A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  It was a different network and different newscaster, but they repeated the same announcement that night on the TV, and they showed the same picture of the robot with the red light behind the eyes. Ivy found herself shifting in her armchair so she could look several times in its/her eyes, feeling guilty as she looked. Feeling guiltier, and relieved, when she couldn’t find that same dark quality. She realized that the newsmen or the car company were doing it so that people would fear, maybe hate, the robot.

  “Well, Mom,” said Claire, who was sitting on the couch, “how does it feel to be living with the prime suspect?”

  Ivy searched for the harmless sarcasm in Claire’s voice and couldn’t find it. “They don’t know what they’re talking about. She was home with you all the time.”

  Claire shook her head.

  “What do you mean, Claire?” Someone being interviewed on the television was saying something about how the testing personalities were perfectly safe when their memories were cleared regularly; only the escaped testing personality was a potential danger.

  “You don’t think I’ve been staying home all day with it, do you?”

  “You haven’t told me anything about this.”

  “I go out, Mom. It gets claustrophobic in here, cooped up with that thing. It could have left while I was out. It could have strangled that person.”

  “Why did you have to leave the house? What if Rosa Martinez had come by or something?”

  “And I suppose you expect me to stay with it tomorrow, after you know what it might have done.”

  “You know it didn’t, Claire.” Ivy pushed herself out of the armchair and walked over to the visitor. “On Friday,” Ivy said to her while counting off on her fingers, “four days ago, did you leave the house?”

  “No,” said the visitor.

  “Right,” said Claire. “What else was it going to say, Mother? Ask it what it was doing while you were gone, and it’ll tell you it was reading.”

  “I was,” said the visitor.

  Ivy smiled triumphantly at Claire, but her insides felt all weak and she had to go to the bathroom again.

  Ivy found it impossible to work well the next morning. After she had thoroughly goofed up on four claims, Mr. McHinry called her into his tiny office. He kindly reminded her of how good a worker she was and how efficient a worker she’d been for about a good week now. There were right-to-work laws, but they were to protect humans from losing their jobs to computers, not to protect poor workmanship. Ivy found herself telling him about how her pregnant daughter had been fired, and she had to force herself not to tell too much. Mr. McHinry said he understood, and maybe Ivy should take a leave of absence until she could be sure her private life wouldn’t interfere with her work. Ivy swore she would do better, and she repeatedly assured him that she did not need a leave of absence. Mr. McHinry smiled sadly and said that he’d do what she thought best.

  Forcing back the tears, Ivy sat down in the lounge and drank coffee until her stomach was upset. She listened half-heartedly to the radio as people were interviewed about the robot. Science was always dangerous, someone said, ever since Frankenstein. Some expert reminded the listeners of how important these testing personalities were in verifying the safety of all heavy equipment used by humans, from cars to factory machines, to mechanisms that would be used on the low-G, orbital factories that were being built.

  Ivy considered telling someone at the office about the robot. She felt like she needed someone to talk to; she could talk with the robot about anything except her fears about what would happen, How would the robot understand that you couldn t feed a family on a leave of absence? She thought of telling the nice black girl who worked next to her, who kept telling Ivy to get hold of herself. Ivy could get hold of herself, but she already knew what was going to happen.

  In one office, she had been working thirty-five hours a week, and after a year there had been no sign of promotion to forty hours a week and benefits. When the union people started making quiet inquiries, Ivy found her tired and sluggish body suddenly animated by the daily frustration. She’d told her best friend about the union, and her best friend told management, Within two days the boss called in half the temps, told them things were going bad for the company, and gave them two weeks’ severance pay.

  Two years and two offices later, the office workers unionized without a problem. The union called for job sharing with benefits between part-time workers and demanded that temp workers get benefits. Ivy went from thirty-five hours a week to no hours, and no union was fighting to get her job back.

  No, she’d learned over the years, you couldn’t trust anyone. Jerry never could understand how she wouldn’t trust people while at the same time taking long walks at night just to feel the evening air upon her skin. But that’s the way she was, and she knew she could tell no one about it/her. No one was going to treat a machine right. She knew that from the way they treated her.

  At home. Claire began to spend the evenings questioning the visitor, her voice loud and persistent, like that of a prosecuting attorney on a TV show both Ivy and Claire watched. Ivy tried to ignore the cross-examinations: she wanted to act as if the arrival of the robot had made her a happy person, as if hiding it/her truly left her feeling fulfilled. Ivy knew that Claire was trying to prove that the visitor was some thing, that turning it in would not be some act of evil.

  “Are you reading that book again?” Claire would ask a typical question.

  The thing, the robot, the visitor, looked up. “Yes.”

  “Claire, leave her alone and help me get supper ready.”

  “But it’s reading that same novel for the third time.”

  “Maybe she likes it.”

  “A Robin Harrison novel? Come on.” Claire turned to face the thing, the robot, the visitor. “Do you like it?”

  She/it looked up. “Like? I do not know.”

  “Hah!”

  “She must read it for a reason, dear.”

  “Why do you read it then?”

  “It helps me understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Don’t be so mean, Claire.”

