Indeed, we saw the pyramids. In fact, we also saw a red-gold dawn in the desert, we felt the first heat of the day, and later the humidity of the pyramids’ claustrophobic passages, and we reached the Pharaoh’s funeral chambers.
Laura was a charming and nice brunette, and she and I got on well and laughed a lot, making jokes about the virtual reality machine. That night, on reaching home, Deirdre asked me, “Do you like Laura?”
“She’s a pleasant girl, of course, but if what you’re asking is if I feel sexually attracted to her, I’d answer that I haven’t considered it. Right now I’m with you and, the truth is, I’ve always thought that one relationship is hard enough to not want to have more than one at a time.”
It was a joke, but I was often not aware that Deirdre still didn’t know how to interpret humor, to realize that a sentence had a different meaning than the literal one. On waking the next day, Saturday, Deirdre had left. On the living room table there was a note from her, which said in perfect handwriting:
I don’t want to be an obstacle for your finding a real girl. Goodbye, I love you, Deirdre
I dressed quickly and went out to the car to search for her, but I didn’t know when she had left. She was able to move through the house in absolute silence, and what’s more, she had night vision, so it was possible that she’d left in the middle of the night. I took a few turns around the neighborhood and then returned home to think. I checked that all her clothes were there and no money was missing; Deirdre knew that these were necessary to move through the world —in fact, recently she’d gone out alone frequently to shop— but she hadn’t dared to take any. I began to worry seriously, but what could I do? Call the police, the Kapek Corp.? I was afraid that if I alerted them, they’d go in search of Deirdre, capture her and in some way inflict some punishment on her, or a readjustment. I went out in the car again to go to the park where we usually went for walks; she wasn’t there, either. When I returned home, now close to midday, I thought it was best to tell someone I trusted. I called Silvia.
“Deirdre is here,” she told me, when I began to explain what had happened. “She showed up very early and told me more or less what she’d told you in the note, and that she thought you had liked Laura. I told her that the truth was that I was the one who liked Laura, who in any event is heterosexual, and I said that she ought to go back to your house and talk to you. Then she told me that you must have awoken by then and read the note, and that she was afraid you’d be very angry. She asked for my help because she didn’t know where to go; she insisted that I drive her to meet my friend Hugo, the anti-technite, because as I explained to both of you the other day, his group offered refuge to droids with problems.”
“Don’t let her leave there, I’m on my way.”
Silvia couldn’t stop laughing when I hurried into her house. “I haven’t enjoyed myself this much in ages,” she said. “I think that your relationship is guided by the solar winds. You’re already beginning to act just like any other couple.”
“Deirdre,” I told her, as we returned home, finally alone, “the next time you have a thought like the one that led you to leave tonight, please, talk to me and we’ll discuss it, because otherwise, instead of your partner I’ll feel like your mother.”
Later, I held her. “And so, my little brunette, later, when it’s nap time, I’ll be repaid for all the worry you’ve caused me.”
Deirdre’s attitude changed again, now in a very curious way. She seemed determined to prove that she was an adult being, and even showed certain clear attitudes of seduction toward me that she hadn’t had earlier. But what surprised me most were that the qualities she tried to highlight weren’t precisely human ones, but droid ones. For example, when we played chess she defeated me in a humiliatingly short timespan, and if I managed hold my own for a short while, she later repeated the match at a dizzying speed, to show me the errors I had made; I had to beg her not to go so fast, or I couldn’t grasp anything. When we went mountain climbing she made movements and leaps that were so impossible for any human that I warned her, “Deirdre, don’t do that or you’re going to break your head open.”
She seemed delighted to show me that she was capable of those leaps and of even more unreal stretches. She had learned to use the navigator of my car from the house computer and she forced me to return home even though I had a meeting somewhere else. And when she connected to the internet she could get into real mischief. Besides that, she learned all the news by heart so she could tell me the things that she thought might interest me most, or she read a book from my library every morning to discuss it with me later, or to recite all the poems by some author that she had liked a lot. She also started to read erotic books in order to suggest new positions or experiments to me at night. Finally, she wound up telling me, “I’d like you to tell everyone that I’m a gynoid and not a human woman. Maybe you’re afraid of what they might think or you’re embarrassed, and I don’t want you to feel that way.”
I enjoyed all of that, but it didn’t cease to worry me. Finally, one morning, I decided to call Myriam from my office; I asked that the call be confidential. I explained, without getting into certain details, what was going on.
“I told you that our more-evolved creations, like your Deirdre, have reached the point when they’re able to think for themselves, but that doesn’t mean that their thinking will be like how we humans think. In reality, even we, at the Kapek Corporation, don’t know how that way of thinking will be. What’s certain is that Deirdre will never change her feelings for you. But if you’d like us to make a readjustment, we’re willing to do so.”
To me, that talk of readjustment sounded like electroshock or a lobotomy. I didn’t want that. I had feared that Deirdre would develop the desire to be human; that she might prefer to develop as a gynoid-woman seemed admirable to me.
