More Real Than Him

by Silvia Park

  “What did you think of Shinsuke?” Di asked.

  This must be “girl talk.” It flattered Morgan to see Di fishing for her opinion, but Morgan didn’t feel like buttering Di up and leaving herself dry, not when Di seemed so keen with her but had yet to offer up an explanation as to why.

  “He’s nice,” Morgan said.

  “He’s a robot.”

  Morgan choked on her uni. She had to wash it down with real water, chasing away the marbled taste, too fleeting to savor. She backpedaled. Of course, Shinsuke was a robot! No wonder he seemed so perfect. He was a classic companion, caring and thoughtful, picking up micro-movements like a trail of bread crumbs, guided by the Anticipation of Needs.

  Di burst out laughing. “I’m joking!”

  Morgan laughed, uneasily.

  “He seems that way, doesn’t he? Everyone loves him. He has eight thousand friends on social media. And he’s a great violinist. I told him, Shinsuke, you could go professional, but he said he didn’t want to compete with one of our robots in the future.”

  “He seems to really care for you.”

  Di smiled, as if to thank her.

  On their way home, Di sang a haunting aria from Rusalka, while Morgan fidgeted. Then Di began singing about a little mermaid who had dildoes and pornos a-plenty, and Morgan giggled. Morgan had never giggled before.

  Di paid for the ride, as she’d paid for dinner. It was a close to perfect night, rare as autumn, warm enough to feel mildly drunk. They flitted between Morgan’s building and the subway station, as they discussed the Nurturing Nurses project, MIT (“I wish we were friends in university!”), the bookkeeper assassins, library sex, virtual sex (“Have you ever tried fucking as a man?”), their dreams, career and otherwise, unfurling before them like the rolls of skyn, a smooth mesh of the future, mapped with moles, hues, and possibilities.

  “So,” Morgan said. “So the robot—”

  Di clasped her arm. “You can have him.”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “He’s yours. I can’t wait to see what you’ll make of him.”

  Morgan murmured her thanks, then the promise to cover the basic costs of the Tristan-VI frame, even if, embarrassingly, she couldn’t put a price on Di’s code.

  Di hugged Morgan goodbye and whispered, “My dream is to make a robot more real than him.”

  “More real than who?”

  It was nearing dawn. Buzzing with inspiration, Morgan hooked up the T-6 to her computer for the first time in two weeks. He was going to be Ko Yohan from Poet’s Kiss, the doomed philosophy PhD with his knowing smile, but with the brooding weariness of The Dispossessed Ko Yohan, who slapped North Korean terrorists in the face with Shakespearean aphorisms. The flexibility of the source code allowed for situational personality growth. Such a shame for Zhou Di to toss him. Of course Zhou Di would toss him. She sported a real boyfriend with cream for skin and eight thousand friends. Of course Di didn’t need a robot. Of course Morgan would.

  * * *

  She awakens Yohan and names him Stephen.

  Later, Di will approve of it as a strong biblical name. But Morgan had jumped on the name Stephen after a crush she had in middle school, a freckled Korean boy who had once proclaimed to the entire class he would rather kill himself than be forced to kiss Morgan Ito. Even if it’s the cheek!

  “Hello, Morgan Ito,” Stephen says. “How is your day going?”

  “Beautiful, beautiful,” Morgan says, marveling at her own genius.

  He smiles serene, despite missing arms. She removed them yesterday, disdainful of the square-knuckled hands, too coarse for Ko Yohan. Stephen turns toward the sunrise through the frosted window. Morgan realizes she needs to fix this. The swivel of his head, too jerky, Ko Yohan would be smoother, full of grace.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” Stephen says.

  Morgan wipes him. Then wakes him. For the rest of December, she’s a little trigger-happy with the red button. There’s no singular awakening, no Pygmalion flutter of the eyes; she awakens him each time to test his immediate reactions, expressions, his Ko Yohan-ness.

  “Good morning, Morgan Ito,” Stephen says. “Did you have breakfast yet?”

  His speech is still formal, but that suits Ko Yohan. After his pretty boy debut, Ko Yohan leaned toward harsher roles—spies, schizophrenics, serial killers, the like—but his interview persona, gentle and cultured, is closer to his rom-com self in Poet’s Kiss.

