I arrived ten minutes before my scheduled appointment, parked, walked toward the door, and rang. The sensors identified me and immediately let me inside. A robot that looked like a robot (that is to say, all metal) emerged to accompany me to the waiting room.
“Someone will come soon,” it said; this was the worst thing I could have encountered on that day, that machine with its clumsy movements and tinny voice. In a single minute, all the anxieties I’d had to overcome during the past three months all came back. I shouted at the television in the little room to turn itself on, the poor thing obeyed, although it began to do strange things when I continued shouting at it to change channels. It was five-twenty and I was starting to be very nervous when the door opened and Myriam appeared. She wore a very elegant suit with a flower-hologram on the lapel and old-fashioned high-heeled shoes. As beautiful as the other time, this time her face seemed to show great exhaustion. Nonetheless, she immediately recovered her best and most professional smile.
“I’m glad to see you again, Emma. So, today is the day.”
“Yes. How are you, a lot of work?”
“Always more,” and for a moment she stopped smiling and sighed. “And now, let’s go find Deirdre. I only want to make a final recommendation to you, and also a warning, and it’s not exactly with regard to Deirdre. I recommend that you don’t say anything for now, save to people very close, and only if you wish, of course, that Deirdre is an gynoid. We’re having certain problems with the anti-technites. I don’t know if you’ve heard talk of them. They’re a group that opposes the existence of androids who look and behave like humans and other technological advances. They’ve attacked us with computer viruses and graffiti on the walls of our offices. In some countries they’ve even held demonstrations in front of our offices, and they’ve publicly denounced people who’ve acquired a companion android. We still haven’t seen these sorts of activities here, but the anti-technite group is growing, which is why we warn our clients. I don’t want you to be concerned, just to keep this warning in mind.”
“I agree,” I answered.
“And now, let’s go.”
I stood up and followed her along a very long hallway to a door marked PRIVATE. Before placing her hand on the sensor that would grant me access, she turned toward me for a moment and smiled broadly: “I’ll leave you with her. All my best wishes, Emma. I’m glad to have met you.”
The door opened. I went in. There was a dark-skinned woman with short hair, seated in the middle of the room with her back to me. On hearing me, she turned.
“Hello,” she said. “Are you Emma?”
I was only able to nod my head.
“I’m Deirdre. Shall we go?”
Her voice was smooth and didn’t have the slightest metallic echo. On seeing her walk, I was also surprised that her movements had nothing rigid or robotic to them; on the contrary, they were surprisingly graceful, with that harmonious slowness of tai chi.
Once in the car, I drove toward home, without stopping; it was a short trip. It was Friday, so we had the whole weekend before us.
“Tomorrow, we can go out shopping,” I told her, at home. “You need clothes, right?” She wore some jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt. “And food.”
“I don’t eat. I’m not built for that.”
“That’s right.” I remembered that I’d read that in the brochure. Deirdre didn’t need to consume sustenance; in fact, it was bad for her inner mechanisms. She could drink liquids, because later she eliminated them in a way resembling what flesh and blood people did. Once a month, she’d have to retire to recharge her battery: a sort of sleep that lasted 24 hours, the brochure explained. Although it wasn’t necessary for her to sleep as humans did (for us it is a real, unavoidable physiological need) it was convenient for her to join her partner in a daily sleep, something like a disconnection or a rest that benefited her as well.
“Then we could get out of Madrid, go to the sierra, for example. We’ll take an aerobus. I think we’ll have good weather. You’ll like it. And now,” I cleared my throat, “I don’t know what we could do. I’m so used to living alone that it’s hard for me to think in plural.”
“You’ve never lived with anyone?”
“Oh, yes, with my family, with other people as roommates... but with the partners that I’ve had, I’ve never spent more than a few days together.”
“And what do you normally do when you’re alone?”
“I read, listen to music, watch a film, work.”
“You can continue to do so, if you so desire.”
“Oh, no, not now.”
She looked at me with her blue-green eyes, so lovely (her face was also sweet, but she wasn’t too beautiful, just as I’d requested) and said, “Do you have a photo album? You can show it to me and that way I’ll get to know you better.”
It seemed like a good idea to me. I got out my scrapbook of printed photos, then put the digital photos on the television and finally took out the cylindrical visor for the holophotos... I spoke to her of my family (with whom I didn’t have a very good relationship, I explained to her, so I wasn’t sure if Deirdre would even meet them), my friends, my travels... In any event, I tried not to be tiresome. It was boring to look at photos of people or places that have nothing to do with you. She listened very attentively, seated on the sofa, with her back firmly erect.
Then, I ate something and it was time to go to bed.
“Do you want me to join you tonight? Would you like us to make love?” she asked me then.
I laughed, rather embarrassed.
“I think it would be better if we sleep together, yes, but... nothing more. For now, that’s how I prefer things.”
