by Neil Clarke
thin coyote who’d stared at us for fifteen minutes before simply disappearing when we blinked. This time, as the light faded through gold to grey, three does grazed placidly along the treeline, their white tails flicking up and down.
Aliss leaned into me. Bear whined very softly, low in the back of his throat, and circled.
The deer reminded me of an ad I’d skipped over a few times in my research. “I think it’s time to decorate for Christmas.”
“What?” Aliss snuggled closer to me, smelling of hot tea. “It’s only November 2nd.”
“Look, Frankenbot was a good try, but he’s not mobile.”
She gave me a quizzical look. “So? She likes him—I see her look up at him from time to time. And it’s a way to watch her.”
We’d actually stopped doing that much, since nothing really changed. I’d even added a way to turn his head to watch for birds in the forest canopy most of the time, instead of watching the untouchable and slightly sad Caroline and her family of silver beings. “Well, Bear has been more effective, since he gets her outside.” I reached down and patted his shoulders, trying to calm him a little so he wouldn’t scare away the deer. “But it’s not like we can have a pony here, so upping the ante with more mammals probably won’t help.”
“Bear could use a friend.”
“He might like what I have in mind.”
Actually, he didn’t.
I ordered and then programmed three deer: a buck, a doe, and a fawn. They were silver, as silver as Caroline’s housebots, and smooth even when they moved. A year—maybe two—more modern than the housebots, their coats silky and shiny, their eyes cameras (as all robots’ eyes are cameras), but able to blink and move, and almost as soulful as a deer’s actual eyes. To make it even better, they’d been programmed with natural movements, and given behaviors to make them appear shy and a bit wild. The first time I turned them on, the afternoon of December seventh, Aliss stood beside them on the wet grass taking pictures, getting close ups of the remarkable wet-looking noses and the delicate ears.
I pushed the remote while standing at the edge of the yard.
The deer turned its head and nuzzled her shoulder. She jumped, then grinned and got them to follow her around in a line.
The first time Bear saw them, the hackles rose on the ridge of his back and he screamed bloody barking murder. We were so focused on the puppy, we didn’t notice anything else until we finally corralled Bear. Aliss, firmly grasping the still-struggling puppy’s leather leash, looked back at me and said, “Turn around.”
Roberto and Ruby stood together at the edge of the fenced yards, regarding us silently. Roberto spoke. “Caroline thought something awful had happened to the dog.”
Behind me, Bear howled again, and then the door clicked open, Aliss gave a hushed and insistent command, and the door slid shut again. “I think we scared him,” I said.
Aliss came up beside me. “He’ll be okay. But please tell Caroline we appreciate her concern. Tell her his name is Bear.”
Roberto nodded and said, “She’ll like to know that.”
Aliss nodded. “Would you like to come in?”
They both shook their heads in unison.
“Please,” Aliss whispered, “Please tell her she can come visit. Surely a little girl her age should go places sometimes.”
One of the silver deer—the fawn—came over to stand on our side of the fence and watch the two robots, flicking its metal ears back and forth.
Roberto assessed it silently, but Ruby held out a silver finger to the beast, and if she weren’t a robot, I would have said she was enchanted by it. She even smiled.
“She’d like to see the deer, wouldn’t she?”
Roberto said, “I don’t know.”
Aliss put a hand on my shoulder. “Do you celebrate Christmas? Will she get presents?”
Ruby spoke for the first time, her voice silky, with natural human inflection. “Of course she will.”
“From who?” Aliss asked.
“Caroline’s telling us to come back,” Roberto said.
So she could communicate with the bots even at a distance. I looked toward their house, but I couldn’t see her. Perhaps she could see through their eyes, like we saw her through Frankenbot. “Please feel free to come back,” I said. “Caroline, too, if she wants. We will not hurt her.”
The robots left, and we went inside to calm Bear.
The next day, Aliss left early so I took Bear for our noon walk in a blustery cold with tiny rain drops blowing sideways in the wind. Caroline waved back at me for the first time.