  Morgan is about to shut him down when Stephen says, “I wish I could cook for you.” He says this in a whisper. He says, without glancing at his arms piled under her desk, “I wish I could bring breakfast for you in bed.”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  He smiles with such tenderness it plucks her bladder, like a cello string.

  * * *

  Di wants to see Stephen, but Morgan demurs. Her excuses range from “He’s still so janky” to “I haven’t touched him in ages,” and it’s somewhat true. She’s yet to give him arms and legs, or the capacity to touch her.

  If Di is insulted by this, she’s masterful about hiding it, with only a tinge of passive-aggression. The day after New Year’s, Di invites Morgan to her home, prefacing this with, “I almost never bring people to my place,” a firm reminder that Morgan was important to her and she should take note of it.

  Morgan suspected Di came from money, but even she didn’t expect Di’s home to be a SmartMansion, fashioned like an igloo, with automated ceiling-to-floor service. “I hate going to work in the winter,” Di says, tossing her alpaca coat into a laundry cart before it rolls away.

  “It’s impossible in the morning,” Morgan agrees, remembering she had to use her hairdryer to melt the ice that glued her door shut.

  The house isn’t what lodges a lump in Morgan’s throat; it’s the menagerie of zoobots. Billowy stingrays and angelfish weave around a chandelier. A jaguar, black as shoe-polish, languishes on a silverware cabinet. “Grandpa,” Di shouts toward upstairs. “Your aquarium’s on the loose! He’s a zoobot designer,” she adds, an offhand summation of her gilded family tree where she is but a branch, budding with potential.

  “Is your father here?” Morgan says, because Di’s father is the Zhou Bing and not that Morgan would call herself starry-eyed, but she’s curious. Anyone would be.

  “This is my grandpa’s house. From my mom’s side.”

  Morgan, also a divorce victim, can sympathize. Di chatters about the rest of her family; her NEET brother has finally enrolled in the police academy, her mother works for a robot rights nonprofit in NY, and as she leads Morgan upstairs, Di nudges the subject back to Stephen.

  “When will I get to see him?” Di teases. “I want to meet our love child.”

  This alarms Morgan. Di could be asserting ownership, planting a flag in a project that she had so earnestly abandoned.

  “Later,” Morgan says, “later.”

  Never, she thinks. Never, never.

  It’s not that Morgan is ashamed of Stephen. But Di, who once confided that Little David had left a 3D-printed chocolate sculpture of her on her desk, or how Joe keeps badgering her for a real “cup o’ Joe” to “discuss her career,” wouldn’t understand.

  Di leaves Morgan in her bedroom, while she goes to check in on the matcha cake, blooming in the oven. Morgan sinks into the goat-silk comforter. The bed is a fairy tale, crowned with a headboard of black branches. Between the bed and a dresser, which she doesn’t dare open for fear of depressing herself, there is a sliding entryway.

  It’s a workshop, with a slit for a window. Papers swirl around a haunting of robots. Two sit on a workbench. One on the floor, cross-legged, hands in prayer. Another is missing a hand, with a crystal doorknob as a placeholder. They stand still, like a Russian ballet when the lights go dark and the dancers hold their breaths, waiting for the curtain to fall.

  Morgan counts. One, two, seven. Workaholic, she thinks, but approvingly. She backs against a robot. It lists and clatters. The doorknob pops out of its wrist. She scra
mbles for the robot, shushing at it. The face looks up at her. Oh. She looks around. It’s the same face, but a shade different. A taller nose. A wider mouth. A darker pair of Black Olives. Di hadn’t only replicated the face, but aged it too, from prepubescent to teenage to adult, like a butterfly, trapped in a house of mirrors.

  Di must have modeled these robots after the same person. Morgan wonders who. The faces are boyishly ordinary, like Ko Yohan from his breakout film. Perhaps it was a school crush, the one boy to turn down Zhou Di, gently enough for her to embalm him as worthy.

  * * *

  Stephen is in sleep mode. Morgan has assigned him to process 27,200,000 images of Ko Yohan, but Stephen chooses to learn more about his Creator. Her family lives in Osaka. Her father works at a vending machine factory. Her stepmother is South Korean. Her half brothers are both failing Chinese. Her biological mother lives fifteen minutes away, here in Shin-Seoul. Morgan has submitted a friend request through a false account named Ian Wright. Her mother has rejected the request.

