by Neil Clarke
“I haven’t seen any people,” Aliss mused.
“Maybe they work.”
Her eyes stayed narrow, her jaw tight and jumping a little back by her ear, and she rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet. I knew what that meant. “Guess we’re talking a walk.”
“Got to meet the neighbors, right?”
I’d actually been thinking about sliding into the hot tub naked and having another beer. But this was our first house together, and I wanted her to be happy. “Let’s go introduce ourselves.”
Our driveway gave under our feet, the heat drawing up a hint of its origin as old tires, but not so much it overwhelmed the loamy forest dirt spiced with cedar. Aliss and I turned onto the road, hand in hand. Meeting the neighbors started to feel like a picket fence, like something my mom would do. We turned off the road onto their driveway.
Red light lasered across our bare shins. “Stop now.”
Aliss drew in a sharp breath and squeezed my hand before letting it go and freezing in place.
“State your business.” I followed the voice to a spot about fifteen feet in front of me, and about knee-high. The guard-bot was the same pebbly-dark color as the driveway, cylindrical, with more than two feet, and not standing still, which is what kept me from counting feet. This bot was neither pretty nor humanoid. In fact, a bright blue circle with a red target stickered in its side screamed weapons.
I talked soft to it. “We’re the new neighbors. We came to introduce ourselves.”
Its voice sounded cheerfully forced, like a slightly tinny villain in a superhero movie. “Aliss Johnson and Paul Dina. Twenty-seven and twenty-eight, respectively. You have been here for precisely sixty-seven hours. . . .”
I waved it silent before it got around to checking our bank balance and running us off entirely. “So, then you know we’re harmless. We’d like to meet your owners.”
“They are not home.”
Aliss still hadn’t moved, but she asked it, “When will they come back?”
It turned a full 360, as if someone else might have snuck up behind it, and then said, “Please back up until you are off the property line.”
We backed, all the nice warm fuzziness of being in a new home turned sideways. After we’d turned away from the house and the bot, my back itched behind my heart. I whispered in Aliss’s ear, “Not very nice neighbors.”
She grunted, her brow furrowed.
“Maybe we should jump in the hot tub.”
She gave me a pouty, unhappy look. “They were watching us.”
I didn’t remind her she’d been watching them. I just hugged her close, still whispering, “This is our first night here. Let’s enjoy it.”
She stopped me right there in the middle of the road, at the edge of our own property line, and nuzzled my neck. When she looked up at me, the slight distraction in her gaze told me I wouldn’t have all of her attention easily. I made a silent vow to figure out a way to get it all, and started my devious plot by sliding my hand down the small of her back and pulling her close into me. We walked home with our hips brushing each other.
The next morning, warmth from her attention still lingered in the relaxed set of my shoulders and the way my limbs splayed across the bed like rubber. Birds sang so loudly they might have been recorded. I tried to separate them, figure out how many species must be outside.
“Honey?” she called. With some reluctance I opened my eyes to find Aliss standing on the small deck outside the bedroom, one of my shirts her only clothing. Fog enveloped the treetops outside our third-story window, tinting the morning ghostly white and gray. “Will you come here?”
Since she was wearing my shirt, I pulled on my jeans and joined her, drinking in a deep whiff of us smelling like each other. Although we couldn’t see the house from any of our windows, the deck had a nearly direct view into the robot-house’s kitchen, the fog and one thin tree-trunk the only obstructions. Three silvery figures moved about inside of a square of light that shone all the more brightly for the fog.
I put a hand on Aliss’s shoulder, leaning into her. “Since robots don’t need food, there must be people there.” “Don’t you see her?”
I squinted. At the table, a girl sat sideways to us, spooning something from her bowl into her mouth. She wore a white polo shirt and brown shorts, and her blond hair was curled back artfully behind her ears and tied with a gold bow. She belonged in a commercial. Across from her, one of the robots appeared to be holding an animated conversation with her.