Aliss didn’t return until just before our evening watch. She brought a needle and thread and a great big shaggy form with her and set the bundle on the table. I looked closely, and managed to resolve the pile of fur into a stuffed dog. She sewed eyes onto it as the light faded from outside, and before full dark, I clicked on the electric light. “You need to see.”
She cut the thread she had in her hand and held it up to the light. It was furrier than Bear, and wider, but clearly a dog. “Cindy helpeed me make it.”
Her friend, who quilted and had a sewing machine. “It’s for Caroline?” “For Christmas.”
The plush doggie sat overnight in the kitchen. Aliss took two cups of tea upstairs, and we sat together, looking out past Frankenbot and petting Bear. Aliss looked as beautiful as they day we’d moved in, maybe more so because of the fierce determination in her face. Somehow, she was going to win this lost girl over. I folded her in my arms, whispering, “I love you,” feeling her breath and her beating heart, smelling the tea and the wet dog and all the things that made our house feel like a home.
In the morning, before she started working, Aliss tucked the dog into a cheerful red and green tote bag. When we broke for our lunch-time walk, she tucked the gift under her arm. It was cold and clear, the ghosts of our breath visible. We paused to admire the three silver deer grazing in the corner of the front yard while a squirrel chattered at them from a tree-branch. As we turned from our driveway onto the main road, we stopped suddenly, our feet stuck to the soft pavement. Even Bear, who growled low in his throat.
I thought about growling, too, but decided not to do it.
A long black car had pulled up into the driveway in front of Caroline’s and the robot’s house. Her parents? Had she hurt herself? Was she leaving? The idea made me happy and sad all together. The limousine must have just arrived since the hood still steamed in the cold air, and it must have come in the back way since they hadn’t passed us.
The doors opened and a stooped old woman got out of the driver’s seat. She went and stood by the door, looking at it expectantly. All three guard-bots swirled around her feet, petting her like cats. The other doors opened all at once, synchronously, and three gleaming robots rose at once from the car. I recognized them from the same catalog we’d bought the deer, with the same “smoother-than-possible skin made of a million million nano-beings.” They’d all been marketed as the next thing in robotic materials and lifelike movement.
The front door opened, and Ruby, Roberto, and the garden bot all walked out, all of them looking downright tarnished next to the new ones. If you looked at them by themselves, they gleamed. But the newer ones were brilliant suns.
Roberto, Ruby, and the garden-bot all looked sad. I thought of the deer which looked happy even though they were neither happy nor sad, and reminded myself the robots certainly weren’t feeling anything at all. I had to be making it up in my head, and it was silly that I suddenly wanted to know the name of the garden-bot with her silver shears and red bucket.
Caroline trailed behind them. The look on her face drove me forward as far as the property line. Her eyes were red from crying. In the months we’d been watching her, luring her, worrying about her, she’d never cried. Not that we’d seen. She was tough.
The three new robots stood to the side, waiting. They gleamed. All of their clothes were new.
The three old robots slid down into th
e seats of the big car, smooth as butter, silken as silver, the move both simple and final.
Caroline buried her face in her hands.
Aliss let out a soft squeak of pain so deep it forced me forward, across the line and over to where the old woman stood beside Caroline, watching her, but not touching her. I had Bear with me, close in case the guard bots turned away from the old woman. Aliss followed by my side, her face as stricken as Caroline’s. I didn’t understand what was going on except the obvious; this woman was taking Caroline’s family and giving her a better, newer one.
The woman herself had steel in her eyes, human steel. She looked at least seventy, slightly shrunken and bowed. But not a bit frail. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised when she said, “Hello, Aliss and Paul.”
I glanced around for Caroline, and found her standing by the door Roberto had slid into, watching us and clutching the door-handle all at once. It appeared to be locked.
I tried to keep as much control in my voice as possible as I looked back at the old woman. “And you are?”
