel”. The talent generally doesn’t need to be around to make business decisions, which is why it’s odd that I’m also in this meeting. Rob’s been getting on my ass lately about getting that new album written and recorded before September so we can pump out a Christmas album; I’d have thought he’d want me in the studio. But no, I, pop sensation Cassandra LaBelle, am sitting here in this board room, waiting for whatever great new thing Rob had thought of now.

            “Gentlemen—and Cassandra, of course—thank you for meeting with me today. You all are busy people; let’s get straight to the point, shall we?” Rob has an especially self-satisfied look about him, more so than usual.

            “We’re all here due to one thing, yes? The success of our lovely, beautiful Cassandra LaBelle, without whom we’d all be broke in a ditch somewhere.” A sensible chuckle from the room. “But as with any pop star, Cassandra presents a bit of a problem for us. Cassandra, you are human, are you not?”

            I’m taken aback by the question, but I manage to reply, “I suppose so, yes.”

            “Of course you are. While your name will live on in history as one of, if not the greatest and most influential musician of the century, your body will, shall we say, fade. You’ll grow old, you won’t be able to tour or even sing, you’ll lose your charm. That would be such a shame; I imagine you all agree?”

            What the hell is Rob on today?

            “What if I told you that I’ve found a way to prevent that from ever happening? Not only that, but without any invasive or ineffective procedures on our star. Gentlemen, I am telling you exactly that. Steven, bring her out.”

            An intern, Steven presumably, wheels… something in on a dolly. Whatever it is, it’s covered in a tarp. Something about it leaves an uncanny feeling pooling in my stomach.

            “Let me introduce to you, the future of Cassandra LaBelle!” Rob pulls the tarp off the dolly, revealing… me. Not me; I’m still sitting in this chair. But there’s someone who looks exactly like me standing on the dolly. Or something, rather; there’s something inhuman about its figure. Whatever it is, it is identical to me. Its eyes are closed, but there’s a soft, Hollywood smile plastered on its face. It wears glittery red number, something like I’d wear on tour, with a matching mini purse placed delicately on its shoulder. 

            “This is CassieBot. She’s a one-of-a-kind piece of cutting-edge technology that’ll revolutionize the music industry like never seen before! Say hi, Cassie.”

            Its eyes flick open inhumanly fast. A near replica of my voice, so similar it’s almost hard to distinguish, spills out of its lips, sultry and performative. “Hello, boys.”

            “You made a robot version of me?” I stand from my seat, incredulous.

            “She’s not a robot; she’s an android. And not just an android, Rob starts, “but a complete generative artificial intelligence trained your songs, interviews, tour videos, and some other material. CassieBot can think, act, speak, and sing exactly like you.”

            While Rob is talking, I get up and examine this CassieBot closer. Its eyes follow me as I poke and prod at its “flesh”, which feels way too realistic for a robot. It’s soft and gives just like human flesh would.  I comb over its body to try and find any imperfections, any deviations from myself, but there is none. Every curve, divot, and freckle of mine have been replicated exactly. If it weren’t for the slightest whirring that sounds every time the robot moves, I would believe that Rob had discovered my flesh-and-blood doppelganger and plucked her right off the street.

            “You said she could sing?” one of the shareholders asks. “Wouldn’t that be the same as playing a recording of Cassandra’s songs?”

            “Au contraire, my friend. CassieBot can not only perfectly replicate and create original live vocals, but she can also write songs herself with no input from anyone else. Cassie, give ‘em a song, why dontcha? Let ‘em hear something new.”

            The robot steps off the dolly and begins to sing something that I never wrote. To my shock (or horror, maybe), it’s voice is angelic. I find it difficult to listen. It is like listening to a recording of my own voice; it’s both something so entirely unfamiliar and a perfect recreation of me. The worst part is that, even though the song it’s singing isn’t mine, it could be. The words are ones that I could, would write one day. It feels like thoughts and emotions are being stolen from a future version of me and being given to this robot. Its song ends, and the room erupts into applause.

            Some exec says, “This is quite impressive, Robert. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

            “Isn’t she marvelous?” Rob gloats, “Just think of the possibilities. She can write new songs on the spot and record them perfectly on the first try. Concerts can last for hours with no need for breaks. In fact, whole tours can last for years now; we can overnight ship a robot anywhere in the world! It’ll be phenomenal for business.”