“How old do you think she is?” Aliss asked.
She still had a child’s lankiness and a flat chest, but she was probably near as tall as Aliss.
“Ten? Twelve?” “She’s alone.”
“You don’t know that.” Although her observations were often uncanny.
“It explains the nasty-bots. They were protecting her. But it’s not right.”
“Her mom or dad will show up any second.”
Aliss crossed her arms over her chest and gave me the look. “No cars, still. No movement except the girl. No other lights on. She’s alone. It’s a crime to leave a girl that age alone.”
I glanced back at the window, where one robot was clearly conversing with the girl and another was bringing her a fresh glass of juice. “She’s not alone.”
All I got for that was the look again. I tugged her close to me. “Come on, let’s eat. She must have parents.”
“I hope so.” Aliss let me pull her gaze away from the bright square of window and its even brighter occupants.
Days later, we sat on new recycled-sawdust Adirondack chairs we’d ordered for the bedroom deck. The table between us held two coffee cups and two pairs of binoculars and a camera. Aliss hadn’t moved from her chair for two hours. She worried at her beautiful lower lip. “No parents. No people. Not for five days.”
“They’ll come.” Not that I believed it any more. “Maybe there’s someone living there who never comes into the kitchen.”
“That’s lame.”
“I’m reaching. I want my girl back.” “Don’t be selfish.”
At least she had a little tease in her voice when she said it.
We met the neighbors—not at the robot house, but across the street. William and Wilma Woods. Really. They were at least eighty. Their kids hired bot-swarms to clean up their yard for them, but obviously did nothing for the inside of the house. The Wood’s probably couldn’t see well enough to tell if there was a purple people eater living in the robot house, and when we asked about it, William pulled his lips up into his hollow cheeks and said, “The new house? I dunno who lives there. We don’t get out much.”
He meant us. We lived in the new house.
The house on the other side of us from the robot house stood empty-eyed and vacant, with a traditional security system that included signs and warnings of proximity detectors. Forest took over for half a mile on the far side of the robot before it yielded a barn-shaped house next to a barn with a corral and three swaybacked horses. The off-beat collection of direct neighbors made me wonder if we’d picked the right house to buy. The robot house was clearly our problem, at least in the world according the Aliss. And since she was my world, it mattered to me. In fact, after days of watching the little girl play ball with robots and eat with robots and study at the kitchen table with the help of robots, I was beginning to worry all on my own. Surely the kid needed a mom or a brother or a dog or something. Something warm.
I have some skill with the nets, but all that got me was frustrated. A holding company owned the house. A public company owned that company and a few hundred more. It spread wealth—a lot more than this house—through thousands of shareholders. Not a very unique tax dodge for second or third homes. All it told me was the girl—or her family—or the freaking robots—had money. Which I already knew. I grit my teeth and kept plugging while Aliss brought me coffee and rubbed my neck. We saw the girl bent over the table studying every day, but I couldn’t find her in public school, onl
ine or offline. No kids of her description had been reported missing anywhere in the country.
We unpacked the house, all except the pallet of robostuff, which Aliss steadfastly ignored, and two boxes of art too lame for the new house.
The third week, I woke up in the middle of the dark and texted a friend in the reserves, who brought his night vision goggles. She was warm—and alone. Human.
Satellite shots from the city never showed a car, although they did show the girl out playing robot ball twice.
Aliss made up names for her (Colette, Annie, Lisa, Barbie) and drew her picture. Not that we didn’t do our jobs (me—investing advice, her marketing), or make dinner, or make love. But the spare time that might have been nights out or movies all went to the robot’s girl.
It wasn’t like we wanted kids. But she started to haunt our dreams for no good reason except that we were human, and she was surrounded by beings who weren’t. We walked by the house at least once a day. Always we saw the guard bots. There were three of them. One too many for the two of us. Or maybe three too many. We hadn’t degenerated into breaking and entering. After all, the robot’s girl laughed and played. Her hair was neat and her clothes ironed.
