Plum Rains

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Angelica turned on her heel and left.

  She took the subway to Chiba Prefecture, still shaking off the scare of hearing an unfamiliar name attached to her digital identity. She distracted herself only to find another worry waiting, imagining things that could go wrong back at the Itou residence, such as Hiro regressing into a more infantile state, wailing or confused.

  In truth, Angelica hadn’t seen Hiro that way except for the first two or three nights. Perhaps he really had grown up, and quickly. If he was a more mature child now, albeit a dutiful one, perhaps adolescence was on the horizon. She could imagine him glimpsing himself in a reflection, perhaps in the darkened TV screen, and suddenly fixating on his own face, unresponsive to any emergency, paralyzed with fascination. That was a sign of developing intelligence, she’d read somewhere: the recognition of one’s own image. Oh, why had she left Sayoko alone with an unpredictable automaton? Because she had no choice. She had to fix this Bagasao problem to clear enough space in her head to handle the rest. She had to refill her own tank, first.

  She didn’t go to Chiba often, but when she did, it felt instantly familiar. Tokyo was not a city of large, densely ethnic neighborhoods and foreign workers here tried to blend in, living near their workplaces or anywhere they could afford. But in Chiba, to the east, she had found ethnic pockets: a mini-mart with Tagalog magazines and Filipino adobo and spice packets next to a massage parlor featuring short, dark-haired beauties catering to a Japanese clientele; a clothing shop that sold tropical dresses and plastic flip-flops as well as maid and nursing uniforms; rental halls for Pinoy-themed parties or karaoke social hours; a corner selling delectable lechón.

  It all smelled like home.

  She entered a cell phone and wire transfer shop, a bell on the door ringing as she entered. It was a ratty little place, comfortingly so: no bio-metric scanners or disembodied voices, no one digging into your data the moment you entered.

  An older woman behind a battered desk at the back of the store eyed Angelica as she dug an envelope of yen out of her purse. It wasn’t much, maybe half of what she owed, but she hoped it would send the right message to Uncle Bagasao: that she had not intended to get so far behind in her payments, that she was still here, working and saving, that she needed her phone back and her online identity restored, that she didn’t want anything else tampered with.

  “You change to pesos, mum?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” Angelica said, eyeing the number board behind her. The exchange rates were larcenous. She’d lose twelve percent more than she’d bargained for. But time was of the essence. She pushed the envelope of yen across the desk.

  “Better deal if you deposit into your account, then let us make electronic withdrawal for you. Seventy-two hours.”

  “No thank you,” Angelica said. “Anyway, I need to get some money overseas quickly.”

  “You have a registered account with us?” the clerk said.

  “Registered? I thought I could just wire this to a name and address.”

  “Not without a registered account. We need approval from the government here before we can wire money for you. They keep track.”

  “Well, what does that take?”

  “Passport. Verification of visa and employer. Criminal check. There can be other requirements.” From a desk drawer she pulled a dirty laminated card, streaked with a mustard-colored sauce. “How much you sending?”

  Angelica told her.

  “Okay, just first three things then, mum.”

  “I give you all that, and then what?”

  “We check. They check. Twenty four hours.”

  She’d had to physically submit her passport to start the renewal process for her work visa, which was due to expire in two months. Pending other requirements, including results from the last language exam she’d taken, it would be returned in a few weeks.

  “I have a copy of my passport. That’s all I have right now. That’s okay, right?”

  The woman frowned. “I don’t know.”

  Angelica pulled back the envelope of yen, took out the topmost bill and set it on the desk, pushing it closer to the clerk. “A copy should be okay, yes?”

  The woman put a hand over the bill and swept it into a drawer. “Probably okay this time.”

  “Probably?”

  “We’ll know by the time you come back tomorrow.”

  “I have to come back?”

  “We’ll text you if your paperwork is not done in time.”

  “Texts don’t always come through. My phone isn’t working.”

