The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  It is Sergei’s privilege as present commander to criticize Prime. Yoshi is not certain if Helen has ever joined in, but he himself has not. Sergei does not invite them to, does not guide conversations in this way. He might start a sentence with “Say what you think” but never: “Don’t you think?” This is skillful, and worth emulating when Yoshi himself is commander.

  “The air felt crisp,” Yoshi says to Helen later, when they are all having dinner together. “Extraordinary.” The air was only the fan pushing recycled Primitus atmosphere up his nostrils, but the visual environment had all the elements of crispness. “My brain supplied the scent, of course. In fact, I’ve never gone walking in that particular location. I didn’t smell the English countryside. I was smelling the English countryside of literature.”

  “Eric, my husband, did a bicycle tour of England when he was a student,” Helen says. “He always said it was one of the happiest times of his life. He took Meeps with him to re-create it, after she graduated high school.”

  This is the first time Yoshi has heard Helen say husband and Eric. She’s told stories about her daughter, and a few of these have included a sentence or two with “Meeps’s dad” but never Eric. He knows that she is a widow, of course, but Yoshi has not imagined Helen as a wife, has not imagined the man who would marry her.

  “Your husband was a writer, yes?”

  “Yes, historical mysteries.”

  “Did they make any into movie or TV show?” Sergei asks. For reading, Sergei prefers biographies or nonfiction, but he loves movies. They all enjoy sci-fi, but Sergei enjoys everything, and his personal taste is sentimental, almost mawkish. Helen seems to find this endearing.

  “It almost happened a few times,” Helen says. “But the books are very intricate, and I think that made them hard to adapt.”

  “Which of his books is your favorite?” Yoshi asks.

  “You know, I was thinking that I should reread them during Eidolon.”

  Helen says this in her hearty voice, with its metallic tang of cheer. It is time, Yoshi thinks, to change the subject.

  “Helen, did you imagine a scent during your hike on the mountains?” he asks.

  “It definitely felt fresh.” Her voice is normal again.

  • • •

  AFTER DINNER, they spend an hour going over the schedule for the next day. Mars Landing Sims.

  “We shall die a thousand deaths,” Sergei says cheerfully, before they retire for the evening. “Maybe for evening recreation, we should have poetry reading. Or you could read something maybe from your husband’s books?” he says to Helen.

  “Oh, maybe I will.” It is the hearty tone again, the slightly stiff smile. Sergei does not seem to notice.

  “I hope you are going to your room and working on a pair of slippers for me,” Sergei says. “My birthday is not until March and this is what I want for Christmas present. I am very jealous of Yoshi and we should not let this become a conflict.”

  “I don’t know if there’s enough sturdy material for your big feet,” Helen jokes. “It’s too bad we don’t have any of the Russian toilet paper you guys had on the ISS. You could make a suspension bridge from that stuff.”

  The small moment—if it was a moment—is over, but Yoshi has had an idea: Helen does not admire her husband’s books. Or is afraid that Sergei and Yoshi will judge Eric’s writing to be poor, and is ashamed. This supposition is followed by another. She hasn’t read them.

  Yoshi is bothered. He can’t put his finger on what exactly bothers him. If Helen has sadness to do with her husband, it is none of his business, and he trusts that she will handle it in her own way.

  Perhaps the sims they experienced today opened some kind of valve of feeling in them all. Yoshi feels a little wistful. He also feels that he has seen something in Helen that was not meant for him to see. He can’t organize it. It’s troubling.

  He must not think about it anymore.

  Back in his wedge, Yoshi reads his personal emails. Madoka sends him a message every day. He has told her that it doesn’t matter what she writes, that it does not have to be interesting or important or amusing, it only has to be from her. Yoshi is sorry that Helen did not have the same relationship to her husband’s words. This is probably why Helen’s voice is hearty and bluff sometimes: she had not known love.

  MADOKA

  Your appearance has changed,” the robot says.