In any event, I realized that she wasn’t happy. Some days, when I got home, I found her in a state I could only call depressive: silent, sad, not motivated to do anything, and pensive. But, could a brain that is a computer be happy or depressed? Yet she asked me very human questions: “If some day you find a real girl who will love you the way I do, what will happen to me?”
“Deirdre, humans are also not sure that love will last forever. Some even prefer for it to not last. For others, we have to learn to live with that uncertainty. Besides,” I added, laughing, “have you seen many girls knocking down my door to court me? There are none because I’m not interested, now that I’m with you.”
Or she asked: “If one day I stop functioning, what would happen to you? You say that now you’ve gotten used to not living alone.”
“It’s not like I was used to solitude before, Deirdre. At least, not always. But don’t think about that. Come on, let me rest my head on your lap and let’s forget about everything but you and me and this moment.”
I felt a great tenderness for her, and I needed her by my side, but I was tormented by the idea that she depended on me so completely, especially emotionally, perhaps because that connection had been imposed on her. She could not resign herself to the idea that love could fade away, she couldn’t look for another love, because she was programmed so that I was her only desire, her only purpose, her whole world.
Now I asked her, “Tell me, what do you feel for me, Deirdre?”
“I love you.”
“Why do you love me?”
“Because I love you. And besides, you’re good to me.”
I felt her love, it wrapped me up, it was a joy and a gift, I valued it because I knew what it was like not to have it. But I didn’t have to make the slightest effort to keep having it, because she couldn’t stop loving me, and moreover the price was paid by Deirdre, and that price was her full maturity and her freedom.
After thinking about it a lot, I asked Silvia to set up a meeting for me with her friend Hugo the anti-technite, an interview which Deirdre must know nothing about. A few days later, I called in to work with an excuse, and went at breakfast
time to the café where Hugo and I had arranged to meet.
Hugo was an Argentine with curly reddish hair and energetic gestures, who was much more friendly and understanding than I had imagined.
“I don’t judge you for having a droid,” he told me when I explained my case to him. “And I don’t doubt your motives. Nor that you treat Deirdre well. But it’s also true that there’s a very different world out there, aside from the two of you. Did you know that right now there are more and more droids working basically as prostitutes? They can give them any look, from a child to an adult. They never get tired, they do everything they’re asked to, they never rebel at all against their owners or their clients and as an added benefit it’s practically impossible for them to transmit sexual diseases. Likewise, more and more often, droids are used as crewmembers for dangerous space flights, in space colonization, especially on Mars. And here on Earth they perform hard labor, for example in the mines and nuclear reactors. And we have heard that the big powers are planning to increase the manufacture of droids to use them in factories and certain public and private services. Part of the left is worried about what this could mean in terms of loss of jobs for humans. The conservatives say it’s much better to use droids instead of humans for prostitution and other jobs, since after all they don’t feel anything, but you have seen for yourself that they are beginning to think and to feel. And some of us, the so-called anti-technites —not at all the name we’d use— say that whether with humans or droids the problem is the same: slavery. Some humans want to have slaves, whether for sex or other tasks. They want to hold absolute power over them and to benefit from their services, without giving anything in return. And my thought is that I don’t want to be a slave or a slave-owner, just as I don’t want to be killed in a war but neither do I want to kill. I don’t want a society and a world like that. In your case, I think that the problem is not in the way in which you treat Deirdre, but instead in that, no matter how you treat her, you still have a slave. And possibly, that’s why you never manage to lover her. You can feel affection and gratitude toward her, but not love, because you know that her response isn’t free!”
I nodded. He continued, “I offer to free Deirdre of her dependence on you. We can erase the obligation to love you from her memory; we’re already doing this in other cases. We won’t touch anything more, so the evolution of her thought and emotions that she’s achieved will barely suffer. At first, she’ll find herself a bit disoriented, but we’ll help her.”
“And after that?”
“After that? It’s advisable that she remain with us for a few months, until she can live on her own.”
That night, at home, as we watched television, I asked Deirdre, “Tell me, would you like to be free, to be able to do whatever you want and to love whoever you want as well, the person you choose, not necessarily me?”
She thought for a long while.
“Then I would wind up alone,” she said at last.
I had the impression in those days that she guessed something of what I was trying to decide. She spent her time making all sorts of artistic holograms, an activity she had already begun to do earlier. Strange geometric figures of light in movement, which as she told me were translations of bits of poems she liked. She also gave me a cylinder visor so I could see all the photographs we appeared in together, which she had ordered. We made love more often than before.
But I knew what I should do, and here it didn’t make sense to ask her if she agreed.
The night before Deidre had to retire for 24 hours to recharge her battery, we went to bed as usual.
“My dear Deirdre...” I began, while she held me just like every night. But what more could I add? That I loved her? It would’ve been a lie. That I appreciated her love? That I had no choice but to do what I was going to do, for her own good? If I said that, I seemed selfless and generous and in reality, if I had loved Deirdre, I wouldn’t have permitted our separation; yes, if I’d loved her as she loved me, even if we were pursued by all the anti-technites of the world plus the Kapek Corporation, we would have fled together, and I wouldn’t have cared whether our history together ended in a politically correct way or not, as it would end now, by my own choice.
