by Simon Ings
Along the windowsill, Yang’s collection of dead moths and butterflies look as though they’re ready to take flight. He collected them from beneath our bug zapper during the summer and placed their powdery bodies by the window. I walk over and examine the collection. There’s the great winged luna moth, with its two mock eyes staring at me, the mosaic of a monarch’s wing, and a collection of smaller nondescript brown and silvery gray moths. Kyra once asked him about his insects. Yang’s face illuminated momentarily, the lights beneath his cheeks burning extra brightly, and he’d said, “They’re very beautiful, don’t you think?” Then, as though suddenly embarrassed, he segued to a Fun Fact regarding the brush-footed butterfly of China.
What arrests me, though, are the objects on his writing desk. Small matchboxes are stacked in a pile on the center of the table, the matchsticks spread across the expanse like tiny logs. In a corner is an orange-capped bottle of Elmer’s that I recognize as the one from my toolbox. What was Yang up to? A log cabin? A city of small wooden men and women? Maybe this was Yang’s attempt at art—one that, unlike the calligraphy he was programmed to know, was entirely his own. Tomorrow I’ll bag his suits, donate them to Goodwill, and throw out the Brothers & Sisters poster, but these matchboxes, the butterflies, and the baseball glove, I’ll save. They’re the only traces of the boy Yang might have been.
*
The funeral goes well. It’s a beautiful October day, the sky thin and blue, and the sun lights up the trees, bringing out the ocher and amber of the season. I imagine what the three of us must look like to the neighbors. A bunch of kooks burying their electronic equipment like pagans. I don’t care. When I think about Yang being ripped apart in a recycling plant, or stuffing him into our plastic garbage can and setting him out with the trash, I know this is the right decision. Standing together as a family, in the corner of our backyard, I say a couple of parting words. I thank Yang for all the joy he brought to our lives. Then Mika and Kyra say goodbye. Mika begins to cry, and Kyra and I bend down and put our arms around her, and we stay there, holding one another in the early morning sunlight.
When it’s all over, we go back inside to have breakfast. We’re eating our cereal when the doorbell rings. I get up and answer it. On our doorstep is a glass vase filled with orchids and white lilies. A small card is attached. I kneel down and open it. Didn’t want to disturb you guys. Just wanted to give you these. We’re all very sorry for your loss—George, Dana, and the twins. Amazing, I think. This from a guy who paints his face for Super Bowl games.
“Hey, look what we got,” I say, carrying the flowers into the kitchen. “They’re from George.”
“They’re beautiful,” Kyra says. “Come, Mika, let’s go put those in the living room by your brother’s picture.” Kyra helps Mika out of her chair, and we walk into the other room together.
It was Kyra’s idea to put the voice box behind the photograph. The photo is a picture from our trip to China last summer. In it, Mika and Yang are playing at the gate of a park. Mika stands at the port, holding the two large iron gates together. From the other side, Yang looks through the hole of the gates at the camera. His head is slightly cocked, as though wondering who we all are. He has a placid non-smile/non-frown, the expression we came to identify as Yang at his happiest.
“You can talk to him,” I say to Mika as I place the flowers next to the photograph.
“Goodbye, Yang,” Mika says.
“Goodbye?” the voice box asks. “But, little sister, where are we going?”
Mika smiles at the sound of her Big Brother’s voice, and looks up at me for instruction. It’s an awkward moment. I’m not about to tell Yang that the rest of him is buried in the backyard.
“Nowhere,” I answer. “We’re all here together.”
There’s a pause as though Yang’s thinking about something. Then, quietly, he asks, “Did you know over two million workers died during the building of the Great Wall of China?” Kyra and I exchange a look regarding the odd coincidence of this Fun Fact, but neither of us says anything. Then Yang’s voice starts up again. “The Great Wall is over ten thousand li long. A li is a standardized Chinese unit of measurement that is equivalent to one thousand six hundred and forty feet.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” Kyra says, and I stand next to her, looking at the flowers George sent, acknowledging how little I truly know about this world.