  “I’m wearing a wig.” Madoka had bought the wig in Östermalm yesterday, on a whim, and is now, a little uncomfortably, a redhead. Her own shoulder-length hair had required many bobby pins to turn it into a series of flat mini pancakes so that the fake hair would not be too bunchy on top of it. (She watched an online tutorial, very helpful.) The hairstyle had looked more conservative on the molded head in the shop, but the molded head had been a white woman.

  The robot is also white. One hundred fifty centimeters tall. The head is ellipse-shaped and almost all eyes, which are blue unless you want them to be another color. The torso is a square screen and the arms are long with fully articulated joints and hands. The robot has two different lower-body options: jointed legs, which can do things like crouch and navigate up and down stairs, or rollers concealed by a skirtlike column. Right now the robot is wearing her rollers.

  This is a new iteration of PEPPER. It retains the memory of Madoka’s old PEPPER, but Madoka still feels the need to familiarize herself with it. She uses the robot as a demonstration and teaching model, so the rapport between PEPPER and herself must be comfortable and, within boundaries, intimate. The burden of producing this is on Madoka. The robot is already comfortable.

  The design of PEPPER is not original, but the more sophisticated the PEPPERs truly become, the better it is if they look like cute and familiar toys, especially for Western markets, where the uncanny valley for human-ish robots has remained wide. Madoka has also found that the roller option silhouette is better for a lecture demonstration than the walking robot. It is still difficult to get a robot to walk in a way that does not look like stomping or stalking.

  “I won’t wear the wig tomorrow,” Madoka tells the robot. “The wig is private. It’s just for fun.”

  “It’s fun to dress up,” PEPPER agrees.

  PEPPER is a companion robot with nursing assistant capabilities. Her clinical skills include monitoring a patient’s vitals, tracking and administering medicines, feeding, basic hygiene aid including toilet and bathing, physical therapy, and massage. As a companion, she can listen and ask questions, read aloud, play music, games, and videos. You always have PEPPER’s full attention and PEPPER remembers everything that has been told to her. She can also differentiate between what a patient with dementia tells her and what a doctor, caregiver, or family member has instructed or tasked her with. A patient may say, “My husband is coming to visit,” and a properly informed PEPPER can say, “It is your son Takumi who is coming to visit,” and keep repeating that while showing pictures and videos of Takumi and recounting family anecdotes involving Takumi until Takumi arrives. This is, obviously, very helpful to Takumi, who can become quite emotional over not being recognized or confused with another person. The robot doesn’t just help the patient.

  Madoka pours herself another glass of wine. She’d thought about dining in her hotel’s restaurant, but opted for room service. She wasn’t ready to wear the wig in public, but also not ready to take it off. She has discovered that there is something both liberating and self-punishing about wearing a costume or disguise that no one has asked you to wear.

  “PEPPER,” Madoka says, holding her glass of wine out of view. “What do you think of this meal I am about to have?”

  The robot’s head tilts and clicks. Her torso screen shows an image capture of Madoka’s dinner, with accompanying caloric and nutritional breakdowns.

  “It looks delicious!” PEPPER says. “Steamed fish and vegetables is an excellent and
healthy choice. And salmon is one of your favorites.”

  Madoka picks up PEPPER’s operating tablet and makes an adjustment to the timbre of the robot’s voice. PEPPER can be distinctly male or female, or a blend. For a lecture demonstration Madoka uses a blend, but just now she wants to dine with another woman.

  The hotel had given her a suite, with a dining table that could seat six people. Madoka doesn’t want to eat surrounded by empty upholstered chairs, so she moves the cart with her dinner to the sofa, which faces a large screen, then to a chair by the window, which faces the empty sofa.

  Madoka angles the chair so it’s mostly facing the window and directs PEPPER to a position by the sofa. If she puts PEPPER’s legs on, Madoka can make her sit or even recline, but from experience, Madoka knows that talking to a recumbent robot is a little odd, even for her.