We walked, and watched, almost every day. Delivery trucks came and went from time to time, but no regular cars stayed, no friends, no family. Just groceries, and occasionally, bags or boxes that might hold shoes or clothes or books.
Fall began to cool and shorten the nights. We were on our lunch break, walking out with the first yellow and orange leaves scrunching under our feet, the sky a nearly-purple-blue above us. After we passed the house and entered the stretch of forest on the far side,
Aliss was silent for a long time before she said, “She’s too good. A kid her age should play tricks and make faces and all that stuff. She doesn’t do that.” “Do robots have a sense of humor?”
“Shit. She’s been like this forever.” Her voice rose. “I keep hoping her mom is on vacation, and she’s coming back. She’s not. The robots really are raising her.”
She fell silent, her feet making soft sliding steps on the road, her breathing faster than it should be for our pace, her lips a tight line in her face. “I’m going in.”
“A little melodramatic, aren’t we? You sound like a TV cop show.”
She swung around in front of me and stopped, blocking my way, head tilted up toward me. “It’s like she’s in jail. But she doesn’t know it. What if they’ve raised her forever? What if that little girl doesn’t know what a human hug feels like? What if . . . what if she thinks she’s inferior to those robots? What are they teaching her?”
“Shhhhhh.” I took her shoulders lightly. She felt like a bird. “We have to keep perspective. Not get thrown in jail for breaking and entering. The cops won’t even go in—you called them.”
She stared at me, eyes wide, then snapped her mouth shut.
“I’m sorry, we can’t. There’s nothing illegal about robot babysitters.”
“They’re not babysitters.” She thumped her fists against my chest and her breath overtook her ability to speak and she actually quivered.
I pulled her in and stoked her hair. “We have to find another way.”
She leaned back and smacked me again with her fists, hard enough it stung a little, might leave a little bruise. “You just don’t care!” Now she was hissing at me. Not screaming in case the damned robos heard, but she wanted to, the sound building up in her and coming out in shakes and deep out-breaths. She looked deep in my eyes, probing me, looking for something.
Whatever it was, she didn’t find it. She turned and stalked up the street, stiff-backed, unbound hair flying behind her, her shirt the only yellow in the green and grey and black and brown of the forest.
I should have chased her. But I was trying not to laugh; Aliss seeing me laugh would have been worse than me standing there holding it in. Not that it was funny. She’d just overreacted so much it didn’t seem real. Two minutes before, we’d been walking happily beside each other.
I didn’t move until she was opposite the house. I should have chased her, should have run as fast as two feet can go. I should have known she meant exactly what she said.
While she hurried up the road, arms-swinging, I stood still, trying for emotional control. She turned sharp left at the driveway and kept stalking, heading for the front door. She was small then, far enough away I could see her but couldn’t expect to run up and catch her. She looked beautiful and terrible, brave in the face of her stupidity.
One bot moved in front of her, the line of its squat body hard to make out except when movement gave it ghost-like visibility. Another one seemed to float toward her, its body easier to see as it moved between me and a green hedge starred with small white flowers.
I shook myself loose and bounded toward her, waving my hands over my head as if the guard-bots would decide I was more threatening even though I stood on a public road and Aliss was doing a full frontal assault.
They ignored me.
Red lines illuminated her jeans, bisected her knees, her calf, above her ankles.
I raced all-out, finally driven to ignore the property line.
She stepped onto the front stoop and jerked, then collapsed, her long hair a curtain across her face. I almost made it to her side when I felt the sharp jolt of a taser and my mouth was too busy being stiff to let out my curse. I went to jelly, crumpling just too far away to touch her. I didn’t lose consciousness, but my head had a muzzy shockiness and my body didn’t really want to move right away, even though my heart was willing.
The guard bots withdrew a respectful distance.