“Jilly.”
I’d heard the name. The first day we were on this property. “You’re Caroline’s head of security?”
“And you can tell us where her parents are.” Aliss hissed over my shoulder. “And why she’s been left all alone.” Her voice rose enough to make me wince and feel proud all at once. “And why she can’t ever leave, and she can’t even pet the dog.” She glanced down at Bear who was looking between Jilly and his obviously upset Aliss as if trying to decide who bore the most watching. “Why she can’t come see our deer and can’t even eat my cookies!”
The woman appeared nonplussed by Aliss’s outburst.
Caroline’s eyes had widened, but she said nothing. The fear in her eyes was worse than I’d ever seen it. Except this time she wasn’t looking at me. Poor kid.
I took a deep breath and added to Aliss’s list. “And why you’re taking the only family she has.”
Caroline yelled at me. “It’s the deer. Your damned deer were better than Roberto and Ruby and Jilly can’t stand that.”
She finally sounded like a pre-teen girl. But this wasn’t the moment to heartily approve.
Jilly responded with a quiet and sure voice. “No. Your help gets upgraded every three years, and you know that. It’s simply time.”
“It’s the deer,” Caroline insisted.
I tried to sound calm, but my voice still shook. “They’re Christmas decorations.” She probably changed the robots because they came over to see the deer. I could still picture Ruby’s silver finger reaching toward the fawn’s silver nose.
“Does she ever see her parents?” Aliss demanded. “Do they bother?”
The seven-footed robo-guards began to circle the old woman restlessly. She gave them hand signals and they stopped, all three of them between us and her. “You’re overstepping your bounds. I have no legal right to kill you, but I can take any unleashed dog.”
Aliss drew in a sharp breath.
A bright red light played along Bear’s leash, just below my hand. Caroline cried out, “No!” “Then go in the house,” Jilly said.
Caroline had to pass us to go in. Aliss handed her the tote bag. Surprisingly, Jilly said nothing, but allowed Caroline to take it into the house. The three new bots followed her, gliding even more smoothly than the old ones.
I looked at the woman and said, “When Roberto mentioned you, I assumed you were another robot. Now that I’ve met you, I wish my first guess had been right. You can’t give her a family of robots and then take them away.” My hands shook. Part fear, part anger. Of course, we should never have let it continue. Calling the cops once shouldn’t have been enough. The poor, poor kid.
Jilly’s lips thinned, and for a moment she looked like all of the irascible old women I’d ever met. She probably had two thousand dollars worth of clothes on, and more in jewelry. Thousands of dollars worth of robots swirled around her feet. She looked like stone.
Allis pleaded, “Please. Leave the robots.”
No change. But then something more vulnerable flashed across Jilly’s eyes and the corners of her mouth softened. She took a deep breath. “Her parents are dead. They died seven years ago. Her grandmother pays for her care, and I take care of her grandmother. That’s all I can do. There is no one else. If anything happens to either of us, Caroline could end up in the state’s hands.”
She waited, let us absorb this. Maybe the woman said this so we’d stop harassing her, maybe because it was true. She was old enough to be the grandmother or the friend of the grandmother. Between being raised by Roberto and Ruby or the State of Washington, it was a tough call.
Aliss’s arm snaked around my waist. I’d had a few friends in foster care in high school. One had done well, gone on to college, turned into a lawyer. One had been raped and otherwise ignored by her foster parents and the state. Caroline was old to be adopted easily. And rich, apparently. The State might “need” her money. And even if well intentioned, how would they deal with a kid who knew advanced physics? Would they let us take her?
As if Jilly had been reading my mind, she said, “She is safe, and halfway through her first bachelor’s degree.”
“But she’s lonely,” Aliss blurted out. “Can’t you see that? Surely there’s money? Look at this house! Hire people to take care of her instead of bots.”