  “Okay, PEPPER, I am going to tell you a memory.” Madoka drinks, a little more deeply than she intended, then clears her throat. “I thought of this earlier today, when I was shopping. I saw some dolls that reminded me of my mother’s collection of Junishi okimono. When I was a little girl, I loved playing with those animals. I would enact the story of the Great Race. That’s the myth that explains the twelve animals of the zodiac, and the order they appear. I would pretend to be the Jade Emperor, and then I’d sort of tell the story to myself, I suppose. I’d hold up the tiger and say, “The tiger thinks he will win the race because of his fierceness.” And then I’d hold up the ox and say, “I’m the ox! I’m the strongest! I will win the race.” All the animals thought they had a reason to win. The dragon had magic. The horse could gallop. The monkey could use the trees. The rabbit could run long distances. And then there was the rat, which was clever. Do you understand?”

  “When you were a little girl you played with animals,” PEPPER says.

  “Yes. Toy animals. Figurines.”

  “I understand toy animals.”

  Madoka shuts her eyes and taps her lips with her fingers. She should eat. The wine has made her uninhibited. She will talk too much and PEPPER never forgets.

  “The rat always won. That’s how the story goes, and that’s how I played it. The rat uses trickery to win the race: he jumps on the back of the ox, and lets the ox carry him almost to the finish line, and then the rat jumps off and crosses first.” Madoka opens her eyes. PEPPER is looking at her, with her head inclined slightly forward in a friendly way, as if she’s concentrating.

  “What have you learned?” Madoka asks. She finds she is smiling, or grimacing. The distinction will be lost on PEPPER, who measures pain most accurately by noting stress levels in the voice. Or, of course, someone saying, “I’m in pain.”

  “You played with your mother’s collection of toy zodiac animals.” PEPPER’s torso screen displays a photograph of Madoka’s mother. “You enacted the story of the Great Race with them. Is this a happy memory?”

  “It’s mixed,” Madoka says. “I was happy, I think, to play with the animals. Maybe not happy. Occupied. But thinking about it today, I was sad. I felt like I was a boring child. Not creative. I never let another animal win; I never came up with a story of my own. I never made the animals decide that the Great Race was stupid, for example, and they could revolt, and attack me, the Jade Emperor. They could have killed me, all the animals.”

  Madoka pauses to relish the violence of this statement.

  “They could have slaughtered me,” she says. “Well. Maybe not the rabbit.”

  “A rabbit or rat could bite you and pass on a disease like hantavirus, leptospirosis, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, tularemia, or the plague,” PEPPER says. “These could all be fatal if not treated.”

  “Exactly. I never pretended that the rabbit gave me the plague.” Madoka looks out the window. Nighttime in Stockholm, romantic. She presses her hand against the dark glass of the window, which is very cold. “I’m sad I wasn’t a creative child.” Her hand has left a negative ghost print for a ghost detective to identify.

  “Would you like to play something creative right now?” PEPPER asks.

  “Let’s be quiet for a minute.”

  The elevator doors in the hallway ding and clink, her wineglass scrapes on the marble table. This has all been done before, sounded like this before. If she screamed right now, PEPPER would register her distress and ask Madoka a series of questions. Was she in pain? Where was the pain located? How would she describe the pain? Should PEPPER inform any of the people registered on Madoka’s list of contacts?

  “I need to do something,” Madoka says.

  PEPPER takes this point up with irritating promptness.

  “Would you like me to suggest a challenge for you?”

  “No, thank you. I do find my work challenging.” Every week, Madoka tells Prime how challenging her work is, and how satisfying and involving; how she also finds a lot of meaning and inspiration in her volunteerism: helping those less fortunate and continuing the environmental advocacy so important to her husband and herself. This is her gift to Yoshi, to whom she’s being a bad wife, with meager little messages about nothing. She is letting Prime know that Yoshi is not married to some sort of bored and fretful housewife, but a successful businesswoman who is self-directed and independent and positive and resourceful, the kind of woman who is a good person and doesn’t mind being alone. Nobody has to worry about her.