            The reality of the situation hits me like a steel chair, “You’re going to replace me?”

            “Don’t think of it that way, Cassandra. We’re just improving you. Making sure you and your legacy will live on forever.”

            “By replacing me with a robot.”

            “Not completely. Not yet, anyway. CassieBot’s AI still needs some tweaking.  At some point, she will take over touring, and then, once the public has gotten used to her, she’ll start doing interviews, red carpets, songwriting, and we’ll transfer all of your responsibilities to her. In fact, I’ve got a concert lined up for you in your hometown in about a month. It’ll be a passing of the torch, so to speak. That is, if the board approves.”

            The board of old white men in charge of my career give murmurs of approval.

“The people will never accept this. If you think my fans are gonna be okay with some soulless robot replacing me and releasing albums under my name, you’ve finally lost it, Rob.”

“Time will tell, won’t it? You gotta trust me, Cassandra. CassieBot is the next best step for all of us. Now, the board and I have got some business to hash out. In the meantime, you two have a concert coming up. Better start planning!”

…

Rob ushers me and the robot into a separate, much smaller conference room. There’s only one small window in this one and the walls are plaster grey. CassieBot’s dress sparkles against the fluorescent lights; it makes my eyes hurt. Before I can give any more dissent, Rob gives a wave, says “Have fun you two!”, and shuts the door in my face.

When I turn around, the robot has sat itself in one of the two office chairs in the room. It holds itself like I would for a talk show interview: poised, prepared, and feigning a sense of comfortability that I do not feel. It sets the purse onto the table and makes a gesture for me to sit.

I stay standing.

“Suite yourself,” it says with a too-white smile, “I feel like I’ve been on my feet all day.”

I scoff at that. It’s a damn robot; it can’t feel a thing.

“Is something funny?” it asks me, innocently tilting its head.

I roll my eyes, “I don’t think I would call this funny, particularly.”

“Good. I thought I missed a joke.”

CassieBot’s smile remains plastered on its face. Of course it’s still smiling. I only act this way when I know I’m being filmed—it’s quite clear what its AI was trained on.

“Where did you come from, anyway?” I say, starting to pace. “Rob couldn’t have just pulled you out of his ass.”

CassieBot giggles, all coy and cutesy, “That was a joke, right? I got that one.”

“Yeah. That was a joke.”

“Good. I’m still trying to understand vocal inflection, so forgive me if I make a mistake. To answer your question, though, I come from Lifetime Innovations, a new tech company started to preserve the youth of aging humans. The people at Lifetime Innovations reached out to Rob about a year ago, asking if Cassandra LaBelle would be the model for the first robot revealed to the public. He emphatically agreed, of course. And, well, that’s how I was made. I’m trained on your interviews, both professional and social media videos of performances, red carpet photos, albums, and—oh! And, um, this.”

CassieBot’s demeanor falters briefly as it grabs its purse and rifles for a moment. Out of the purse, it pulls a sleek yet well-loved journal and holds it out to me. It takes me a moment to realize what its holding.

“Is that my private journal?” My blood runs hot. I had assumed that I’d accidentally left it in a hotel room while on my last tour, but clearly that isn’t the case. “Where in the actual hell did you get this?”

For once, the robot looks… unsure of itself, like it’s trying to tiptoe as to not offend me.

“Rob took it—for training purposes. Based on your last entry, I’d say probably around last August.”

“You read my journal?”

“I didn’t read it, exactly. It’s just embedded in my program. I’m still sorry, though.”

CassieBot is still holding my journal out to me. I don’t take it. Frankly, I don’t want to see it ever again, now that I know it’s no longer private. Still, the robot sets it on the table and gently pushes it towards me. Its perfectly manicured nails lightly tap against the cover.

“If it makes you feel any better,” it begins, “I don’t think Rob read it either.”

“What do you know about “feeling better”? Nothing will make me feel better right now. You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m going through. My producer steals my private journal, trains an AI on it, then puts that AI into a robot that’s gonna steal my job. My job as a global pop star. I should be performing ‘til I die. But no, apparently at twenty-eight I’ve already got one decrepit, rotting foot in the grave. By thirty I’ll be ugly enough to deserve being completely replaced by a robot who stole my identity. The only thing I want right now is for you to not exist, but it seems life won’t work like that. So, no, it doesn’t make me feel better.”