The door opened.
A silver form in dockers and an izod t-shirt bent down and gazed at Aliss, an inquisitive expression on its face.
The guard bots whirred off, surely going back to watch for more nosy neighbors.
Aliss sat up, looking the robot in the eyes, which were like tiny camera-irises set inside lids with no lashes. From the distance of our third-story porch, their eyes had looked nearly human, but here the emotion came from subtle changes in the shape of the smooth, sil ver face. Robos can come with human-colored skins and rose lips, and blond or dark or even grey hair, but whoever chose the bots for this house liked them to look like science fictional beings. I’d seen similar models up close at home shows, except they’d looked even less real, maybe because people in bad suits were selling them like refrigerators. This one had an air of authority.
“You were trespassing,” it stated convincingly. It glanced at me, as if making sure I knew I was trespassing, too.
I nodded at it. “Sorry. We’re the neighbors.”
“Yes.” It looked back at Aliss. “We have been watching you watch us. That’s why Jilly told the bots not to kill you.”
Good for Jilly. I struggled to sit up, pulled my hands under me, folded my legs, and noticed my back hurt.
“Is Jilly your little girl?” Aliss asked.
For just a moment, it looked like the robot couldn’t decide what expression to wear. “Jilly is our head of security. I am Roberto.”
I managed not to laugh. I stood up, happy to be above him. “Glad to meet you.” In spite of the fact that he was a machine, his authority felt absolute. “We came to visit. The girl who lives here, she must need friends.”
I was rewarded with a sweet look from Aliss, who took my hand, and also took the half-step or so necessary to keep it naturally. A man and his girlfriend, standing together on borrowed ground on a quest for warmth and humanity for a single little girl.
Roberto stood, too, half-a head taller than me, a full head taller than Aliss, and a lot shinier. Roberto seemed to gather himself up, or maybe align was the right word, like coming to perfect parade rest, making every bit balance just right. There was no blame in his smooth voice as he said, “I presume you mean human friends?”
I was clearly out of my league. “We see she’s taken care of,” I stammered.
Aliss put some serio
us pressure on my foot. “Can we meet her? Please?”
“She will be finished with her classes in three hours. Would you like to come back after that and join us for afternoon tea?” “Uh, sure.”
Aliss let up on my foot. “Thank you, Roberto. We appreciate the offer.”
As we walked hand in hand up the driveway, the guard-bot ignored us, a dark rock-colored splotch the size of small dog, turning around and around softly at the base of a deep green rhododendron bush.
We went in through the garage door. I eyed the pallet of robow-hatevers in various states of repair. Aliss pecked me on the cheek. “I’m going to go get ready. Why don’t you see if you can find a good vac?”
I blinked at her, startled. “Sure.” It took me almost an hour to free three robovacs, test them, and decide which one had a prayer of actually cleaning the floor. The one I eventually chose wasn’t silver, but rather a rounded bump of burnished wood with rubber edges and a long scratch from one time when it slammed a wall hard enough to knock a glass vase down on its back. I squatted and rubbed its familiar top, talking to the damned thing as if it were a dog or something. “You’re sure a whole five or six generations removed from the neighbors bots, aren’t you? That silver thing over there might be the brightest crayon in the box, but I kinda like you.”
It made no reply.
I carried it up the steps from the garage, fifteen pounds of robot tucked under my arm. When I opened the door, the scent of warm molasses lifted my spirits. I put the bot down carefully, noting that it looked even more beat up in the gleaming kitchen than it had in the garage. I patted its back, then stood and curled my arm around Aliss’s lovely stomach and kissed the top of her head. “Thank god Jilly let us live so you could make cookies for me.”
She swatted me with a kitchen towel. “The cookies are for the girl. I wasn’t worried about the guards. They knew we were neighbors. I mean, we might have been borrowing a cup of sugar, right? It wasn’t like they were going to shoot us.”
