An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘Hey!’ It is the girl, Ellen. She kicks at the skateboard and I almost fall off. I hang on, carefully adjusting my weight. I don’t turn around. I’m counting.

  ‘HEY!’ She bends down and takes hold of the board and rocks it till I slip forward and off it and onto the concrete and graze the palm of my hand.

  I watch her step onto the skateboard, wobbling from one side to the other. She isn’t used to the way the wheels slip on the surface of the concrete. She trips and stumbles off and the board shoots out and onto the grass; she is off balance, she will fall. I fling my body forward so that she falls softly onto me. My hand hurts. Ellen pushes herself off me and retrieves my skateboard. She sits on it in front of me and now I can’t see the top of the overpass at all.

  ‘Your hand’s bleeding,’ she says.

  I touch the palm of my hand. There is a glint of something in it. A tiny shard of glass the night cleaners didn’t get. I pick the glass out of my hand and wince.

  ‘Are you really a robot?’

  I frown and nod.

  ‘But one with blood.’

  I nod again and brush the drop of blood away. Barely a scratch. I try to squeeze more blood for her to see but it is only a tiny red bloom of nothing.

  ‘Machiney,’ she says. ‘My Machine.’ She pulls my hand towards her lips and kisses the place that is grazed. ‘All better,’ she tells me as if her gesture could somehow make it heal faster. She points: ‘That’s my mum sitting next to your dad.’

  I look back to where a young woman shares the bench with Hamish. They are talking. I wonder if they’re talking about us. Hamish might share some story or other, how I like to skate down the hill too fast or how I’ve just taken to reading all of a sudden and how I’m really enjoying a classic old series by Ursula Le Guin.

  ‘Do you think they’ll fall in love?’ Ellen asks me. I snort through my nose in reply.

  ‘Why not?’ she says. ‘Because of your mother?’

  ‘Synthetics don’t have mothers. Or fathers. He’s just my Guardian.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll tell my mother you’re a robot?’

  ‘Ellen, that’s a secret. Promise you won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I promise.’

  She stands and picks up the skateboard. ‘Come on,’ she says and runs off in the direction of the playground equipment. There are two young kids chasing each other through the raised walkways. She ducks and climbs inside the rainbow tube and I reluctantly follow her.

  The tube is warm inside. There is a slightly musty smell, damp socks, a whole sticky day of play. I can smell chocolate, and there are stars. I put the palm of my hand out face up but I will never be able to catch them. I can see the shape of a child, a shadow with mussed-up hair running back and forth, throwing herself on the ground outside the tube, a second shadow. There is a chase happening. I watch them run and tumble.

  ‘Come on,’ says Ellen. ‘Quickly.’

  She pushes me onto the soft and bouncy surface of the floor. There are stars falling into my eyes through shafts of coloured light. I blink but it’s an illusion, this sense that they’re falling into her curls as she hovers above my face.

  She fumbles with my shorts; I am not sure what I should do. I am not designed to be sexual with someone of her age. And sex with a child is illegal. I absolutely must not hurt her. My purpose is to protect her. She was right about finding pleasure in it, though. My body has begun to announce its pleasure in the contours of my flesh. It speaks to her and she answers crudely, pushing her knickers aside and plumping herself down on the seat of my excitement. She swings there, rocking back and forth. All the nerve endings in my skin are hyperstimulated. This new, sweet smell of her like apple or melon, the heat of her. I am nothing to her. I’m like the swings outside, a piece of play equipment. But she is expanding to fill up the world. She rocks back and forward the way she probably did on her mother’s sex toy and I am a toy too, and yet I feel her on me. I feel the tight pressure around my flesh. I see that she is happy, grinning, giggling, increasing her pace as she climbs towards her orgasm.

  In my room I would be unable to control my excitement from the pure physicality of human contact, but here I am distracted. The small shadow of a child chases back around the rainbow tube again and there is a thud as she trips and falls quite close to where we are coupling. I see the silhouette of a bigger child extend a hand and help her up. A small kindness and a brushing of knees before the chase starts again.