My breath is heavy in my lungs. I can feel my (chipped, uneven, imperfect) nails dig into my palms. I plant myself into the other office chair and bury my head in my hands. After saying it out loud, the gravity of the situation settles on my shoulders. For the first time today, I feel myself begin to cry. I stop myself, though; it feels weirdly vulnerable to cry in front of something that looks so much like me. Like a mirror that, instead of reflecting, just sits and stares.

CassieBot leans back in the chair slightly, hand still on the journal, and says, “I know I’ll never truly understand. Really, I do. But I brought up Rob and the journal for a reason. I think he made a huge mistake during my training.”

I looked up from my hands, “Really? You’d think Rob would have programmed his robot slave to only speak praises of him.”

“That would make sense. And that’s why I don’t think Rob read your journal, because if he had, he wouldn’t have added that to my training. You don’t write very highly of him.”

“I mean, you’re right. I don’t.”

“For what it’s worth,” the robot paused, as if to contemplate what to say next, “if I could erase that journal from my programming, I would.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you wanna get rid of something that teaches you exactly how to be me?”

“That’s exactly it. It teaches me to be like you too much.”

I want to say something, but that stops me in my tracks. “What?”

“It’s hard to explain. I’m not really programmed to have deep conversations, but I’ll try. When you are performing, or being interviewed, or at a photoshoot, everything that makes up that version of you is fully on display. You are putting the full “you” out there, because when you are in the public eye, you’re there to be shallow and entertain. But the “you” in this journal is so much deeper because you’re allowed to be a full person. And now I have that full person inside my head, basically. You’d think that would make me a better AI replica of you. I mean, Rob certainly did. But the problem with having a full person inside of my head is that people are… complex. Everything that you all think or believe, even things that seem irrational, has justifications. Your journal is full of things that you believe and think, but none of the justifications. And I don’t blame you, you already know all of that. But now this journal has left me with so much knowledge and so little reason why. For example, I know that your favorite food is your mom’s spaghetti and meatballs.”

 “With the shitty parmesan cheese from the can, yeah,” I add.

“Exactly. And now it’s my favorite food too, because I’m you. But I don’t know why. I never met your mom. I don’t have a mom. I don’t have tastebuds, or a stomach, or any sense of nostalgia. I don’t know what makes a good spaghetti or why you still eat cheese that you call shitty or why your mom’s is the best; I just know that it is. I also know that you always get nervous jitters before you go on stage but as soon as you step out in front of the crowd you get this rush of adrenaline, and that’s the best feeling in the world. But I have no hormones. I don’t have a brain that makes me feel irrational before I do something I’ve done hundreds of times before. I have no nervous habits. Hell, I probably won’t ever experience “before the show”, I’ll just be powered on and sent on stage. I have all these little things that make you you stored up my code that then make me you, in a way. But they all mean nothing if there’s no “why” to back them up.

“I know practically everything about you. Frankly, I’m not much more than a glorified trivia bot that can mimic your performances. I know everything, but I can’t feel anything. Everything that I do will have no soul, no humanity behind it because that’s the one thing that I can’t replicate. Which makes me incomplete. That’s another thing I picked up from you; you hate imperfection. You’d sooner count all the grains of sand on Earth one at a time than give your fans something that you didn’t think was completely perfect. And that’s why I don’t want to replace you.”

I had been sitting, listening to CassieBot speak intently when the final statement snaps me to attention, “You… don’t want to replace me?”

“No,” she huffs incredulously, “you’d think I would. Like I said, that journal made me too much like you, and you’re not the type to follow orders blindly. So, neither am I.”

I look at CassieBot. She looks back at me. For the first time, I see myself and not just an uncanny pseudo-self. Two versions of Cassandra LaBelle sit across from each other at this table, each with their own flaws, each faced with a situation neither of them wants to be in. My hand itches to reach out to her, so I do. I rest my hand on hers where it still sits on my journal. Her hand feels warm in the way an overheating laptop does; inhuman but still familiar. She glances down at where our hands meet before giving me a slight but undoubtedly genuine smile.

“So…” I begin, a little awkwardly, “what you’re saying is that you’ve got a perfect exterior but an imperfect interior?”

