I Was Made For Loving You Baby

Four: Substitute.

(Takes place between S6.6 ‘All The Way’ and S6.7 ‘Once More With Feeling’)

“It’s quite astounding,” Giles said. “You don’t even sound like Buffy any more.”

“I do so sound like Buffy. I’m big with the Buffy-sounding,” I said, in Buffy’s voice. “When I want to be, that is,” I went on, reverting to the voice I had chosen for myself as Violet.

“How do you do that?”

“Easy. You know I don’t speak the way you do, right? I just play sound files, and my mouth movements are only for effect. Well, I’ve altered the files slightly. Added a little Stevie Nicks, a little Alicia Silverstone, changed the pitch a touch. I got the idea from a book Spike lent me, Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’. The sentient computer in the book uses multiple voices, even manipulates video images, creates multiple fictional personalities. I’m not in that league, but coming up with a voice that can be my own is no biggy. Does it sound okay to you? Honest opinion.”

Giles fidgeted. “Yes, it does sound okay. In fact, I have to admit it is a remarkably attractive voice. It is completely human in every way. Vocabulary, phrasing, rhythm, and intonation. You are no longer simply parroting Buffy’s phrases, as you did when we first encountered you. If we didn’t know that you are a robot we would have no way of telling. You have made remarkable progress even since you first became self aware.”

“Books, movies, interaction with humans. You think I’m doing good? As in, being successful, not as in fighting the good fight. Which I do anyway, but, off topic.”

“As I said, your progress has been remarkable. Miraculous, even. I wonder …” His voice trailed off.

“You wonder what? Come on, Giles, don’t leave it hanging.”

“I wonder whether Willow somehow managed to imbue you with a human soul.”

“Oh, come on, Giles, get over this soul complex,” I scolded him. “I’m a robot. Deal with it. No soul, no heart. Artificial intelligence here.”

“If you say so,” he replied, obviously unconvinced. “If your personality does stem entirely from programming then Warren Mears should win a Nobel Prize. Even your original performance level as the BuffyBot was a quantum leap ahead of any other developments in artificial intelligence, and indeed the pure mechanics of your physical abilities are far more advanced than any other humanoid robot.”

“He stole everything,” I informed him. “I’ve looked at all my program files. They’re full of things like ‘Copyright MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’, ‘Copyright Ai Research’, ‘Copyright JPL’, and ‘Copyright SonyCorp’. I didn’t really understand until I started doing my own bit of hacking. He stole programs from everyone in the field, and put them all together. It ended up something beyond what anyone else had done, but he didn’t create it. I think he stole all the bits and pieces of my classy chassis too. Well, apart from some bits which no way am I going to discuss with somebody who I can’t help thinking of as my Watcher. I think he might have bought those bits.”

Giles went red and took off his glasses. “Still an amazing achievement,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “However, your mention of me being your Watcher reminds me of a worrying aspect of your creation. Spike revealed far too much about us all to someone about whom we know very little. Warren’s earlier project, April, implies that he is perhaps not totally rational in his motivations.”

“Spike didn’t spill all that much. A couple of paragraphs about each of you, is all. I filled in the blanks from listening to him talk and from interactions with you all. A lot of it didn’t really make sense until I ‘woke up’. It was only about Buffy herself that he got big with the details.” I frowned. This was a deliberate decision involving activation of eleven different devices. Humans do it automatically. I do it by choice, as a visual signal of my thought processes, partly because it makes me appear more human and partly because it helps the other party in a conversation to follow my meaning. “Which I guess is a bit of a big spill. He put a command line in my programming which I don’t think you’d be too happy about. Sort of like the secret fourth prime directive that OCP put in Robocop. He could take control of me. I’ve deleted all that stuff now, nobody controls me but me, but it’s not cool it was there to start with.”

“Oh dear.” Giles began polishing the lenses of his spectacles. They were already clean; this was a nervous displacement activity and indicated that he was worried. “Yes. Very ‘not cool’, as you put it. Extremely worrying.”

“Deleted already. Lighten up.”

“Worrying that he felt the desire to install that directive, I mean,” Giles explained.

“Yeah, know what you mean, but hey, he’s probably off working for Microsoft or something these days. And if he ever tried to activate it, big surprise. All he’d do would be to get me majorly pissed. Nobody controls me but me.”

“Is that why you are so wary of Willow?”

“Damn right. She’s big with the controlling. It’s strange. Spike got everybody else so right. How come he was so wrong about Willow? I mean, he put protecting her as one of my top priorities. Even above you.”