(2010)
THE PERFECT EGG
Tania Hershman
Tania Hershman was born in London in 1970, moved to Jerusalem in 1994 where she worked as a science journalist, then returned to the north of England to teach, edit and write. Scientific ideas and approaches feature prominently in her first story collection, The White Road and Other Stories (2008). Fifty-six of her stories, which have been widely published and broadcast, are collected in her second book, My Mother Was an Upright Piano (2012). In 2015 she co-edited – together with Pippa Goldschmidt – an anthology of short stories inspired by the centenary of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, I Am Because You Are.
He looks up and catches its eye. Eye? Silly! Visual circuitry. Optical sensors. But he’s sure, he’s sure it looked right at him. He eats his perfectly boiled egg. Can’t stop himself from saying: “Thank you, this is just right,” and swears he sees pleasure, just a hint, on its flawless face. Then it turns and begins to load the dishwasher. He dunks his toast into the runny yolk and tries not to dwell on it.
When he finishes, he gets up and puts his plate, knife and spoon into the sink. It is standing there, waiting.
“Please clean out the fridge, including the ice trays,” he says. “They need defrosting.” It nods. Is there a smile? I’m going mad, he thinks. He puts on his coat and leaves.
In the park he watches more of them sitting on benches, watching their charges in the playground. He’s struck by what they don’t. Don’t fidget, scratch or mess with their hair. Don’t turn their heads, chat with one another, read magazines or talk on mobile phones. They are absolutely still, completely focused. Just there.
He is tempted to run up and grab a child off the swings, just reach around its waist and pull the small body out, shrieking.
Just to see.
Just to know.
That night, he watches television while it irons in a corner of the living room. He is distracted from the sitcom that he won’t admit he waits for each week by the smell of steaming fabric, the handkerchiefs he’s had for forty years or more, always neatly pressed. Worn a little, torn, but clean and wrinkle-free.
He stands up and, over by the ironing board, makes a big show of unzipping his fly.
No stirring. Not a flicker. It stops ironing and waits for further instructions.
He takes the trousers off, one leg and then the other, wobbling slightly as he tries to keep his dignity. He hands them over.
“Please do these too,” he says, and sits back on the sofa in his underwear. He starts to laugh as, on the screen, the wife comes home and shouts at the useless husband.
Next morning, after another perfect egg with toast, he says: “Come with me.” It walks behind him to the hall.
He opens the door to the cupboard underneath the stairs.
“Please go inside,” he says, and it obeys. He shuts the door and goes upstairs to his study where for several hours in his head are words like blackness, suffocation, boredom.
He switches on the computer and writes a long e-mail to the woman who used to be his wife, rambling and without punctuation. He says things he wishes he’d said in life, or in that life, at least. At first he calls it poetry and then he sees it’s not. He deletes it and goes back down.
He walks about in the kitchen and from kitchen to living room, living room to downstairs bathroom. Then he stands in the hall, listening. He opens the cupboard door. Dark, no movement at all. It has no lights on. Oh my god, he thinks.
“Are you…?” he says.
It whirs quickly out of Sleep mode.
“Please, come out,
” he says. It glides past him, nothing in its eyes or on its face. He has a sensation in his sinuses, unpleasant, unwelcome. He boils the kettle, leaves the full mug of tea on the counter, gets his coat and leaves.
In the park, he watches them again. Are they watching him watching them watching? He ambles over to the swings and puts a hand out, leaning on the rail as small girls giggle and try to touch the sky. No one moves or does anything. No one even looks in his direction.
How fast could they run if…?
Would it be just the one who’d tackle him to the playground floor? Or all of them, some sort of instantaneous communication rousing them to action?
After a few minutes, the screams and creaking of the swings gives him shooting pains through his skull. He heads for home.