  The woman gestured to a row of old-fashioned cell phones on the wall, the simplest SIM card models, rentable. Angelica stared at them, calculating how much money she was willing to spend just to meet the requirements of wiring.

  The clerk was losing patience. “Maybe you go to place you are already registered.”

  “I’m not registered for wiring money. I usually just send from my account, online. But I can’t get online.” She hadn’t expected understanding at the bank, but she expected some here. Surely, the woman could appreciate her dilemma. “My authentications don’t work. I’ve been hacked.”

  The woman squinted at Angelica: a quick, pressed-lip smile that was reluctant sympathy, overshadowed by distaste.

  “You owe someone in Philippines a lot of money, mum?”

  She stood at the back of the mini-mart next door, pretending to study the shelves of Lucky Me instant noodles and Maggi brand sauces, when really she was just gathering her wits. She had to come back tomorrow to sign, in front of a notary who was available only from three to five in the afternoon. She’d wasted three hours already. It would take two more hours to get home. Forgive me. Half a day leaving Sayoko alone, or worse than alone. Angelica touched the cross at her neck, rubbing the tiny pendant between two fingers, an action that had once brought her a small measure of peace.

  The man at the front of the shop was studying her in the anti-theft mirror overhead. She picked up a half-dozen narrow plastic packets of calamansi juice, the very thought of the tiny tart lime-like fruit making her mouth water, and dropped them into her shopping basket. He kept watching her.

  She moved over to the pharmacy section, eyeing the teas and herbal supplements. A slim Japanese woman in black slacks and a mandarin-collared business jacket was holding a box of “Good Hope Morning Fertility Tea” made in Luzon. The Japanese seemed to believe the Filipinos had some secret when it came to conception, but one of the secrets was simply not living too long in Japan. Angelica knew plenty of Filipinas who managed to get pregnant, intentionally or not, even despite the general worldwide birthrate decline and the especially steep drop in wealthier countries. Generally, you get pregnant at the worst time—when you can’t handle it, when you don’t even believe it, that’s when it happens, especially to bad girls, Angelica remembered a nun saying, without adding any of the other details—the exact, anatomical how of the matter. She’d been twelve at the time, caught giggling in the orphanage, exchanging uninformed guesses with another girl.

  In the Philippines, pregnancy had been sad news often enough, or maybe bittersweet at best, because who could afford a baby, and what if you didn’t have a job, or what if you had one job or two, and no time to watch the baby and had to pay someone else to do it for you? But here in Japan, it was only joyful news, a miracle that the average woman prayed for.

  At Angelica’s approach, the woman dropped the fertility tea stealthily into her basket. It’s only overpriced raspberry leaf and mint, nothing miraculous, Angelica wanted to say, but didn’t. Every person had her own story, her own desperation.

  In the overhead mirror at the end of the aisle, Angelica saw the man turning back to the cash register, satisfied for the moment, helping another customer who was pointing to something in the corner. It was a candy red, three-foot-tall, early model kitchen helper. One step above a Room
ba.

  Angelica walked to the front of the store.

  “How many weeks you want to rent?” the cashier was asking the customer.

  “Three weeks, just while my mother-in-law’s foot heals.”

  “One month is the same as three weeks.”

  “All right.”

  Angelica waited her turn, then asked the cashier: “Do you have another one to rent out, the same model?”

  The cashier waited for the Japanese customer to leave. He leaned closer.

  “You’re sure you only want a simple one. It can’t do very much.”

  He was still leaning, calamansi juice packets not yet rung up, hoping to up-sell her to something: a stolen unit? An illegal unit? A dumb or older, slightly less-dumb sexbot?