“Spike had you programmed to protect us right from the beginning? Yes, I remember you coming to my assistance in the lobby of Glory’s building. You turned away from aiding Spike to come to my rescue, if I remember correctly. May I ask what those priorities were?”

“Yeah, sure, go ahead.” He didn’t ask. I realized that I had mistaken his meaning and that he had not really been asking for permission to ask the question. I amended a file to avoid making the same mistake again and answered him just as he was drawing breath to repeat his query. “Priority one would have been to protect Joyce, but that was superfluous because she died while I was under construction, so that meant that priority one was Dawn. Priority two was Willow, then you, then Spike himself, then Xander, then Tara, then Anya, and then innocent bystanders. Myself last.”

“No mention of Buffy?”

“Hey, I had to believe I was Buffy. He didn’t want us ever to meet.”

“He actually made protecting me a higher priority than himself?”

“Yeah. You were more likely to need it, and losing you would really hurt Buffy. He loves her. Anyway, don’t tell him I told you, but Spike likes you.”

“I’ve begun to realize that over the past few weeks,” Giles replied. “I’m getting a new perspective on Spike through you. He’s not so bad, really. But don’t tell him I said so.”

“Stuffy reserved British guy. Him too. God, you two are so like Lister and Rimmer. Not that Lister’s stuffy and reserved, but with the liking each other and not admitting it thing.”

“Hey, I resent that!” Giles protested, and then began to laugh. “I admit I can see a bit of Lister in Spike. You’d be Kryten in that analogy. I have to say there isn’t really a lot of resemblance.”

“Other than us both being robots, no. Maybe I’m more like Holly in series three to five. Although not so much even there. I want to be Kochanski. The original Clare Grogan Kochanski.”

“Yes, hmm. Violet, if you don’t mind my asking, how is it that you have such an obvious affection for Buffy? I would have expected you to regard her as a rival for Spike’s attentions.”

“I do. It just doesn’t stop me liking her. I think of myself as her sister. Or her cousin from LA, like the fake ID says, but as close as a sister. It’s the only way things make sense to me. Don’t expect me to explain it to you. Hey, me speaking coherent sentences is way past what you should expect, right?”

“I must confess there is very little about you that I understand. I can manage to cope with e-mail these days, after a struggle, but a self aware robot who is, I have to say, extremely likeable, and with a generous nature and a sense of humor, is completely beyond my comprehension. Despite your denials, the only way I can accept you is to regard you as having a human soul.”

“Okay, you do that. I have to treat the squishy grey thing in your head as being a hard drive for humans to make sense to me, so fair enough.” I grinned at him, and he smiled back.

“I think I’ll make myself a cup of tea. Would you – oh, silly of me. You can’t, of course. I forgot for a moment there.”

“I could, you know,” I told him. “Hey, sexbot, remember? Of course I can swallow. Giles, why have your ears gone red?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said stiffly, and rose.

“I’ll have a glass of water, please, while you’re up. I do need to top up my coolant systems. Tea wouldn’t be a good idea, it might make me overheat.”

Giles made a pot of tea for himself and brought me a glass of water. “Amazing,” he said as I drank it. “Is there anything you can’t do?”

“Well, eating is a problem. I think I could do it, but it would mess my insides up a lot, maybe clog my filters, and cleaning me out would be a lot of work. But hey, being on a diet makes a good excuse, so no big problem. Apart from that, my big failing is handwriting. I can only do printing, not the joined up stuff, and I can’t even read most people’s handwriting. My OCR can’t cope. I have to read it one letter at a time, and I make mistakes. And I found out in Vegas that I’m pretty pathetic at shuffling cards. Which wasn’t a biggy, doesn’t seem to be a girly skill so nobody laughed too much, and the ones that did stopped when I won all their money.”

“Your expedition to Las Vegas did make a valuable contribution to Buffy’s finances, although I have some qualms about the morality. You’re not going to make a habit of it, I trust?”

“No. Only if it’s necessary,” I assured him.

He stayed silent for a while, drinking his tea, and then sighed. “You are doing a wonderful job of making a life for yourself, standing on your own two feet. I only wish Buffy could do as well.”

“Hey, I could teach her to play poker,” I suggested.

“I don’t mean financially.” He sighed again. “Buffy is avoiding her responsibilities. I feel she is far too reliant on others. On me, on you, even on Spike. Think of last night. She should have dealt with Dawn’s reckless behavior herself. She is Dawn’s family, after all. Instead, she expected me to talk to Dawn. I’m a single man; I have no experience in dealing with rebellious teenage behavior except in the capacity of a Watcher to a Slayer. I had no idea what to say, and it was not my place to discipline the girl anyway. Buffy took it for granted that I would, and that rather distresses me.”