Jilly watched us for a long while, and then closed her eyes, mumbling. I didn’t see a communication loop across her ear, but her grey hair was thick enough to hide one. Surely she was talking to someone. In the meantime, the only movement was Bear trying to watch everything at once and the guard-bots trying to watch Bear and us and the perimeter all at once. And us, shivering in the cool wind, which made the ten minutes before Jilly spoke seem like forever. “She had a live-in teacher until two years ago. She outgrew her capabilities, and the . . . circumstances . . . were problematical. Caroline is exceptionally bright, and she is doing better in this situation than in her previous one.”
She sounded like she believed her words completely.
We stood silent. Surely Aliss felt as struck dumb as me.
“Caroline is scraping the bottom of the kind of complex physics and math that breaks old men’s hearts. She does well with machine teachers.”
“She has no friends!” Aliss blurted. “At least leave her Ruby.”
Jilly stood and watched us, the guard bots floating in agitated tiny circles, drifting up and down, as if restless. At least they’d stopped targeting the leash.
Caroline’s face was pressed to the glass in the second story window, looking down at us all. She was crying again, her eyes raking the car. In her arms, she clutched the toy dog Aliss had made her. I couldn’t see Aliss’s face, but I hoped she could see the girl with the dog.
“When did you change her keepers last?”
“I think you should leave now,” Jilly said. Since she punctuated her words with a hand signal that caused the bots to scoot close enough that Bear started barking and snarling. We backed off, but I hated every step. This whole situation was an odd trap, for Caroline for sure, and maybe for us. We stood to the side of the driveway and gave the long black limousine plenty of time to pull away.
“Boy, I thought I hated this before,” Aliss said. She wasn’t crying, but she’d gone still and angry.
“Did you see Caroline with the dog? I think she likes it.”
“I should have sewn in a nail file.”
“Maybe. At least we have more information now. We best keep walking so Bear won’t be deprived of his routine.”
So we did. Keep walking. A bit sad. On our return trip, we looked up at the windows of Caroline’s house, but she no longer stood looking out. The roboguards made sure we saw them, floating at the edge of the property, as menacing as the first time we saw them. My feet kept dragging, and beautiful Aliss looked far more disturbed than pretty. Although it took a long time, we made it home.
Even though it was still a few hours
before dusk, we both gravitated to the enclosed deck, bundling up under fleece blankets and watching a light wind blow the lowest branches of the trees softly back and forth. It was too early for animals, so all we saw outside were birds: two crows and a Stellar’s Jay. Bear settled for his afternoon nap and I stroked Aliss’s hair and wished we’d never moved here, and never seen the robot’s girl, and didn’t know about the situation we seemed unable to do anything about. Once Aliss got up and made us both strong-smelling Chai tea, and once we let Bear out at his request, watching him avoid the silver deer like the plague while doing his business. When he came back in, Aliss patted him and held him close. “I hate robots, too.”
“Maybe I should program the deer to walk over there tomorrow.”
She laughed, a little sad. “I’d hate to see them torn up by the nasty-bots.”
“Yeah, me too.”
We sat and watched the day slide into darkness, not stirring again until it grew too dark to see each other’s expressions and Bear began letting out soft whuffs, asking for his dinner.
In the kitchen, habit caused me to turn Frankenbot’s eyes toward the robot house. I’d almost reached up to turn the controls back when I noticed something different. “Come here, Aliss.”
She was at my side in an instant.
A big square of something white—maybe butcher paper or poster-board—had been taped to the kitchen window. Words had been hand lettered on it. “You can sit on your deck now.”
Did that mean we could use the deck now because she’d taped something over the window? Or what?
Aliss seemed more confident than I felt. She took a bottle of syrah and two glasses up the stairs. The door to the bedroom deck slid open silently as we approached it and sat beside Frankenbot, shar ing the empty chair. Aliss poured us each half a glass of wine. She raised hers. “To Frankenbot, who represents our first progress.” She stroked Frankenbot’s now slightly rusty head almost fondly.