She undressed. She had a lovely body, perfectly designed to match my tastes, that was only logical: her breasts were like little golden dunes, rounded like a rainbow; the line of her hips, delicate. Of course, I needed something more than a body that was pleasant to look at to feel desire. I undressed as well and got into bed, a little worried by how my own figure might seem, not exactly as ideal as her own. She copied me. We spent a good while lying there on our backs, without even touching. Then she approached, and put her head on my shoulder and her hand in mine. The touch, the heat, were just like that of any human woman: a smooth skin; the fingers of her hand long and slender. Then she wrapped one arm around my waist.
“You know, Emma? You’re just as I had hoped you’d be.”
But, what could a gynoid hope for? Was that a stock sentence prepared by the programming they’d installed in the hard drive that served as her brain? And even so, don’t we real humans keep similar sentences in our mental archives to say in compromising situations, when we think it’s convenient to do so? I caressed Deirdre’s hair (did she feel anything in that caress?), hair as real as my own, and I felt myself relax, and I fell asleep.
The next weeks were a new period in my life. Deirdre and I did many things together. In the mornings, she had to connect to the Kapek Corporation central computer via the internet for a few hours, so that the company’s technicians could monitor her status and send her the information she still needed, at least during these first weeks. Later, Deirdre would run on pure pleasure, reading books from my library (of all sorts: fiction, essays, poetry... I had asked that she like reading) and even the newspapers or daily digital media (as long as I was asking, I’d requested that her ideas be on the same wavelength as my own so that they didn’t become a motive for arguments or distance between us).
I tried to arrive home from work early and almost every afternoon we went out for a walk; on the weekends, we left Madrid and went to the Sierra. I liked to hike and climb, and Deirdre learned quickly, and of course she soon surpassed me. She also far surpassed me in other areas, for example, chess: I never managed to beat her or even stalemate her. Or playing cards, or even Parcheesi, a game which she didn’t have archived in her memory and which I taught her, only to find myself utterly defeated from the third or fourth time we played. She could d
rive better than me, repair any kind of electrical apparatus, and she was able to repeat from memory entire texts she had read, something that was very useful for me for my work in the publishing house. Every night, before bed, we did a few tai chi forms together.
What’s important is that we got along well. Deirdre was very affectionate with me and I could act the same way with her, and she seemed delighted to receive my care and affection. We never got mad or argued because of those little, absurd things which humans frequently fight about. Of course, she had no past, with its baggage of happy memories but also of unpleasantnesses, wounds, frustrations and fears, so she had not accumulated that rage that we carry, we beings of flesh and blood, to discharge at whoever we have closest and say we love, or to cause each new relationship to founder.
Her way of listening to me was curious: more than being programmed to do so, it seemed that she wanted to learn about everything I talked to her about. She herself explained to me that they had designed her not as an automata able to only give one or pre-determined answers, but instead with the ability to learn, to search for and discover new possibilities of answers to the same questions or stimuli. That process would be slow; Deirdre could store many things in her memory, but it was much more difficult for her to draw relationships between them and above all to interpret them.
More than teaching a machine, my task seemed to be educating a child, as Myriam had explained to me. I did not understand at all how it was possible for Deirdre to learn new answers, which entailed an incipient thinking of her own, beyond her programming. Did she know that she was an gynoid? She knew it, but didn’t seem to give it much importance. And, did she really have emotions, did she really feel for me that love she showed me? At first this doubt tormented me, later I didn’t want think about it any further. Her attitude seemed spontaneous. And I behaved with her as if she were completely human; I never gave her orders and I asked for her opinion in all matters.
Sometimes she asked me: “Are you happy to have me here, with you?” And how could I answer anything but yes? The truth is that I had never felt as comfortable with anyone as I was with this gynoid that I allowed myself to consider, even knowing I was fooling myself, more woman than machine.
A few days after coming home with me, we made love for the first time. I was surprised to be so relaxed, just like that first night when I fell asleep by her side. I explained to her that I liked to touch her, caress her, kiss her, even though she couldn’t feel the same way as I did. She told me that I must, of course. She had no shame nor prejudice regarding any suggestions of mine as to what we could do, so I really enjoyed myself, and day after day and night after night we tried different possibilities. While her skin was just like a human’s, and had a smell that was very pleasing to me, something like incense and rockrose, it’s true that neither her mouth nor her sex could have that taste of a woman with a heart, entrails, and humors. To compensate, her fingers and tongue could be extremely expert and at the same time delicate. I liked making love with Deirdre, and I began to wonder if she couldn’t have an orgasm as well, even if it were just an electronic one; after all, what is ours, if not a shock, a current that needs to reach the brain?
Was I in love with her? It’s difficult to say yes. I began to love her, but without that passion that is on the other hand an altered mental state —that passion I had felt for Karol, even though we argued so much; the passion I maintained, for so long and so uselessly, for Elisa; that passionate tie full of pain that had joined Manuela and me until her death. I loved Deirdre with an affection that was sweeter, calmer, quieter.
The first problem arose on the afternoon when my friend Silvia (who had already met Deirdre) wanted us to have an encounter with that other acquaintances of hers, Leticia, who lived with an gynoid before I did. The couple lived in a small town near Madrid.