  Junichi had told her about those once, laughing at Angelica’s naïveté. She had not realized how common sexbots were, or rather, had once been, just three or four years ago. Haptic suits combined with virtual reality visors were the thing now, evidently, able to provide head-to-toe sexual experiences without stirring up public debate. Sex-capable androids were more problematic: too dumb to be convincing, and then, for a brief time in the mid-twenties, too smart for society to tolerate. A thing that might one day pass as a non-selective, sexually functioning spouse without having emotional needs of its own threatened the institution of marriage altogether—and that was without considering the problem of falling childbirth rates. Until Junichi had explained things to her, Angelica had known a little about the negotiated halt in strong AI development—the Pause—but not that sexbots had been part of the negotiation.

  Evidently, a few of the older, smarter models were still in circulation.

  Angelica told the cashier, “Oh, I’ve got my own troubles with a smart social robot, thank you.”

  “Yes, mum,” he said, chuckling. “Smart not always better. But if you change your mind, come back,” he said. “We have things not on display. What a person wants, a person can find. It does not have to be girl model. There are men who will love you, too.”

  “Pretend men, you mean.”

  “Aren’t those the best kind?”

  Outside, she saw a flyer advertising a singles meet-up for Filipinos in Tokyo—the sort of thing she had always avoided, the sort of thing Rene, Sayoko’s physical therapist, had encouraged her to attend. Which reminded her, for the second time in a few days, that she hadn’t clarified her complete non-interest in his Filipino friend. Once her phone was working again, she would text Rene and make herself clear. No dates, no matchmaking, no thank you. True love and family were not in her future.

  Her affair with Junichi was not something she always felt good about, but she understood it better at stressful times like these. Junichi was low stakes. He would never truly love her, never even fully understand her. She could not fully rely on him, but that was better, because at least she knew it in advance. No false expectations. No entanglements. Life was complicated enough.

  She had rented a dumbphone while she waited for her smartphone to work again. Now she’d rented herself a Samsung dumbbot, Gina Model 4.0, to keep an eye on Hiro.

  On the subway home, she had to squeeze the three foot by one foot box against her chest as the crowd surged against her, but she was finally relieved. When Angelica phoned from the train platform, Sayoko had answered her wrist monitor, dropping the connection on the first try but answering again on the second, which was better than she’d ever done, and in line with her rapidly improving attitude. Via wrist monitor, Sayoko had sounded cheerful and even mischievous, like by answering she was making it easier for Angelica to be away from the condo longer than Itou-san would’ve approved. Things had gotten more interesting for Sayoko. She and Hiro were a team.

  Concerned about choking and messes, Angelica had not left Sayoko with any snacks except for a cup of broth, which was still sitting on a side tray, untouched, when she returned. Dinner was served late that night, but Sayoko, thankfully, did not notice. She’d spent the afternoon so busily chatting with Hiro that she’d lost track of the time. Was it going to be this easy? Maybe robots were not threatening replacements. Maybe they were only helpful additions—as long as employers saw it that way. Angelica’s fear had blinded her, perhaps.

  “Sayoko’s schedule had some variation today, even after you returned from your errand,” Hiro said later that night, when Angelica was preparing to take Sayoko to the bathroom, following dinner. “I understand; it was a distracting day for everyone.”

  “Wait here, please,” Angelica said.

  Hiro had no choice but to wait. He had no mobility. He was sitting on the counter near the kitchen table, to be moved to another room when Sayoko insisted, but no sooner.

  As Angelica pushed Sayoko’s wheelchair toward the doorway, Hiro called after them, “There is one small but important health observation—”

  “We have some important business to attend to, Hiro. Private business. Isn’t that right, Sayoko-san?”

  Sayoko did not answer, but the expression on her face was clear: To the bathroom. Without delay. The day had been exciting enough already, and Sayoko was too tired to get there on her own, which was fine with Angelica. She didn’t mind a moment alone with Sayoko, a chance to be of use and to begin reclaiming the relationship they’d once had.

  From the hallway, Angelica heard Hiro speak up again. “It is only that—”

  Angelica called back, perhaps a little gleefully, “Later, Hiro.”

  From behind them, he intoned dutifully, “Understood. I will log the observation for discussion later.”