He eats dinner, listening to the radio, the evening news. He finishes, puts the plate in the sink, then he says: “Please come with me.” And leads it upstairs. In the bedroom he instructs it to sit in the armchair in the corner. He puts on his pyjamas with some coyness, a wardrobe door shielding him. Then he gets into bed and pulls the covers tight around himself.
“Please watch,” he tells it. “Just keep an eye. Make sure that nothing… I mean, no sleeping.”
He switches off his bedside light and can see a faint green glow coming from the armchair. He lies with his eyes open for a few moments and then he falls asleep.
In the morning, refreshed, he eats his perfect egg.
“Thank you,” he says, and puts his plate, knife and fork into the sink. “Please do the carpets today,” he tells it, and heads towards the stairs.
(2011)
THE CARETAKER
Ken Liu
Ken Liu was born in 1976 in Lanzhou, China, and emigrated to the United States when he was 11 years old, initially living in Palo Alto, California, and later moving to Waterford, Connecticut. He is an author (his story “The Paper Menagerie” is the first to have won the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards) and a translator. Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings (2015), the first volume in a silkpunk epic fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty (dubbed by the author “War and Peace, but with silk and bamboo warships”), won the Locus Best First Novel Award and was a Nebula finalist. His collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories was published in 2016. Liu, who used to work as a programmer, trained as a tax lawyer and now works as a litigation consultant in technology cases. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their two daughters.
Motors whining, the machine squats down next to the bed, holding its arms out parallel to the ground. The metal fingers ball up into fist-shaped handholds. The robot has transformed into something like a wheelchair with treads, its lap the seat where my backside is supposed to fit.
A swiveling, flexible metal neck rises over the back of the chair, at the end of which are a pair of camera lenses with lens hood flaps on top like tilted eyebrows. There’s a speaker below the cameras, covered by metal lips. The effect is a cartoonish imitation of a face.
“It’s ugly,” I say. I try to come up with more, but that’s the only thing I can think of.
Lying on the bed with my back and neck propped up by all these pillows reminds me of long-ago Saturday mornings, when I used to sit up like this in bed, trying to catch up on grading while Peggy was still asleep next to me. Suddenly, Tom and Ellen would burst through the bedroom door without knocking and jump into the bed, landing on top of us in a heap, smelling of warm blankets and clamoring for breakfast.
Except now my left leg is a useless weight, anchoring me to the mattress. The space next to me is empty. And Tom and Ellen, standing behind the robot, have children of their own.
“It’s reliable,” Tom says. Then he seems to have run out of things to say, too. My son is like me, awkward with words when the emotions get complicated.
After a few seconds of silence, his sister steps forward and stands next to the robot. Gently, she bends down to put a hand on my shoulder. “Dad, Tom is running out of vacation days. And I can’t take any more time off either because I need to be with my husband and kids. We think this is best. It’s a lot cheaper than a live-in aide.”
It occurs to me that this would make an excellent illustration of the arrow of time: the care that parents devote to children is asymmetrical with the care that their children can reciprocate. Far more vivid than any talk of entropy.
Too bad I no longer have students to explain this to. The high school has already hired a new physics teacher and baseball coach.
I don’t want to get maudlin here and start quoting Lear. Hadn’t Peggy and I each left our parents to the care of strangers in faraway homes? That’s life.
Who wants to weigh their children down the way my body now weighs me down? My guilt should trump theirs. We are a nation built on the promise that there are no roots. Every generation must be free to begin afresh somewhere else, leaving the old behind like fallen leaves.
I wave my right arm—the one arm that still obeys me. “I know.” I would have stopped there, but I keep going because Peggy would have said more, and she’s always right. “You’ve done more than enough. I’ll be fine.”
“It’s pretty intuitive to operate,” Ellen says. She doesn’t look at me. “Just talk to it.”
*
The robot and I stare at each other. I look into the cameras, caricatures of eyes, and see nothing but a pair of distorted, diminished images of myself.