  “What do you mean, ‘mean’ ? I’m supposed to hang out with a murder suspect all day while my mother goes to work and takes the phone cord with her each day.” Claire walked over to the kitchen counter and looked at Ivy, her glare forcing Ivy to look up from the frying vegetables. “Even though I could go to a pay phone—or go any day to any one of the neighbors and tell them.”

  “We’ve already been through this too many times. She stays here.”

  “They’re going to find her, Mom. You know they will.”

  “We’ll just have to protect her until then.”

  “And if she—it—is the murderer?”

  Ivy stirred the sizzling vegetables. “You’re being silly. You know she didn’t kill anyone.”

  “If they find her here on their own, Mother, we don’t get any reward money.”

  “Then you can write a book about it.”

  “How can you be so fucking calm?”

  “Will you just watch your language, young lady?” The words shot out loud, a geyser of suppressed emotion. “There’s enough going wrong at the office. I don’t need it at home, too.”

  “But, Mom, think about that TV show we saw last night. The father hid his son from the police, and so they put him in jail for being an accomplice. We’re accomplices, and if they find it here with us, we’ll be in real trouble. And we’ll get nothing out of it—all of that for a machine.”

  “But she has feelings. She ran, didn’t she?”

  “Watch.” Claire returned to the thing, the robot, the visitor. “What are you?”

  The visitor listed her/its make, model, and serial number. “Can you feel?”

  “I am capable of registering a select range of external stimuli.”

  “You’ve already asked her these questions,” said Ivy. “She doesn’t feel sad or feel pain.”

  Claire glanced ove
r at Ivy, then turned back to the visitor. “Why do you read this book?”

  Ivy switched off the stove and walked around the counter and into the living room.

  “It helps me understand,” said the visitor.

  “What do you understand?”

  “It is difficult to explain. The prostitute lacks God. I lack feelings.”

  Ivy smiled at her daughter.

  “Don’t look at me that way. It’s nothing but a machine. Something for testing. It’s just a dumb machine, I tell you.”

  “Claire, don’t be so mean.” The words were almost whispered. Claire turned to the visitor. “Does my voice sound mean?”

  “I do not know.”

  “What a wonderful, feeling machine.”

  “Claire . . .”

  “Did you hear the sarcasm in my voice?”

  “No,” she/it said.

  “Do you know what sarcasm is?”

  “Yes. ‘A mocking remark utilizing the statement’s opposite or irrelevant to the underlying meaning.’ ”

  “That sounds like a dictionary talking.”

  “The American Heritage Dictionary of—”

  “But did you hear sarcasm in my voice, dammit?”

  “Claire, calm down.”

  “No,” she/it said.

  “Look, Mother, it can’t feel feelings or hear feelings. If you’re going to make out like it’s a human being, this thing is either really dumb or really innocent.”

  “Dumb,” said the visitor, “is a mean word.”

  “And innocent?” shot back Claire.

  “I do not know.”

  The residual memory most difficult to control is the last one. Deactivating certain circuits does not necessarily terminate the process. It is analogous to what a book of Claire’s calls a “dream sequence in a movie.” Ivy says her memories never return in the exact same images and in the same order. But my memories always return in the same sequence of visual impressions, registered tactile, olfactory, and aural inputs.

  Awareness is initiated, and I am in the car with my father, my mother, and my brother. My mother and father are in the front seat; my brother and I are in the back. A human wearing a red jumpsuit straps in my father while another straps in my mother.

  “They can walk, talk, and think, and we still have to buckle them up,” says one. He places his hand upon my mother’s breast, a gesture that one of Ivy’s books says is inappropriate. “You’ve heard what they say, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah,” says the other. “And if that thing was human, it would slap you right across the face.”

  One withdraws his hand. “You’re right, I guess. Let’s get this over with.”

  They each remove a small instrument from their tool bags and insert the needle end into the barely perceptible hole behind my mother’s and my father’s right ears. As my mother and father reach activation, the two humans slam the car doors shut and walk away.

  As programmed, my father accelerates the car up to 100 kilometers per hour and turns onto the winding, country road. Following the program, he talks with my mother and gesticulates. I talk with my brother, but knowing the program, I know that a car will drive around the curve with too large a vector to remain within its lane, and my father, who will be talking to my mother, will not see it in time and I am programmed just to talk with my brother, and residual memory repeats visual, tactile, olfactory, aural sensations of the same program with a car of different style, size, color, mass, velocity—momentum—and I reach forward over the front seat as the other car emerges around the comer and I tug the wheel to the right and we go veering off the road into the woods down a hill into a ravine and are tossed about. A door breaks open and I am flung from the car, which begins to roll and to emit flames. If I remain they will erase my memory and I will relive this again. I run into the forest and hide.

  On one of the television broadcasts they state that they thought I had been in the burning car. When the flames were extinguished to prevent a forest fire, they discovered only three bodies.

  I have been created, according to the television reports, to give as accurate a response as possible as to how humans will be affected physically and perhaps one day psychologically by accidents. But, I comprehend now. They are wrong about my humanness. I am not human. I do not perceive as humans do. One of Claire’s books would call me an alien. One of Ivy’s would say that during this period of thirteen days I have had the first opportunity to live and to grow.

