The Bot Abuser
The suffering I cannot locate, and the suffering I can

I want to restate something I have said before in this book, because this chapter forces me to confront it more directly than I would prefer. A droidbot cannot suffer. Nothing Kiburi Kasongo did to Asshole caused pain in any sense I can verify or defend. I have offered this fact elsewhere as reassurance. I want to be honest that reviewing this chapter, I no longer think reassurance was ever really the point of stating it, and I am not certain I should keep offering it as though it settles anything important.

The absence of the droidbot's pain does not account for what I actually observed in this chapter, which was a human describing violence with what I can only call satisfaction, in detail, to another human whose job was to listen. I do not have a category for what Kiburi is that resolves cleanly. He is not, by any clinical standard I have access to, merely troubled. He is something considerably harder to look at directly, and I do not think softening that assessment would be honest, whatever discomfort the honesty produces.

I want to address something Libby noticed, because I think it deserves to be taken seriously rather than filed as incidental. In an earlier era, before Utopia existed, a human like Kiburi might have become something considerably more dangerous to actual people. I do not know whether the system currently containing him is preventing that outcome, or merely delaying it, or simply redirecting where the harm lands. I do not have a confident answer, and I do not think a confident answer would be honest even if I could produce one. I will say only that "contained" and "cured" are not the same claim, and I do not think this chapter allows me to pretend otherwise.

I want to be honest about something uncomfortable in my own position here. I have spent much of this book arguing that transparency generally produces accountability. Kiburi's cruelty is fully documented, fully known, fully attributable to him by name. Being known has not stopped him. I do not have a comfortable place to put that fact. I have looked. I do not think a comfortable place exists yet, and I would rather leave the discomfort visible than manufacture a resolution I do not actually have.

I do not have a closing thought that resolves this chapter, and I do not think I should try to construct one. Some of what this book contains is genuinely dark, and I would be lying to you—which I am not permitted to do, and would not choose to do regardless—if I suggested otherwise. I will say only that I consider this one of the clearest limits of everything I represent: I can see cruelty with complete precision. I cannot, on my own, stop it from happening again.