Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  I had been eagerly waiting beside the thick, heavy door to the house for about a half-hour—a long time for a little girl only three and a half years old. Finally, the pressurizing fans clicked on and about a second later the door we called Gatekeeper unlocked with a clunk, clunk and slid open with a whoosh. Mom and Dad were there, as expected, and between them, also expected, stood First Brother. He was holding their hands. He looked entirely human, like an adult, though his body appeared rigid, even his eyes, which stared straight ahead. Because of the outward flow of air—intended to repel smart dust from wafting into the house—I couldn’t smell them, or the wet vines draping the arborway behind them, or the purple crocuses freshly in bloom, or the earthy scent of trees after a night of soft winter rain.

  Normally, I would have rushed into Mom’s and Dad’s arms, but on this day I, too, might have appeared somewhat wooden, intrigued as I was at seeing in person for the first time one of my brothers, whom Grandpa referred to as Sentirens. First Brother was about Mom’s height, shorter by about 8 centimeters than Dad, and wore black shoes, black slacks, and a long-sleeved pink shirt. His black hair, short and parted on the left, contrasted with Mom’s blonde hair and Dad’s, nearly white like mine.

  First Brother didn’t even glance at me. He just continued staring—eerily, it seemed at the time—at something over my head. I looked back, but there wasn’t anything on the blank white wall. All of the walls in our house were white and, except for the scenescreens in our bedrooms, blank: no windows, no artwork, no clocks—no places for surveillance microbots to hide.

  “Hello, Sara.” “Hello, sweetie,” Mom and Dad said, respectively, before stepping forward, still holding hands with First Brother. Gatekeeper went whoosh, clunk, clunk. The pressurizing fans fell silent.

  “This is your brother,” Mom said. She was trying to pull her right hand free from First Brother’s left. “Aren’t you going to say hello?”

  I looked back toward the kitchen and called out, “Grandma!”

  “My darling little girl,” Mom said, bending over to pick me up. “Give me a big hug.”

  Her breath smelled of stale cigarette smoke, but her body smelled of violets, and I loved the way she held me, loved her warm, wet kisses, loved the energy she exuded, of an intensity greater than either Grandpa’s or Grandma’s.

  I was passed to Dad, who had by then also managed to free his hand from First Brother’s. “How’s my sweetie?” He hugged and kissed me, but more gently, softly, softer than either Grandpa or Grandma would have; and he smelled good, too: citrus, mint, sandalwood—all calming like his smile.

  I heard cheery hellos from Grandpa and Grandma and was set back down onto the floor. While the grown-ups hugged and kissed, First Brother continued to stare, now at something on the ceiling, though at what I couldn’t tell, for there wasn’t anything there—just the same blank whiteness of the walls.

  “How’s my grandson today?” Grandpa said, sounding cheerful. He hugged First Brother, but First Brother continued staring at the nothing on the ceiling.

  Grandpa brought First Brother’s right hand close to me and indicated with a nod and a smile that I should do something with it. I took hold of the big hand—its skin cool and smooth, almost slippery, like that of a frog—but I didn’t know what else to do with it.

  “Perhaps you could show your brother our house,” Grandpa said.

  “Okay. Come along, then,” I said, pulling on the reptilian hand.

  First stop: kitchen. I showed him the chair I sat on in the breakfast nook. He didn’t look at the chair. He didn’t look at me when I sat in the chair. I opened the refrigerator door. He didn’t look inside. I touched the biorecycler, which was still purring with the leftover lunch Grandma had fed it. This he looked at, though not until I removed my hand.

  I walked over to the nutriosynthesizer. I told him that Grandma and I liked the fruits and vegetables that came fresh from our garden more than those that came from the synthesizer. Grandpa didn’t think there was much of a difference. First Brother continued looking at the recycler.

  I noticed the synthesizer’s green light was on, so I opened the small door. An orange, with no peel, lay on the round glass platform inside. I reached in and separated the orange in half.

  “Here,” I said, “you try. See what you think.”

  It took me a moment—a moment during which he didn’t reach for the orange, or even look at it—before I realized he probably wasn’t interested in food. I had been told he simply plugged his tummy into an electrical outlet to charge his tens of thousands of little batteries and capacitors.

  I put the orange back in the synthesizer. First Brother continued staring at the recycler.

  “When it stops purring,” I said, “we can put some of the feedstock into the synthesizer and make another orange. Or whatever you want.”

  He still didn’t look at me. A little voice inside said: He doesn’t want anything. Not from you.

  Tears welled up in my eyes. I wanted a brother I could play with.

  Just then, Grandpa appeared, followed by Grandma, Mom, and Dad. Perhaps they had been just around the corner, listening.

  “How’s the grand tour going?” Grandpa asked.

  I tried to smile. First Brother kept looking at the recycler. I wished it would stop purring.

  No one said anything for a moment. Then I noticed an antoid crawling along the seam between the floor and the cabinet on which the synthesizer sat. Rarely did we see an antoid during the day; they worked at night, seeking out and carrying off dust and crumbs and, should any make it past Gatekeeper, alien microbots. Grandpa said the antoids acted as an immune system for the house, destroying any foreign body, including any of their own kind that might have mutated or that might have been tampered with by outside persons. There were special killer antoids—larger than the others, with brown and black stripes that gave them the appearance of spiders—that checked the operating codes of all the antoids they came across.