  Ellen bounces fast in my lap. She is making little huffing noises. Her head is nodding, the curls snapping at the stars like hungry snakes. She grunts and then is still for a moment. She looks down at me and laughs, her cheeks flushed. She is grinning, panting. Then she steps off my lap and pulls my shorts up over my stiff penis, like dressing a doll.

  I lie still for a moment trying to process the mad clatter of thoughts and feelings. She is happy. I have not hurt her. I have done nothing wrong, and yet there is a creeping uncertain feeling. Is this a moral dilemma? I am not sure if I should feel ashamed, or anything about what I am supposed to feel and when I try to think through it all clearly it just gets tangled up in a big knot.

  ‘Come on.’ She reaches down and takes my hand and pulls me up. Another small kindness. If she is twelve or thirteen or thereabouts…I wonder if she thinks this makes me her boyfriend, or if I am just a thing to use like a pen or a computer or a chair. Or something in between.

  ‘Let’s go on the swings,’ she says. ‘You can push me up really high.’

  I let her drag me through the loops of the tube and out into the heavy wet air. Summer is coming, but for now it’s quite pleasant and she drags me to the swing and hops on it and waits for me to push.

  I look to where Hamish is sitting beside Ellen’s mother on the bench. He smiles at me and I am not sure if I should smile back. I am not sure if his faith in me is warranted. In the current circumstances. I shrug and push the swing and Ellen kicks higher and higher, shrieking and laughing and enjoying the wind in her hair.

  Liv tries to sit cross-legged on the bed beside me but thinks better of it. She uncrooks her knees and swings them out straight in front of her and tuts. ‘You know I keep forgetting I’m an old person now. You never quite let go of how your body used to move when you were young.’ She shuffles back and plumps a pillow up behind her. ‘There was this guy, Kurzweil. He used to think we would make ourselves immortal. I don’t know if that’d be wise, though. I’m going to die. One day. Fairly soon, I suppose. It keeps me going. It makes me try harder. If I had forever, I think I might just take a big long siesta for a few years, maybe longer.’

  Death. Death and Dying. There are human parts of me. I am suddenly anxious. Will the human cells die? Will my fleshy body betray my computer brain? I don’t have this information. I can’t predict my future in this instance.

  ‘You know this is just a trial project, don’t you Cameron? Its range is limited right now. We don’t know what all the data will mean or if we’ll ever find a way to stop those men hurting kids. It is a small, limited test. You know that don’t you?’

  I blink. I nod. I have always known that this is a trial. But now the word echoes in my head. If you try something then it will either succeed or it will fail. And what happens if this trial does not succeed? What happens if I am a failure? Death. Death and dying. What happens if it is not the human parts of me that fail? What happens if it is the robot part? My machine brain? My heart is beating faster. They will be monitoring every moment of my experience. They will know that I am aroused, but not in a good way. Fear. That is what it would be in a human. I open my mouth to speak and then close it again.

  ‘What is it, Cameron?’

  ‘I know it’s a trial, Liv.’

  Were they monitoring me in the park? They never used to check on data from Real Play. All they needed was my time in the room with the Hebes. I can’t ask Liv about it, but even thinking about the park makes
my heart beat just a little too fast. The rainbow tube is a spiral of questions. Am I still obeying my primary directive? Am I still a successful prototype? That thing that happened—I didn’t do it, it was done to me. And yet I’m responsible for the protection of the children. I have transgressed or I have let myself be transgressed upon. Am I responsible for a crime? My heart’s beating so fast she won’t need to look at the data to know that I’m aroused, but will she know that I am aroused in a bad way?

  ‘Cam, what’s up? What are you feeling?’

  ‘Frightened,’ I say. ‘I think that’s it.’

  She raises her eyebrow. Her whole face is a question.

  ‘I’m aroused but not in a good way.’

  ‘Then yes, you’re frightened,’ she says, nodding. She shifts over on the bed and places her hand next to but not touching my leg. A small sign of her support.