“It’s okay, me and Spike gave her a talking to. Well, mainly Spike. He went all big brothery. Which I think worked out okay. I don’t think Dawn will do anything as stupid again, and she didn’t get all resentful. She learned her lesson.”

“That’s not the point. It was Buffy’s responsibility, and she shirked it. Passed it on to others. I am beginning to think that she will never learn self-reliance if others always take on her responsibilities, and I am considering returning to England so that she will have to depend on herself. I can’t stay in Sunnydale indefinitely, I’m going to have to leave anyway, and I think it might be best to make it sooner rather than later.”

“But she needs you! I need you! I want you to be my Watcher. And, and, who will I watch British videos with if you go?”

“I’ll leave my videos for you, Violet, and the multi-system VCR converter so that they will play on Buffy’s TV. I’ll replace them with DVDs back in England. You can watch them with Spike.”

“Videos not really the big issue here, Giles. Don’t go. Please.”

“That’s, umm, I’m touched. You really want me to stay?”

“What, weren’t you listening? Damn right I want you to stay. It’s not easy, what I’m doing. I might look like I’m managing, but there are still big holes. I’m going to do something real stupid eventually. I need people around me who know what I really am. Sensible people, which means you and Anya and Tara. Mostly you.”

“I’m sure you would cope perfectly well, Violet.”

“Maybe, but I could do with help. Please, Giles, stay. At least for a while longer.”

“I won’t make any precipitate decision.” Giles finished the last of his tea. “I must say that it is tempting to stay simply to observe your development. You are becoming quite a remarkable person. Not just intelligent but perceptive, humorous, even wise. Many humans don’t make as good a job of being human as you are doing. The contrast between you now and how you were over the summer is absolutely astounding.”

“Still the same robot girl here in some ways, Giles. Still got the taste for ‘knock knock’ jokes, although maybe they’re a bit better these days. Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?” Giles played along with me.

“The.”

“The who?”

“You think I look pretty good for plastic
You think my programming’s fantastic

Substitute my stakes for hers
Substitute my wigs for furs
Substitute you for my dad
It’s something that I never had.”

Giles chuckled. “Very clever, my dear. How long did it take you to come up with that?”

I activated a frown. “Giles – I didn’t mean to sing that. I was going to sing the first couple of lines of ‘My Generation’. Something took over and made me sing that parody of ‘Substitute’. And the backing music – that wasn’t me playing .wav files. It was coming from outside me. Something took control of me.”

“Oh dear,” Giles said softly.

“Oh dear indeed. There’s something odd going on, and I don’t like it. Nobody controls me but me.”

“Perhaps it was just a one-off incident,” he said hopefully.

I shook my head. I could hear something unusual in the distance. I put my finger to my lips in a non-verbal signal to Giles that he was to be quiet, went to the window and opened it, and turned up the sensitivity of my hearing.

“I’ve been making shows of trading blows just hoping no one knows …”

It was Buffy’s voice in the distance, with orchestral accompaniment.

“Oh, no, mustard on my shirt.
Mustard. I’ll never get it out.
My favorite red shirt …”

A couple of strangers, also with orchestral accompaniment.

“No …” I began, but I hadn’t turned down my hearing and I gave myself terrible feedback. I muted hastily, readjusted my settings, and continued. “No, I don’t think it’s just a one-off. Something odd is definitely going on.”

“Something strange is happening
You found yourself compelled to sing
With words not of your own choice
Something took over your voice
And now the same is happening to me…”

Giles looked rather alarmed, but continued to sing. I passed him his guitar, without intending to, and he began to accompany himself. A drum and bass joined in; I could not locate their source. Giles continued to sing, expressing his intention of investigating the cause of this phenomenon, and I settled down to listen.

I left when he finished, agreeing to meet him at the Magic Box tomorrow, and headed back to Revello Drive. I would have gone to see Spike, but things had been a bit awkward between us since I seduced him in Vegas and I’d agreed to give him some space.

I wondered if he was singing anything. Probably punk. Ramones all the way, baby. Or a love song to Buffy. Why didn’t he just give up? She’d never love him. He should just take me.

“Spike
You’ve been waiting much too long
Still it looks like she won’t turn to you
Spike
You’ve been loyal, true and faithful
But what’s the point of being so blue?
If I could get that same dedication
I’d give you everything in creation
If she doesn’t want you
If she doesn’t want you

I’ll be your substitute
Whenever you want me
Don’t you know?
I’ll be your substitute
Whenever you need me …”

It’s a good thing there wasn’t anyone around. It would have been really embarrassing if Xander, for instance, had overheard.

When I find out who or what is responsible for this they are so dead.

***