The next morning, while she was recharging, I called Hugo. He assured me that when I returned from work, Deirdre wouldn’t be at home. From the doorway of our bedroom, I looked at her for the last time.
Now, I spend many weekends at Silvia’s house. Two months ago she had a car accident and broke a leg. When she got out of the hospital, she still needed help. During the week she has a (human) girl hired to help as a domestic aide, but on Saturday and Sunday I go over. She hasn’t lost her good spirits, and she tells me that when she can walk without problems the two of us will go out in search of life; in other words, to find a girlfriend. Of flesh and bone or with a heart of silicon.
Sometimes I see Deirdre. She walks in front of Silvia’s house with Hugo or someone else from the group; their headquarters is near her house. I know, via Hugo, that everything is going well, and that Deirdre’s artistic abilities surprise them, what they call byte abstraction, three dimensional holofigures that translate poems and literary fragments into the artificial language of bits, converting them into prisms of color, arcs, spirals, facets, cusps, edges, irised polyhedrons, moving lines of light, resplendently spinning bodies.
The other day, Friday, I was in Silvia’s garden arranging some plants when Hugo came in with her. I’m sure he didn’t expect to find me there. He was even a little nervous about bumping into me. I was also nervous. I greeted both of them while I cleaned the earth from my hands. Deirdre, of course, no longer remembered me, I had been completely erased from her memory; if that weren’t the case, she couldn’t have been free. Nonetheless, she asked me what I was doing, and I gave her a white rose (I would have preferred a red one). She was lovely, Deirdre, and seemed as sweet as ever, but now she had a much stronger gaze than ever: she knew who she was, where she had come from and from now on she’d only have herself to rely on. She was no longer programmed to depend on anyone. She continued asking me about the names of the plants and how to take care of them, until Hugo told her that we should go, since Silvia wasn’t home.
Since that Friday, I can’t get the image of the new Deirdre out of my head. I think that soon we’ll meet again. It won’t be difficult, perhaps a visit to some new art exhibit, her byte abstractions. I don’t know what will happen then. Is it possible that there is some tiny corner of her electronic memory that still holds a memory of me? If she were designed to be my companion, my complement, couldn’t it be that we would search each other out? Would I be able to make this free Deirdre, who could meet many other women who might interest her, fall in love with me?
Silvia suspects that I’m beginning to fall in love with Deirdre.
Original Title: Deirdre
Translated by Lawrence Schimel
Erick J. Mota, born in Havana in 1975, is a physicist and science fiction writer. He has won several prizes in Cuba and other Latin American countries, including the 2004 Guaicán, the 2007 Golden Age, and the 2008 TauZero for Short Novel. He has published a short story collection, Algunos recuerdos que valen la pena [Some Worthwhile Memories] and, in 2010, a novel and collection of related short stories, Habana Underguater [Underwater Havana], which describes a world in which the Russians won the Cold War and Cuba is the center of several international conflicts. The second part of the series, Los propios rusos [The Russians Themselves], was a finalist for the 2011 Minotauro Prize.
“Greetings from a Zombie Nation” is a story that reinforces our conviction that science fiction can be a valid tool for constructively examining our present —in this case, the reality of Cuba.
The story is a daring and pertinent political metaphor —ingenious and raw— about a stalled society that slowly transforms its citizens into the living dead. A fun and funny story about zombies, bureaucracies, socialism and revolution. We think it is one of the best Cu
ban science fiction stories ever published.
I
The sign on the wall at the end of the street was as simple as it was clear. It was written in enormous red letters over the white lime paint. The watchword of the moment, repeated endlessly on television, on the radio, and at meetings:
THIS ZOMBIE BELONGS TO FIDEL!
All just like in the old times. Like in the Special Period. Many catchphrases to hide the crisis. What’s strange was that now there wasn’t any crisis, things were going well for us.
Or at least, that’s what we thought.
The wall, for its part, was neglected, as if it belonged to a colonial building. But there are no colonial houses in this part of the city. All the houses date from the beginnings of the 20th century; therefore, they were built following North American construction rules: block walls, concrete columns and concrete roofs. Over a hundred years have passed and every house holds itself up despite years of abandonment.
But the wall, since it didn’t belong to any house, is more deteriorated than the rest. The cement has fallen away in some areas, exposing the clay bricks. Moss and lichen give its lower area a greenish tint, right where the sidewalk starts. Until yesterday, the paint and the old sign, along with the old slogan, had a yellowish tone. Even the old standby of FATHERLAND OR DEATH seemed gloomy and sad.
The sidewalk, hardly traveled on since it was at the end of an alley, sports cracks worthy of an earthquake at the top of the Richter scale. The asphalt of the street, exhausted by years and the lack of traffic, wears old potholes from a moderately-glorious past. Some weeds sprout from the curb.
Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Page 10