  I like Liv. I trust her. She’s not like Hamish. She is not the instigator of the project. She told me her job is just to quietly observe and find a narrative thread to make sense of it all for their report. She observes me now, the small signs of distress, my hand clutching the bedspread too tight, my breath coming quick and uneven.

  ‘What are you frightened of, Cam?’

  If I say, will it lead to the failure of the trial? I’m programmed to respond honestly, but…

  I don’t want to fail. I don’t want them to shut me down. What should I say?

  ‘Cam?’

  I glance towards her. She stares at me so carefully I feel as if she were reading me. I am a story with a clear narrative. That’s what she does. Narrative. She knows; she must know what’s wrong. I feel my breath stop. I feel the human cells reacting to the lack of oxygen. The human part of me might die from fear.

  ‘Is it the last visit? The Hebephile? I saw it, Cam. I tracked it. I experienced it along with you.’

  ‘You were watching?’

  She nods.

  ‘How did it make you feel?’

  ‘Aroused,’ she says, ‘but not in a good way.’

  I smile a little. I feel like she might know exactly how I feel. ‘But I enjoyed it. That’s my job,’ I tell her. ‘That’s my purpose. I am built to enjoy it.’

  She reaches out and touches my hair. Human hair. Grown, not made. There are parts of me that have equivalent parts in her. She strokes the pale curls, catches one between her fingers.

  ‘You are built to learn, Cam. Your brain remembers and grows from those memories. That’s the only way we can make you seem so much like a real human boy. And it’s my job to log the story of those memories. To anticipate how your brain will grow. We don’t know if we can keep you at this age forever. In five years’ time, we don’t know if you’ll still be a boy or if you will grow into a man. We—everybody—we’re the sum of our experience. So if we keep you at age thirteen for fifty years, won’t your brain just grow and grow, and become the brain of a wise older man?’

  Aging. Death. Dying. I turn and look to the door. I want to get my skateboard. I need the sense of speed, of going fast, all the wind and the sky to distract me from myself. I wonder if they’ve turned the air conditioning off in here. It seems terribly hard to breathe.

  ‘You’re distressed.’

  I nod.

  ‘That’s okay. That’s normal. Do you know what it is that is making you most distressed? Cam? Do you know?’

  I try to slow my breathing. I try to concentrate on nothing but the air in my synthetic lungs, feeding my human cells the necessary amount of oxygen. Keeping me alive.

  ‘Cam?’ she says gently. ‘It’s okay. We just need to talk about it. You need to tell me what is worrying you most.’

  ‘Number One,’ I say. My voice sounds a little breathless, a little high pitched. ‘I want to know what happened to the first model, Cameron One. And the second, and the one after that. I want to know if they are still working. I want to know if they are still alive.’

  ‘You know, Cam, I don’t have that information. I can ask. But they might not tell me. The whole program is pretty tight-lipped. Do you understand that, Cam?’

  I nod.

  ‘I think we should cancel this afternoon’s Real Time session.’

  I shake my head vigorously.

  ‘After last time, I think you need a bit more of a break before you meet the next offender face to face.’

  ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘I’m fine. I want to. I like it. You know I like doing it with them. It is my favourite thing. It will make me not so…frightened.’

  She stares at me for a long time and I won’t flinch. I stare back. I want to prove I’m not a failure. I want to keep doing my job. I want to keep living for as long as I can.

  ‘All right,’ she says, finally. ‘But I’ll be monitoring. I’ll be feeling whatever you feel. If anything goes wrong this time you just have to ask and it will stop. Just say, “Liv. I want it to stop.” I’ll be there before you can count to ten, okay?’

  I nod.

  She stands. She holds out her arms and I step up into them. She hugs me to her chest and she smells good, like baking bread and the faintest hint of jasmine. It must be the fabric softener she uses but I like it.

  ‘Oh. I brought you a gift,’ she says. ‘Close your eyes.’

  In the dark behind my eyelids I can hear the door opening and then closing. It opens a second time and I know she’s standing in front of me. I can feel the heat off her body. I can smell her.

  ‘Okay.’

  I open my eyes.