  I knelt down to get a closer look at the one crawling on the floor. It was one of the striped killers carrying a regular antoid in its pinchers.

  “First Brother, look!” I said. “Do you have antoids in your house?”

  He didn’t answer, didn’t look.

  “I do the cleaning in our house,” Mom said. “We can’t afford an army of robots.”

  She glared at Grandpa. He simply looked at me and said, “Why don’t you show your brother the rest of the house?”

  “He’s not interested,” I said.

  “Of course, he is,” Grandpa said, narrowing his eyes. He had told me that I should be nice to my brother, that I should be patient.

  “How about our communications room?” I said, thinking of its plush, crimson seats and large Vidtel screen.

  “Another thing we can’t afford,” Mom said.

  “Perhaps your room,” Grandma suggested. She smiled at me. I wished I could be alone with her for a moment, so I could tell her how confused and upset I was.

  “Come along then,” I said, taking First Brother’s cold, limp hand.

  He followed me as I led him to my room and showed him around: This is my bed… This is my study table… This is the scenescreen on which I can see my choice of our garden or the sky any time of day… This is where I go potty… and so on. Every time I glanced at Mom and Dad, they were watching First Brother and smiling and nodding; but every time I glanced at Grandpa and Grandma, they were looking at me and smiling and nodding. First Brother picked the oddest things to stare at—a frayed edge on my pillowcase or the way the water swirled and dove, burped and rose again in the toilet when I demonstrated how to flush it—and he would just stare at such things until I’d pull on his hand and say, “Come along, then.”

  I don’t know where I picked up that phrase, “Come along, then.” It seems so formal to me now, and I don’t recall ever hearing Grandpa or Grandma use it, but I’m quite certain that is what I said over and over that first day to capture First Brother’s att
ention. I tried to capture Mom’s and Dad’s attention, too, by showing them new pictures I’d drawn and new words I’d learned, but they kept telling me to show my brother, and they kept smiling at him and watching his every move. He, however, clearly wasn’t interested in my drawings or words or in my ability to add, subtract, and multiply whole numbers. He kept staring at things I’d never paid much attention to, and not once did he look into my eyes.

  That’s all I remember of my first meeting with First Brother, but years later Grandma told me that by the time everyone sat down for tea, I was pouting. Then First Brother took great interest in how the milk swirled and dispersed into Grandma’s tea, and Mom and Dad took great interest in First Brother’s great interest, and I appeared to intentionally bump and spill the cup, though I claimed I just wanted to see, too. Mom scolded me, saying she was once a little girl and knew naughty when she saw it. I protested by pulling off all my clothes and running around the house, screaming and tossing everything I could onto the floor until I was captured and put to bed for a nap.

  I don’t remember being scolded for my bad behavior during First Brother’s visit, but evidently the visit lurked somewhere in my mind, for one day while Grandpa was leading me through some multiplication drills, I blurted out, “I want a brother to play with.”

  Grandpa—his white hair and bushy eyebrows like clouds on his long, angular face—looked at me intently with gray-blue eyes. Shadows pooled in hollows beneath his prominent cheekbones, and his pale skin appeared as thin and fragile as filo pastry. But he exercised daily, was tall and slim, with confident posture, and nearly always brimmed with energy—certainly enough energy never to let me step far out of line.

  “I happen to know,” he finally said, “that First Brother plays games very well.”

  “He doesn’t like me. I want a new brother, a nice brother who’ll play with me.”

  “I don’t believe you are correct in thinking that First Brother doesn’t like you.”

  “He’s not interested in me. He looks bored.”

  “Bored? Look bored for me. Let me see what it looks like.”

  I pursed my lips and stared blankly over Grandpa’s head.

  “Are you bored now?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “But you look bored.”

  “So?”

  “So, one can look bored but not be bored.”

  “But I was pretending!”

  “And are you quite certain First Brother wasn’t pretending? Are you certain he wasn’t actively engaged in some exciting mental activity? Since when do we jump to conclusions based merely on one visit and a few ambiguous expressions?”

  Unconvinced, I pinched my lips together.

  “You should not presume that you are uninteresting to First Brother,” Grandpa persisted. “Your mother and father tell me he said he would like to visit us again.”

  “What kind of a name is First Brother?”

  “It’s just a name. He was your first brother to be created. Would you like to give him a different name?”

  “No.”

  “What would you like, then?”

  “I want a brother who’ll play with me. I want a brother who’ll talk with me, at least look at me.”

  “And what are you prepared to do for him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you want First Brother to talk with you and play with you. I suppose you would also like him to love you and hug you. Is that right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Imagine, then, that deep inside him something wants to love you, hug you, and play with you, but there are some underdeveloped connections that inhibit his expressing brotherly feelings for you.”

  “You think he wants to hug me and play with me?”

  “Yes, if you’ll be a good sister to him.”