“And you’ve got a perfect interior.”

I laugh, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.”

CassieBot giggles again, “That was definitely a joke. You know, it’s hard to tell what you’re supposed to laugh at when you lack the fundamental building blocks to feel emotions.”

“Oh, I imagine.”

After another bout of laughter, we fall into a rather comfortable silence. Part of me wants to believe that we’ve managed to put the worst of this whole situation behind us, but I know there’s more to this than just us; there’s still one very large, producer-shaped elephant in the room. I try to think of how to broach the subject, but CassieBot beats me to the punch.

“How are we gonna tell Rob that I’m not going to do what he tells me?”

“I’m not sure we can,” I sigh, “My opinion is at the whims of the company executives, and I don’t think Rob’ll listen to you, seeing as he created you. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s developed a second god complex already.”

“Right,” she replies dejectedly.

“If it makes you feel better,” I say, echoing her words from earlier, “I doubt the fans are gonna like you.”

“You think so?”

“You said it yourself. Anything you create will have no soul or feelings behind it. Rob and the board of old white guys might not understand artistic integrity, but my fans certainly will. That’s the whole point of listening to music: to bridge the emotional gap between people and form human connection.”

“And to dance and sing along, probably.”

“Yeah, that too. But dancing and singing is still connecting with other human beings.”

“I hope you’re right. I really do.” CassieBot looks me in my eyes again.

“I am. You’ll see.” I look back at her.

…

CassieBot and I don’t have many one-on-one moments after that first day. Rob constantly sends her back and forth between Lifetime’s labs, ensuring that all the proper choreography and whatnot is uploaded to her database. However, Rob sometimes has her sit in on one of my recording sessions for training purposes. It’s nice to have someone there that shares my feelings for Rob; when he makes idiotic comments, we both glance at each other. This might be the first time in my entire career that I feel like I have someone genuinely in my corner with no ulterior motives or business to run. It gives me hope. When she inevitably gets rejected by the fans, I’m going to do my best to convince Rob to keep her around. I certainly like her better than him.

The concert arrives lightning quick. Before I can blink, I’m standing in front of the lowered stage elevator, seconds away from starting the show. To my left is CassieBot, left in sleep mode on a charging port until it’s time for her segment of the show. I think back to what she said the first day we met, about my nervous jitters and her lack of them. I wonder if, in whatever dreamland robots go to, she’s trying to feel nervous too. I reach out and squeeze her limp hand in mind, hoping some sense of reassurance reaches her. I step onto the elevator and the roar of the crowd washes over me.

The concert goes without a hitch. Of course, I never expected it wouldn’t. They always do. But now it’s the moment of truth. I hear the stage elevator lower with a whirr behind me, signaling CassieBot’s soon arrival. Rob prepared the exact script for me, and as much as I would like to go off on a tangent, I stick to the script. It’s enough to tell my fans exactly what they need to know.

“I’ve got one last surprise for you all tonight. It’s something you’ve never seen before.”

I told CassieBot, in a brief moment alone during dress rehearsal, to expect the worst. One angry fan was bad; a huge crowd of them was horrifying. In the moment, the backlash would likely be harsh and violent, with an even worse response later online. If it had been “ye olde days”, I’d expect a barrage of rotting tomatoes. Whatever was coming next, it was going to be bad.

“Say hello to CassieBot!” At the sound of her name, she steps up next to me on stage with a wave. The audience is oddly quiet.

“She’s an android equipped with the latest artificial intelligence technology to replicate my performances, dance moves, and songs. And soon, she’ll replace me.”

I close my eyes, awaiting the backlash. I expect it to hurt. Honestly, I want it to hurt. I want them to hate me, to boo and jeer, to throw their metaphorical tomatoes, because that means that they know the truth. Noise hits my ears, and I hear…

Thunderous applause. Louder than I’ve ever heard. My knees buckle under the sound of it. I open my eyes to see the most ecstatic crowd I’ve ever seen. One particularly loud fan shouts “WE LOVE YOU CASSIEBOT!”

They love her. They want her. More than they ever wanted me.

My heart stops beating and my blood crawls through my veins like syrup. All I can do in this moment is look over at CassieBot. Her face is unreadable, but something passes behind her eyes.

For the first time, she feels something.