  Angelica had wondered if the presence of a secondary robot, however simplistic in appearance, would threaten Hiro, but the opposite seemed true. Hiro had been excited to watch Angelica pull Gina out of the box. The unit’s bottom half looked like a vacuum cleaner, a simple cube on hidden wheels. Her trunk and two arms were slim, her hands the only complex part of her upper body, with agile, jointed fingers. Her face was a small hard oval with patch-like eyes and an oval-shaped speaker for a mouth. No denying it, she was cute.

  Hiro had a dozen questions to ask about her abilities and limitations, where she was made and when, why her surface looked so scuffed.

  Angelica said, “She’s already been rented out a lot.”

  “She must find it a challenge to adapt to the needs of her many owners,” he suggested tentatively.

  “She doesn’t adapt.”

  “But over time—?”

  “Her time’s almost up. Don’t worry about it. See all the dings? Old model robots just get worn out. We’ll return her to the shop in a few days.”

  “Return her?” he asked. “Won’t that be confusing to her? Won’t she miss us?”

  “She doesn’t have emotions. She doesn’t think. She can clean house a bit, that’s all.” The most important thing was that she went room to room, monitoring the condo, sending those images and sounds back to a remote handheld device or linked phone. For Angelica, she was an advanced nanny cam with the added benefit of being able to retrieve items for Sayoko.

  “Perhaps she’ll do more later.”

  “She won’t do more, Hiro. I’m telling you: she doesn’t learn.”

  There was a pause as he tried to digest this fact, still skeptical. “Well, I like her anyway.”

  The next day, everything went smoothly. On the subway back to Chiba, Angelica actually got a seat for once. Throughout the journey she periodically checked Gina’s remote feed, adjusting the camera’s two perspectives: full-room and visor, which showed a downward view of Gina’s narrow, hard-molded body and flexing fingers at work. Seeing the world through Gina’s perspective, Angelica realized how hard it was for a robot to do the simplest things, like pick up a tray or fill it with all the items required for serving tea. Gina’s fingers flexed, advanced, adjusted, and flexed many times before she gripped objects securely. Angelica wondered how much
more capable Hiro would be when he was fully assembled. But it wouldn’t come to that, she reassured herself. Yes, perhaps robots could harmoniously augment the capabilities of human helpers, but not if they were too mobile, too smart, too independent. Gina 4.0’s charm was in her limitations.

  Making her way up from the subway, Angelica reassured herself that both Sayoko and Hiro were fully occupied playing with the simple robot housekeeper. Meanwhile, she had arrived at the wire transfer shop too early and had time to kill in the corner shops, studying the imported groceries, unfolding bright-patterned wraparound skirts as if she intended to buy them, as if she would ever be on a tropical beach again, anytime soon.

  Oh, there were things she didn’t miss at all, but the fruits, and the flowers . . .

  Just as the thought moved lightly through her, like the scent of night-blooming jasmine, she saw a corner stand offering small bright orange fried balls on a stick. Kwek-kwek. How she loved the very sound of it, the two syllables repeating playfully. Deep-fried quail eggs. The last time she’d eaten one she’d been on a street corner in Manila, waiting for a jeepney and watching it pull up: all glittering gold and green like a superhero, “Big Boy” in bold letters at the top, Mercedes Benz hood ornament on the toothy grill, cartoon images painted on its sides, more colorful than any taxi in elegant, muted Japan. The tastes, the color, the noise, the attitude.

  “Kwek-kwek. Really?” she asked the vendor.

  Actually, it was a bright orange, deep-fried chicken egg. Tokneneng. Close.

  The sky was clouding up, with rain threatening. She’d wandered in and out of the more interesting shops and she still had forty-five minutes to kill, and that was if the notary showed up exactly on time. Angelica loitered under the shadowy eaves of a corner produce stall, a half-block from the wiring office, eating two of the deep-fried eggs as she stood against the wall, aware that in Japan this kind of on-the-move snacking was considered impolite.