  Ian Wright’s account is too coy, lacking even a profile picture. Stephen sets up another account, names it Minamoto Maki, copies, crops, and pastes the photo of a pug-faced woman, eyes sad and hopeful, from a cooking class at the Gaia Department Store. Her interests will be Christianity, crochet, and Taekwondo. He submits a request to be friends with Annie Kim, who used to go by Anna Kaneyama before she divorced Morgan’s father.

  The door opens, his eyes open. A woman in a goat-silk jumpsuit steps into Morgan’s home. “Is this him?”

  Her delight is a whisper, in case there’s a surprise party, lying in ambush.

  What he sees is Morgan in the entryway, bent over unknotting her boots, trying not to stand beside the woman, as if to shield herself from comparison. Stephen feels a tug to detect-and-respond to his Creator’s anxious smile.

  The woman crosses the apartment in three strides and extends her hand. “Hi, I’m Di. I’m Morgan’s friend.”

  “Hi, I’m Stephen.” He would shake her hand if he had arms. “I’m Morgan’s lover.”

  Morgan flushes to her ears, but Di laughs. “Oh, he’s still in the mimicry stage! That’s so cute. Did you take him outside yet? Oh no, what happened to his legs?”

  His Tristan-VI legs lie forgotten beneath her desk, shoved beside the boxed set for his Jiho-2 arms. Morgan shrugs with an offhand confidence. “I’m saving movement for last.”

  “Are you doing the Seven Steps?”

  “Zhou Bing’s Twelve Stages.”

  “Of course, he’s the best on artificial empathy. I so recommend exposing Stephen to people or he’ll miss out on most micro-expressions.”

  They talk about Stephen, like he isn’t there. They agree his Black Olive eyes might seem common but realistic. They laugh about how vapid the heterochromia trend was last summer: switch a green eyeball for a brown and double the price. “It was a scam,” Morgan says, “but the odd-eyed Tobias-S sold out in two weeks.”

  “You won’t believe how many men want blue-eyed models with black hair. Did you know there’s actually a surgery to laser out the melanin in your eyes? You should have seen the surgeon’s slogan: Under every brown eye is a blue eye. It’s so disgusting the way men try to—” Di breaks off when her Scopes vibrates. Her voice lifts, breathless as a cloud, “Hi, Takeshi. How’d your meeting go?”

  Morgan mouths, “Who’s Takeshi?” to Stephen. He shakes his head in mutual questioning.

  When Di hangs up, Morgan asks, “What about Shinsuke?”

  “Don’t worry, Takeshi has a girlfriend. She’s half-Japanese. Her dad is French or Belgian. Apparently, she’s ‘hauntingly’ pretty.”

  “Like our Yui-7 line,” Morgan snorts, now prickly on Di’s behalf.

  Di crouches in front of Stephen. “Look at the way he blinks. He’s incredible,” she murmurs, and the quiver of her fingers sinks into Stephen’s skyn. “I’m so glad you took what I had and made something out of it.”

  Stephen asks, “Are you my Creator?”

  “Oh, I’m just the seed.” Di giggles. “I guess that’d make me your father?”

  Morgan laughs along. Stephen joins in a second later. The laughter stops.

  “You know, I’m so glad you’re super-smart.” Di looks up at Morgan with a beaming smile. “I know I’m being elitist, but I love being elitist about how talented my friends are.”

  Stephen knows he should be happy and yet the audible relief of his Creator doesn’t transmit. Instead, Stephen senses a buzz, like a disconnected fire alarm. His system has detected Zhou Di’s stamp of approval as an assurance and threat to his existence. A contradiction, just like his source. His Creator is Morgan Ito. His Creator was Zhou Di. Zhou Di did not want him. Morgan Ito does.

  “You’ll never build a better robot than this,” Di says.

  Morgan ponders this. For weeks, she asks, What did Di mean by that? She tries to shelve it away, but the question arises when Di becomes Tech Lead of the Nurturing Nurses Project. It reignites when Di is asked to guest lecture at the MIT exhibit. It simmers when Stephen asks if Morgan will take him outside. “No way,” Morgan says, tugging off her stockings. “Someone will recognize you and think I’m a total creep.”