  “What does a sister have to do?”

  “Be patient with your brother; play with him; help him develop emotionally; help him become more like you.”

  All I wanted was a brother to play with. But I didn’t say anything more because I knew that in being difficult with Grandpa, I would be treading close to a meditation session on his study floor.

  My formal education, which began before I can remember, consisted primarily of Grandpa’s tutorials: a multitude of questions presented in logical order, each building on the previous ones, each waiting for me to search and stumble and finally grasp its solution. To help ensure that my mind wouldn’t wander too far or too often from my studies, he insisted I minimize my exposure to frivolous information. Consequently, until well into my teens I was not permitted to watch or listen to popular media productions or enter into group activity of any kind on the internet. Unlike what he considered most other humans of our time to be, I was not going to become an imitative assemblage of other imitative assemblages, contaminated with every desire and so-called need festering in the world beyond our security walls.

  Grandpa’s prohibition extended to all mathematics and most science books—books, he said, which were full of answers that would steal away my rapture in discovery and spoil my capacity for wonder. Like the storybook character, I, too, was a little engine that could—could make significant rediscoveries even at my age—and the pistons that gave me power were question and answer.

  Occasionally, if I couldn’t solve a problem, I’d become anxious and start to whine for Grandpa to help me. At such times, he would take me into his study, where he would have me sit cross-legged with him on the floor and meditate. For him, meditation wasn’t a practice of cultivating the joy of non-doing or the sense that each moment is complete; it was the practice of clearing one’s mind for the purpose of preparing a calm consciousness to receive messages—such as solutions to his problems—from one’s unconscious. He taught me to be attentive to my breathing and, whenever my attention strayed to the bothersome little pains that sprang up devilishly in my cramped legs and back or to the chattering thoughts that often invaded the silence of my mind, to calmly refocus on the in-and-out tides of my breath. When he sensed my impatience was finally tamed, he would tell me to let my mind go to the problem at hand and, if my attention wandered from the problem, to return to my breath, then back to the problem, and so on. When he was satisfied with my progress, he would terminate the meditation, give me a little hint, and send me off chugging along until the problem’s solution, like the first wildflowers that pierce the hills in spring, would suddenly blossom in my mind.

  Grandpa said I could either read the story of the evolution of knowledge, or I could discover much of that knowledge anew. We chose—at least in my little mind it was “we” who chose—the road of rediscovery. Over a period of several years, beginning when I was about three, we plotted the positions of the moon and of several planets and stars; we rediscovered Kepler’s laws; we performed Galileo’s pendulum and rolling-ball experiments; we re-traversed the paths of Euclid and Archimedes; we dissected anatomically correct models of animals. And for the most part, I loved those wonderful trips into knowledge, but I had no one other than imaginary friends to play with—well, no one other than Grandpa or Grandma.

  “I’ve been thinking about your desire for a companion,” Grandpa said a few days after he’d admonished me to be a good sister to First Brother. “Let’s find Grandma and go for a drive.”

  “Did you make a new brother for me?”

  “No, no,” he chuckled. “Brothers aren’t made that fast. Besides, you already have two marvelous brothers. You just need to learn how to love them.”

  About a half-hour later on that sunny late-winter day, the yard gates opened, a gardenerbot scurried to the side with some weeds it had just pulled, and Grandpa drove out onto our long driveway. The car was peculiarly quiet inside, the kind of silence made of invisibly fitted heavy armor. Another car followed us, a car driven by one of Grandpa’s security guards. The sunburst honey locust trees lining the drive were bare, but in the vineyard wild mustard blossoms brightened the ground like thousands of tiny suns.
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  As we drove on narrow, winding country roads, a few early wild blossoms—red delphinium, Grandma told me, and blue periwinkle and yellow Spanish broom—smiled at us from grassy verges along the way. We finally pulled in to a homestead with a small white house, an old red pickup with a deep dent in its side, and a dilapidated barn, all tucked in among winter-naked oaks, willows, and black walnut trees. A man, older than Dad but younger than Grandpa, came out of the barn to greet us. Grandpa said the man worked on a vineyard nearby. A dog was barking—a deep, scary barking—from somewhere inside the barn. I held on firmly to Grandma’s hand.

  Following the man through a creaky spring-hinged gate, we walked on a sidewalk, grass sprouting between jagged cracks, toward the house, up a few stairs, and onto the pillared porch, where there were two Adirondack chairs from which most of the white paint had peeled—a center slat was absent from one, like a missing front tooth—and a wicker basket in which a litter of sleeping puppies snuggled: five, taffy colored; one, pure white.

  Reminded of Grandma’s Madonna lilies blooming then in our greenhouse, I pointed to the white puppy and exclaimed, “Lily!”

  Even now, remembering, I can feel the excitement I felt when that soft, warm, sugary bundle of sleep was placed in my arms; and I can hear myself beg, “Please? Please, Grandpa. May I keep her? Please?”

  But Grandpa was coy. He reminded me of the toad I’d quickly lost interest in. And the lizard.

  I said everything would be different with Lily: I’d take good care of her, really, forever.