  Angels. I see angels. The photograph is almost the way I remember it. Three children, white feathered wings. One thing is different to my memory. Behind the children there are storm clouds forming. One of the angels is angry and I wonder now, looking at it, if it is because of the coming storm. He knows he will be caught out in the flood. The other angels seem innocent. They seem not to notice. The angry angel has a halo of blonde curls, a little like my own hair. He even looks a little bit like me.

  I don’t know what to say to her. I step forward as if to hug the framed photograph but it is far too big. It hides all of Liv from view. I know that Liv is back there, holding the image up but I can’t see her. All I can see is the photograph, the dark clouds forming, the angel that looks like me.

  My face itches and I touch it. My finger is wet. I am crying. My fluids are the fluids of any other boy. My tears are real tears: they irrigate my eyes to keep them clear of dust and I suppose at this moment they have been forced from my eyes by the tension that has been building in my skull.

  Liv rests the photograph on the ground and peers over the top of it. She watches me wipe at the tears. She is not smiling. I wonder if this is me failing again, and she’ll put a red cross at the edge of her report. Write a big capital F and put a circle around it. I want to stop. I sniff. I try to stop but the tears are rolling down my cheeks.

  ‘You like your present?’ she asks me.

  An Uncertain Grace. I remember.

  My voice is not quite steady as I nod and tell her: ‘Yes. I do. Yes.’

  Liv is with me in my brain. Watching. I like that she is with me as I roll over on the bed and let him gentle himself into the fleshy parts of me. He is trembling. Aroused, I suppose, but not at all in a good way. He is frightened, this Hebe. He is trying to be gentle with me but he keeps glancing up, his gaze circling around the room. He is looking for hidden cameras, probably. He is looking to where the scientists might be hiding behind a lens, observing his every move. It isn’t stopping him from performing the act. He’s still hard. He’s still physically responding to my body. He is still taking advantage of this rare opportunity to live out his darkest desires. But he is searching for the eyes that are on him. He is looking for them in all the wrong places. All he needs to do is flip my small body over and look into my eyes.

  He’s right. They are watching. Through me. I’m their eyes. When he enters my bum he is entering Liv as well. She is feeling every trembling stroke. She is there with us as he stops looking for her. He app
roaches his climax and they are no longer important. When he grimaces and thrusts himself harder into me it is just the two of us. And even though I thought I might be too distracted to find pleasure in the act this one time, I glance up at the eyes of an angry angel keeping watch at the head of my bed and I ejaculate into the Hebe’s hand. He has been holding my penis. He feels the pulsing of it against his fingers and the thick mucus that fills his palm and he joins me, pumping his stuff into me. Gasping, crying, groaning. He rolls off me quickly and pulls his knees up to his greying chest and weeps. I turn and watch him cry and rest my small hand on his larger one.

  He opens his eyes and looks at me with such desperate sadness. I shuffle closer to him on the bed. I hug his knees and whisper to him. ‘I hope they can help you.’ He sniffs. ‘I hope I can help you,’ I say.

  He frowns. He sniffs and pulls away from me and pulls his trousers on. I watch him dress. Liv told me she would be with me, dressed in a flexible suit that mirrors the pressures on my own human skin. She is looking from my eyes as I see him tucking his shirt into his trousers, pacing, looking up at the nonexistent cameras that he thinks must be hidden in the ceiling.

  ‘I want to get out,’ he says. ‘I want to get out of here.’

  The door opens and the correctional synthetics are there to greet him. They will lead him back to prison. Liv and Hamish will monitor the data they have gathered from his brain during our brief, sweet tussle.

  If they cure him he will no longer desire me. To be well is to find this repulsive, what I do with them. To be well he has to reject me. I turn over and shuffle down where I can stare at my photo. I don’t want to remember the rainbow tube. Liv is in my head right now. Liv is with me. I try to think of the feathers, but all I can see is a shower of glitter, a small girl wriggling to push her pants aside, pushing me backwards, stepping over me, settling down on my lap. I stare at the photo. I stare at the feathers. I stare at the storm clouds. Liv will be seeing all of this through my mechanical brain activity. She will be seeing how confused I am. How aroused. How disturbed.