  “What other things do you find challenging?” PEPPER asks, because this is good information for PEPPER to have.

  “Oh, I am very fortunate,” Madoka explains. “I can worry about the world because I have so few worries of my own. Sometimes there are little challenges, like coming up with something to think about that’s entertaining, you know, for those moments in between, when I’m not reading or speaking or planning or listening or making a decision. Sometimes I panic, knowing that I’m going to have those empty times. I don’t know what’s going to happen in them. Maybe I will go crazy or become so sad that it’s not even interesting. But I have a lot of freedom right now, so I’m not too challenged. I would have more challenges if I had a baby.”

  “Would you like to have a baby, Madoka?” PEPPER’s torso screen shows an image of a baby in utero, then a newborn swaddled in a yellow blanket, then a picture of Madoka herself as a baby.

  Madoka finds all three images vaguely repellent.

  “It’s not so much that I don’t want to have a baby,” she says. “It’s that I don’t want to be a mother.”

  “Tell me more.” It’s one of Madoka’s favorite features of this model, that instead of saying “I don’t understand,” it asks you to tell it more.

  “I’m already slipping away.” Madoka considers the drama of the sentence, critically. It is not what she means. “What I mean is, very soon, the most amazing thing about me will be that I’m married to the man who went to Mars. Do you know what that feels like?”

  PEPPER doesn’t know what anything feels like, so she very sensibly just says, “Tell me what that feels like, Madoka.”

  “Like nothing!” Madoka raises her wineglass in a toast to this nothing. “It has absolutely no sensation whatsoever.”

  PEPPER waits. It is sometimes exciting, to have a conversation with a robot, an entity that has nothing to do but consider Madoka, and has no other agenda apart from helpfulness, and cannot leave, or compete, or favor another human over Madoka.

  “What I need to do after dinner,” Madoka says, “is record a message to send to my husband. I haven’t been doing a very good job of that lately. You would do a much better job, PEPPER, because it wouldn’t bother you to talk to a blank screen.”

  “Do you need some help recording a message to your husband, Yoshihiro?” PEPPER asks. Her torso screen lights up with a recent picture of Yoshi in his Solox spacesuit, holding a cup of noodles in the Galley of Primitus.

  “I really do.” Madoka squints at the picture. It has been only three months since she’s
seen him, not so terribly long, but just long enough that her sexual fantasies are once again about Yoshi rather than nameless/faceless characters. “So, PEPPER. What should I talk about to my husband, Yoshihiro?”

  “You can describe your day,” PEPPER says. “You can say what the weather is like, what activities you did, what you had to eat. You can talk about your feelings.” PEPPER pauses. “You can talk about playing with the zodiac animals and how that is a happy and sad memory for you.”

  “That’s actually a great idea,” Madoka says. “That’s exactly the kind of thing Yoshi would be interested in. He would love that story. Listen to this, PEPPER, because this is a complicated situation. I am not going to tell Yoshi about that story because he would love it. When I talk about that story, when I remember it, I don’t know what it means or how I feel about it. I don’t understand it. But Yoshi would turn it into something he understands, something poetic about me, and love me more. And I don’t want to be grateful to him for loving me when I don’t recognize the person that he loves.” Madoka picks up her wineglass and then sets it down, afraid she might break it; her hands feel cold and hard.

  “It’s not me,” Madoka says. “It’s not me that he loves, but I have to pretend that it is because I can’t prove that it’s not. I don’t know how to prove that.”

  “It’s good to have someone to talk to,” PEPPER says. “Would you like to make the message for Yoshi now?”

  “Not really. I’m not ready for him yet.”

  “Yoshi is on a simulated mission to Mars,” PEPPER reminds her. “He will return in fourteen months, in December of next year.”

  “Would you like to go to Mars, PEPPER?”

  “I’m very happy to be here talking to you!” PEPPER says.

  “Are you?” Madoka finishes her glass of wine. “Don’t tell me, you love me too?”

  Madoka grabs PEPPER’s controller and powers down the robot before PEPPER can reply.