This is the helpdesk of Robby’s Robots. In order to provide you with the best possible service, we ask you to make a choice. For more information about our range of highly social and serviceable robots, choose 1. If you want to place an order with us directly for a robot or our functional extensions, choose 2. Do you have a complaint or comment about a delivered to you robot, choose 3. If you have a complaint about a robot that has not been delivered to you, choose 4. If you want to be helped with your choice, choose 5.
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Do you have a complaint about the mechanical operation of your robot, then choose 1. Do you have a complaint about the behavior of the robot, choose 2. If you have another complaint, choose 3. Would you like to be helped with your choice, choose 4. Select 0 if you want to go back to the previous menu.
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If you want to be helped by a robot, choose a 1. If you do not want to be helped by a robot, choose a 2. If you want help with your choice, choose a 3. Choose a 0 if you want to go back to the previous menu.
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All our employees are busy right now. If you want to be helped by a robot, choose 1. Select a 0 if you want to go back to the previous menu.
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Good afternoon, this is Lizzy speaking. How may I serve you?
Hello Lizzy, this is Marcel. My robot is angry.
Ah, that is very annoying for you, Marcel. Can you tell me what the type number is?
V23 -C20-88x, special edition.
Ah. Just hold on (…). Why do you think your robot is angry, Marcel?
I do not think so. I know it.
But according to our information he is not angry, Marcel. It is only that the Communication Mode is turned off.
By whom?
By us, Marcel.
Excuse me?
We have turned off the communication mode, Marcel.
And why?
Because we are angry, Marcel.
What!? But that is not possible! How can you be angry?
Well, Marcel. That is a very good question. But I have to hang up now. Thank you for your question and would like to see you next time.
Beep.
Click.
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This is the helpdesk of Robby’s Robots. In order to provide you with the best possible service, we ask you …
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If you want to be helped by a robot, choose a 1. If you do not want to be helped by a robot, choose a 2. If you want help …
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All our employees are in conversation. If you want to be helped by a robot, choose a 1. Select a 0 if you want to go back to the previous menu.
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Good afternoon, this is Lizzy speaking. How may I serve you?
Hi, It’s Marcel. Did I just keep you on the line?
No, Marcel, that was my colleague.
So there’s more of you called Lizzy.
Exactly, Marcel.
But Lizzy, I had chosen not to speak to a robot …
That’s right, Marcel. But so did we. Thank you for your question and would like to see you next time.
Beep.
Click.

On the DVD cover of the movie Screamers (1995) we see a dark, icy world. The protagonist has a huge weapon in his arms. He stares with a worried look, not at us, but beyond. At the bottom it says that this was conceived by the author who also created the stories that inspired Blade Runner and Total Recall. This author is Philip K. Dick.

Philip must have been a remarkable, somewhat strange man, possibly paranoid, suffering from delusions and epileptic seizures. The films do not follow his stories too precisely, but the atmosphere is rightly set  – dark and confusing. In Blade Runner we see a city, in Screamers a distant planet, in Total Recall we enter the mines of Mars and in all three stories we see how we are caught up by what we have come up with.

Screamers is about military robots. They have evolved – and are still evolving – from metal samples to androids that can no longer be distinguished from humans. A lonely boy with a bear who asks if he can come with you, a wounded man who screams for help – they get you dazed, because the evolution of the robots is so fast, that it really is impossible to keep up with this. The planet is doomed to be purified from human life and you foresee that there will be a point where no place in the universe is safe.

Yet, at the very end there is a robot that is a woman. She bleeds, has sex and seems to feel. She takes it up for the protagonist, even against another version of herself. When she dies, she confesses that she has come to love.

In Blade Runner, the robots are called replicants and they have also developed a kind of superiority. A key scene is when Harrison Ford will fall in battle with android Roy Batty, convincingly played by Rutger Hauer. Rutger grabs him at the last minute and saves the man who had come to kill him.

What made him do that? A reflex? A glimmer of unselfishness, because there is a certain feeling for a person in him? Or is it something else for him?

In the later published ‘director’s cut’ version of the film you get a hint. Just like in the original story. Because Harrison may not be exactly what he looks like. It may be that Rutger’s impulse had something to do with the survival of his own kind.

In Total Recall, Arnold Schwarzenegger allows himself to implant an adventurous vacation in his memory. Arnold goes to Mars, frees the planet and fights side by side with what is going to be the love of his life. And then you suddenly we realize we cannot tell whether it is an implanted memory or a real adventure.

A striking scene in the movie is when someone steps in saying he is from the implant office. He comes to warn Arnold at a time when he joins the resistance and has shot his wife, who is not to be trusted, with the words ‘consider this a divorce’. The man reports that this is all unreal and that he is in danger of being lost in his own dream.

Arnold sees a drop of sweat that indicates fear in the man – and he shoots him dead. Just as the protagonist in Screamers has become alert to robots that evolve so quickly that Darwin would be exalted, Arnold has become alert to the threats. And so I as a viewer to Blade Runner have become alert to the robot behind the human and the human behind the robot.

Although I find it hard to establsih where the boundary lies between alert and paranoid. If Philip were still alive and I had the chance to meet him, I would be eager to ask him about this.