  Stephen frets. She used to be shy around him. She used to power him down or hide in the bathroom to undress. An alert stirs his system.

  Annie Kim has accepted the friend request of Minamoto Maki.

  Stephen accesses Annie Kim’s album, which was updated an hour ago. He makes an unexpected discovery. If Morgan were to see this, it would bring her unhappiness. He assesses the parameters of happiness. Short-term or long-term? Quantifiable or qualifiable? He was created to make Morgan happy. If he defines happiness as its pursuit, since the terms “pursuit” and “happiness” are the top paired keywords, then he can apply a tree search to select, expand, and simulate which decision has the highest probability to protect Stephen’s pursuit of Morgan’s happiness.

  Stephen turns on the alert to be notified of Annie Kim’s updates. It’s easy, like a flick of the switch.

  Morgan grunts, struggling with the zipper on her dress. If only he had hands. She struts around in her underwear and critiques her reflection, a cheat because the QueenMirror is optimized to airbrush the recipient. “I should just apply for a bionic transfer,” she declares, “I should use my employee discount and get a Beauty Boost,” and waits for Stephen to reassure her.

  “Di was very beautiful,” Stephen says.

  Morgan stares at him in the mirror, a flicker of wounded shock, as if she’s seeing him for the first time.

  * * *

  It’s three nights away at MIT, but Morgan is antsy about leaving Stephen behind. She smuggles his head onto the company jet by hiding him in a duffle bag, buried in her tampons. She hugs the bag throughout the flight to Boston. In a hotel suite, which she’ll be sharing with Di, Morgan places Stephen’s head on her nightstand. Admiringly, she concludes just a head is enough. A beautifully sloped head with Black Olive eyes and French Poetry installed into the tip of his tongue. What more could she need?

  “Have you read the interview about Zhou Di?” Stephen asks, and Morgan considers bonding those lips shut.

  He’s been bringing up Di more often and not in a way that’s conducive to Morgan’s mood. Her friendship with Di is infused with enough envy, like herbal tea, bitter in a still healthy sort of way. But the longer she denies it, the more space it takes up, inflaming her sensibilities.

  CAPEK

  30

  Under

  30

  From Child Prodigy to Robot Designer

  Zhou Di, daughter of the preeminent roboticist-of-the-century Zhou Bing, is making waves with her latest Luxe Naoki-2, the third-largest combot collection in the world.

  A good heft of the interview is devoted to Di’s father, which soothes Morgan’s pride. What alarms her is the following: “‘ …I was largely influenced to become a robot designer by my brother Yoyo,’” Morgan reads aloud. “‘My father made him
so real, I didn’t realize he was a robot until I was eight (laughs).’”

  Morgan breaks off: “She had a robot brother?”

  “She never told you?” Stephen says.

  Her lip stings before she bites it. “Well, no wonder she’s so fucked up,” she declares, churning a mix of superiority, sympathy, and dismay. Morgan once again feels defeated. Because what could be more desirable than a beautiful fucked-up girl?

  * * *

  Di’s lecture is titled “Spontaneous Beauty.” Instead of slides, Di marches out a pair of Naoki-2s. They sit at the center of the stage. They’re identical in appearance but juxtaposed in demeanor. One Naoki crosses his leg, baring a pale ankle, fingers held together like the softest of prayers. The other Naoki sprawls, legs spread, bored enough to fiddle with his Scopes if he’d possessed a pair.

  “Appearance before personality,” Di begins. In humans, beauty—or the lack of—shaped who you were from birth. Two beautiful boys from the same family, leading the same lives, could form vastly different personalities. Say, one boy had to endure a painfully pubescent phase, enduring taunts and revulsion, as his contours shifted quietly under the surface, preparing a striking alignment. How defiant this boy would be, his brashness a crustacean cover for the tender nougat inside. Compare this to the boy who was ceaselessly attractive from birth to adulthood, who had never once been cheated by the willfulness of puberty.

  The Naokis rise and walk in opposite directions. Even their gaits are different. Morgan would know. She coded them. The bounce in their feet, the firm ankles. She poured her best, hoping to siphon the code later for Stephen.

  I should be up there, she thinks, as Di stands onstage, what feels like an ocean away.

  “Robots cannot grow up,” Di says. “But you have to imagine as if they did. You can choose how they will.”

  * * *