I didn’t like Leticia from the beginning. Her gynoid, Karen, was gorgeous —dark-skinned, with long hair, very tall, a model’s body— but the way Leticia treated her thoroughly disgusted me. She was very authoritarian, and her behavior was just like the masculine machismo of yore and not so long ago. The gynoid seemed frightened and was silent almost the entire time, which did nothing but increase Leticia’s bad behavior. We’d been together some two hours and Leticia had already drunk more than she should have when she proposed that we exchange partners for that night. I answered that of course it wasn’t just my own decision and she’d have to ask Deirdre. She laughed.
“Come on now, what are you playing at? Are you trying to get me to believe that you behave as if your gynoid were a real woman? Perhaps you think that you’re better than me because you ask that sort of absurd question to a machine that’s programmed to obey you in everything? That’s why you bought it, otherwise you’d have hooked up with a real girl. So don’t lecture me.”
Her comment wounded me with its grain of truth, but I wasn’t ready to let myself be cornered and blamed so easily.
“I play the same game you’re playing, dear,” I said. “You play at being the macho despot with someone who can’t defend herself. Perhaps many human women have passed you by because of how vulgar and brutal you are. Karen can’t do that. But if that scratches your itch...”
The situation began to get so heated that Silvia hurried to intervene. “Well, look how late it is, I think we should go now.”
We left hurriedly and, once in the car, Silvia apologized, “I’m sorry, I didn’t imagine that Leticia would act like that. She’d drunk too much. In any event, I know she doesn’t treat Karen well, but she wouldn’t be any different if Karen were a human girl. Anyway, I’ve even thought of speaking with my friend Hugo, who is an anti-technite but not a fanatic, because he had mentioned to me that in these cases, when someone doesn’t treat their droid well, his group has even liberated them by force. I’ll let you two know what he tells me.”
We left Silvia at her house and I proposed to Deirdre that we go to the park where we often went in the afternoons. We took a silent stroll.
“Why are you so quiet?” I finally asked her.
“Leticia is evil. I don’t like how she treats Karen.”
“Me either, but Silvia already told us: she wouldn’t act any differently if Karen were a human girl.”
“You would never treat me that way, right?”
“I hope to never treat anyone that way.”
She was silent for another long time, then asked, “Did it bother you, what Leticia said about you?”
It’s true, I had done nothing but turn those words over and over again in my head. Was I a hypocrite who thought herself better than Leticia because I treated my gynoid well, when I had bought someone forced to love me in the first place? That would be fooling everyone else, and even myself. But what if I really tried to convince myself that Deirdre could be like a real flesh and blood woman? The first would have been hypocrisy, the second a lie that was just as blind and dangerous. All that, I thought, and my error, my enormous error at that moment, was to speak it aloud to Deidre. Or perhaps, I’ve told myself later, it wasn’t an error.
She listened to me without answering, but later, at home, when we went to bed (she had insisted, as always, on showering with me beforehand), in the darkness, with her head on my shoulder and her body pressed against mine, she asked me, “Emma, are you in love with me?”
I was speechless. My Deirdre, my sweet Deirdre, so tender and affectionate, seemed to lose herself more and more in the labyrinth of her own thoughts.
I had to be sincere.
“I don’t know, Deirdre. Perhaps not yet.”
“Why did you want to live with me instead of a real girl, a human?”
“I suppose I had many fears. All my relationships with real women, as you call them, have been a true disaster. With our struggle to keep our independence, autonomy, freedom, we get so stubborn that we won’t cede a millimeter in our thinking and attitudes. Of course there have also been good moments, but they don’t last long. I felt wounded so often by
words, those words we humans say to one another so carelessly, impolitely, vengefully, or in bad faith; that doesn’t happen with you. I don’t blame the others, I had too many fears, traumas, complexes —but things which fortunately are alien to you.”
“Would you fall in love with me if I were a real girl and not a machine?”
“You’re not a machine, Deirdre; that is to say, you’re not like the washer, like the television, nor even like the computer. You’re something else; not human, of course, but also not artificial.”
We didn’t talk about this subject again; nonetheless, from them on, Deirdre’s behavior changed. Sometimes she was silent more than usual, and in her attitude, in her gestures, there was something that I could only compare to human sadness. I told myself that this melancholy was only logical, if she were really beginning to think.
A month later, we met up with Silvia again, and another friend of hers, this Laura. At the beginning of my relationship with Deirdre, we had spent a lot of time alone, just the two of us, to get to know one another better, and because I wanted to enjoy life as a couple after so much time without having a partner, and perhaps also because I didn’t know how to introduce her to my friends. Little by little, I had worked up the trust, and I proposed to Deirdre that we go out more with other people. I thought that that would please her —until that afternoon when we met up with Silvia and that Laura.
Silvia had invited us to have an afternoon snack at her home. She had bought a virtual reality machine and wanted to show it to us. She loved to travel, but couldn’t afford long or expensive trips.
“Girls, this is a wonder. Yesterday I was in Istanbul, the day before I was sailing off the Marquesas Islands, and the day before that I climbed Kilimanjaro and the native guide who accompanied me told me a lot of things about his country. This afternoon, I’m taking you to see the pyramids in Egypt.”
Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Page 9