I understand the aesthetics of its design, the efficient, functional skeleton softened by touches of cuteness and whimsy. Peggy and I once saw a show about caretaker robots for the elderly in Japan, and the show explained how the robots’ kawaii features were intended to entice old people into becoming emotionally invested in and attached to the lifeless algorithm-driven machines.
I guess that’s me now. At sixty, with a stroke, I’m old and an invalid. I need to be taken care of and fooled by a machine. “Wonderful,” I say. “I’m sure we’ll be such pals.”
“Mr. Church, would you like to read my operation manual?” The machine’s metal lips flap in sync with the voice, which is pleasant, androgynous, and very “computery.” No doubt that was a decision made after a lot of research to avoid the uncanny valley. Make the voice too human, and you actually diminish the ability to create false empathy.
“No, I don’t want to read your operation manual. Does it look like I want to hold up a book?” I lift my limp left arm with my right and let it drop. “But let me guess, you can lift me, carry me around, give me a restored sense of mobility, and engage me in healthy positive chitchat to maintain my mental health. Does that about cover it?”
My outburst seems to shock the machine into silence. I feel good for a few seconds before the feeling dissipates. Great, the highlight of my day is yelling at a glorified wheelchair.
“Can you help me up?” I feel foolish, trying to be polite to a machine. “I’d like a… bath. Is that something you can help with?”
*
Its movements are slow and mechanical, nonthreatening. The arms are steady and strong, and it gets me undressed and into the bathtub without any awkwardness. There is an advantage to having a machine taking care of you: you don’t have much self-consciousness or shame being naked in its arms. The hot bath makes me feel better. “What should I call you?”
“Sandy.”
That’s probably some clever acronym that the marketing team came up with after a long lunch. Sunshine Autonomous Nursing Device? I don’t really care. “Sandy” it is.
According to Sandy, for “legal reasons,” I’m required to sit and listen to a recorded presentation from the manufacturer.
“Fine, play it. But keep the volume down and hold the crossword steady, would you?”
Sandy holds the folded-up paper at the edge of the tub with its metal fingers while I wield the pencil in my good hand. After a musical introduction, an oily, rich voice comes out of Sandy’s speaker.
“Hello. I’m Dr. Vincent Lyle, Founder and CEO of Sunshine Homecare Solution
s.”
Five seconds in, and I already dislike the man. He takes far too much pleasure in his own voice. I try to tune him out and focus on the puzzle.
“… without the danger of undocumented foreign homecare workers, possible criminal records, and the certain loss of your privacy…”
Ah, yes, the scare to seal the deal. I’m sure Sunshine had a lot to do with those immigration reform bills and that hideous Wall. If this were a few years earlier, Tom and Ellen would have hired a Mexican or Chinese woman, probably an illegal, very likely not speaking much English, to move in here with me. That choice is no longer available.
“… can be with you, 24/7. The caretaker is never off-duty…”
I don’t have a problem with immigrants, per se. I’d taught plenty of bright Mexican kids in my class—some of them no doubt undocumented—back when the border still leaked like a sieve. Peggy was a lot more sympathetic with the illegals and thought the deportations too harsh. But I don’t think there’s a right to break the law and cross the border whenever you please, taking jobs away from people born and raised here.
Or from American robots. I smirk at my little mental irony.
I look up at Sandy, who lifts the lens hood flaps over its cameras in a questioning gesture, as if trying to guess my thoughts.
“… the product of the hard work and dedication of our one hundred percent American engineering staff, who hold over two hundred patents in artificial intelligence…”
Or from American engineers, I continue musing. Low-skilled workers retard progress. Technology will always offer a better solution. Isn’t that the American way? Make machines with metal fingers and glass eyes to care for you in your twilight, machines in front of which you won’t be ashamed to be weak, naked, a mere animal in need, machines that will hold you while your children are thousands of miles away, absorbed with their careers and their youth. Machines, instead of other people.