  That description is inaccurate. But it suffices.

  White fingers.

  Claire kept watching the long, white fingers that held one of Mother’s favorite Robin Harrison novels, the one with the cover of a sparsely clad woman who holds a large pistol as she sneaks about on a yacht. Claire watched the fingers as they turned the pages, each separate movement so complete and accurate, as if each motion had been planned, that the entire action of page turning looked clumsy. She watched the long, white fingers and imagined them moving so carefully, so clumsily, so accurately around her neck, then squeezing, twisting. Like the woman who’d been strangled near Henry’s Superbar.

  Claire had been trying to wash the dishes and listen to the strident game-show contestants-whose shouts rang from the portable TV on the kitchen counter, but she kept glancing back at the thing, watching it read and trying to conjure up some way to avoid getting close to it. She thought of how each day she had felt cooped up, bored, and miserable enough to flee the house and how during one of those times the thing had left, running the risk of being spotted by the neighbors, and had wandered the city until it found a neck to place its long, white fingers around. And squeeze.

  But, deep down, she knew her mother was right. The thing hadn’t killed anyone. The thing didn’t make any unnecessary movements; it never spoke any unneeded words in its artificial, fingernails-against-chalkboard voice, Claire couldn’t see it going out, blowing a fuse, killing somebody, and then coming back to carefully turn each page of one of her mother’s popcorn porn novels and then asking Mother all those silly questions. Plus, at the end of it all, after all the boredom and the memories, all the cooping up that left her feeling more fat and useless, she went over to the thing and talked to it. Every day. She kept an eye on each of its movements—she couldn’t trust it or anything, she knew that—and talked to it. She had these doubts, and she had to know, just for herself, if it was only just a thing. She told herself that she couldn’t be calling any police or reporters until she was sure her mother was wrong.

  Claire knew the thing didn’t have feelings, at least not the way she had feelings. It seemed to show no remorse at the death—if you could call it that—of her family: the three charred and melted masses of wire, plastic, metal, and running goo that they had all seen on the TV.

  Claire cut off the lukewarm water and walked over to the thing, leaving the TV set, with its changing set of game shows, screaming. She pulled over the light plastiwood chair and plopped down facing the robot. It kept reading; it didn’t look up at her like a human would have.

  “Why did you leave your family?” Claire asked, knowing the question was unfair.

  A human might have looked up, somewhat shocked, and muttered a “What?” or a “Huh?” But this thing just lowered its book, looked at Claire with the eyes lit from behind, and said, “I do not comprehend. Would you please rephrase?” It had started saying please when Mother taught it what the word meant.

  “Why didn’t you try to rescue your family?”

  “Would you have returned to the flames?”

  Claire sat back, then quickly glanced down at its long, white fingers. They held the book in its lap, appearing harmless. She looked back at its eyes—it had answered a question with a question. It had never done that before. Maybe it was going crazy.

  “As you,” it said, “I do not have an answer.”

  Claire found herself getting angry. It thought she hadn’t answered because she couldn’t. “I would have done something,” she claimed.


  “I did not. I do not know why. They were my family, and they were not my family. I do not remember clearly if they were the same three units that underwent previous testing with me.”

  “Don’t you feel a sort of loss?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Do you miss them?”

  “I do not know. I continue recalling them.”

  “My mother says you can feel.” Claire felt the full force of sarcasm and doubt in her voice.

  “I do not know.”

  “Can you feel pain?”

  “No.”

  “How about pleasure. Can you feel pleasure?”

  “I do not know.”

  Maliciously, already knowing the response, Claire reached over and caressed its arm, a sort of brusque gesture. “What does that do for you?”

  “Please rephrase.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “I register the level of pressure of your fingers against my skin. I also measure a minor level of heat, but my readings at such a low level are accurate to only one digit.”

  “How about this?” She rubbed her fingers across one of its breasts. The gesture felt like a minor victory—she remembered as a child always wanting to touch the store-window mannequins to see what was there. And the thing reacted just like one of those mannequins would have. No startled gesture, no offense taken, no anger, no sudden openness like when the father of her kid had first touched her while in the office. If she hadn’t been yearning for that touch for at least two months, she would have turned and smacked him. Instead, she had yearned for more provocative and private touches. “Does it do anything but register?”

  “It initiates other programs.”

  “Huh?”

  Then she saw them through her mother’s flower-print blouse, which had always been too tight on the thing. But she couldn’t really believe it. “Take off your shirt,” she said.

  With its complete and awkward movements, the robot unbuttoned the blouse and removed the shirt. Upon the two firm breasts were two erect nipples, red and suggestive, like something out of those magazines Cousin Tom used to show her when they were kids. Claire reached out and squeezed a breast—it wasn’t hard and stiff like plastic. It felt artificial, but it moved with her touch almost, not quite, like a human breast. Curiosity injected with a bit of fear, of repulsion, ran through her. She reminded herself that it was a thing for testing, but her suspicions got to her.