"Mm." Sal closed her eyes.
The reboot, when it happened, was obvious; a sensation under her palm of relaxation as Sal's mouth opened. "Sarah Unit is in Administrative mode. Commands?"
It did feel odd. Most of the Raises she worked with didn't report verbally unless set to that mode, precisely because it was distracting. The line's name, too, was something Sal had told her before, but it still struck her as strange, knowing Sal only as Sal. "I'll be accessing your systems. Please pull up diagnostics for visual transfer and open the panel at the rear of the neck."
The panel at the back of Sal's neck popped free; Clara picked it up carefully and set it to the side. There was probably some manual method of opening it as well, for the case where Sal's systems were too damaged to open this way, but an internal eject would be safer and less damaging.
Under the panel was a variety of cable ports, as she'd expected; only one of them seemed still compatible with current cable design, a simple visual output. She attached her screens to that one and powered them up as a test—a successful one, as data began to spill across her screen, describing Sal's BIOS. To actually work with it, she'd need to attach her computer somehow; she'd prepared for that, and had stocked up on converters of various kinds. Carefully, she slotted one into the wide flat opening and attached her own box's hookup into the other end of it.
Clara spent the first two hours not adjusting anything, just reading through the data and getting used to the code that made up "Sal". It was extremely similar in structure and content to the case studies she'd worked on at school, but relying on that felt dangerous. Sal wasn't a case study; she wasn't some example of old-fashioned and unethical robotics. She was an actual person lying in Clara's bed, if not an organic one; one whose AI was leaps and bounds more complicated than any Raise that she'd worked with. Even though she was programmed to be primed for domestic work, there was no limit on her behavior because she was designed to take and learn and adjust her own behavioral trees, her own priority structure, based on her interactions with humans.
The basic code structure's similarity was almost a trap; without spending time getting familiar with all the places it allowed for free will and autonomy, she could very easily do irrevocable harm to Sal. Even without intending to adjust anything, even intending to only clean up areas where leaks or conflicts were occurring and to find what internal parts needed replacement, there was risk.
Sal trusted her not to mess this up, Sal trusted her with not just her life but her identity, her sense of self. All those fears that Sal had mentioned before were being placed, too, in Clara's hands. If she changed Sal's values, then the things she hoped for, the things she feared—none of those would matter.
There was no point where Clara felt 'ready', not exactly. She simply reached a point where she felt she had all the information she could get without working with it directly, and had to hesitate, staring down from her screens to Sal lying prone on her bed. There was something so intimate about this that she almost felt embarrassed, a strange sensation in conjunction with the fear of doing something wrong, of hurting her.
And then she started.
Sal had been running constantly, but the repair nanites in her system had done a fine job in terms of keeping joints lubricated and her mechanics working. Instead, the problem seemed to be a combination of code bloating, memory that needed to be stored more efficiently, excesses in her registry that were interfering with her processing and, simply enough, various chips that had worn down despite the nanites' work on the broader mechanical systems. Those, at least, could be replaced at the same time as she worked on the software side and keep Sal from having to wait too long. Clara had managed to get hold of spares for everything that seemed urgent, if not everything that could be done. She connected old chips to new, setting a data transfer between them, and turned her attention back to the code.
Hours passed there, and Clara hardly noticed. She broke to use the bathroom when her body's demands wouldn't be ignored, and, having stepped away, realized she was hungry. She made herself toast, then dove back in without letting herself rest further. It felt disrespectful to pull away from Sal at a time like this.
The clean-up and reorganization in her code took less time than the physical transfer of information from one chip to another, and no wonder. Sal had lived so long, experienced so much—all her life was in this. Waiting for it to finish, she looked Sal over one last time, and finally let herself really focus on the one piece of information she absolutely knew she couldn't touch.
Registration: Karinne Anders (deceased).
Looking all around the code that supported it, she confirmed that Sal didn't technically require this registration to function. It was part of ownership, but having and recognizing an owner wasn't a vital part of her system. It had been programmed into her as part of the unit's purpose as a domestic servant, but it could be anything—even blank. Following the threads back, a blank registration would simply place no priority above Sal's own. With Karinne's identification marked deceased, it looked like rather than erase the registration, Sal herself had adjusted her priorities to connect it to her memories of Karinne. She had attached herself, Clara thought, to promises of the past, to the tea shop that—from the way it was constructed—likely still felt to Sal more like Karinne's than her own. Clara had an idea, an impulse that she couldn't shake even though she couldn't be sure how accurate it was, of what Sal's feelings for Karinne were. She wondered if it had been mutual.
"Is this part of mourning her? Did you ever find a way to recover from your grief?" Clara murmured to her.
"Command unclear," Sal—'Sarah'—said.
It wasn't hers to touch regardless. The transfer finished and, careful, Clara fished around up Sal's neck into her head to replace the chips, to click them into place.
Finally finished, she unhooked her cords and closed the panel back up. As soon as she'd disconnected, she started to shake, hands trembling so hard she couldn't force them to steady. It wasn't entirely unexpected—she was exhausted and overwrought and terrified that she'd done it wrong in some way. But she had to push through. She cleared her throat, forced herself to focus. "Please reseal the panel and reboot in personality mode."
"Understood." The panel locked tight against the back of her neck.
A few seconds passed, and Sal stirred, rolling over to look at her properly. For a moment, she seemed to be focusing internally, the lenses in her eyes dilating and contracting. It only made sense. She'd want to see, however well she could, what was done to her.
Then she smiled, the expression wide and actually easy to read, her lenses dilating, her mouth parting a little. "Clara..."
"How do you feel?" Clara asked. She felt, somehow, even more wobbly at the sight of that smile than she had before. She hadn't been sure that was possible.
"I feel... good. Steady," Sal said. She flexed her fingers and lifted her arms, rubbing at her face with those smooth, unmarked palms. "Really refreshed. Maybe not quite like new, but... I don't feel like I'm falling apart."
Without really meaning to, Clara laughed. "Well. Good. I mean, that was the goal."
"My registration—"
Clara blinked rapidly, and suddenly searched her memory over again. She hadn't meant to do anything to that—had she done so in her distraction? No, she was sure she'd done nothing, just left it how it was. "What about it?"
"Nothing," Sal said. "Never mind."
But maybe that alone had been worth noting, Clara thought, suddenly awkward. After all, Sal knew that she thought that Sal should clear her registration and live freely.
Before she could come up with something to say—explanation, denial, whatever—the thought was pushed from her mind. Sal had half sat-up, wrapped her arms around Clara, and started to lean back down again. Clara lost all sense of balance; exhausted, she fell back onto the bed with Sal, finding herself curled against that firm exterior, head on her shoulder. "Sal—"
"You must be tired. Nearly six ho
urs have passed."
"A little tired," she admitted, and squirmed a little to get herself comfortable. It had been a long time since she'd cuddled anyone; her cheeks grew hot with an embarrassed happiness.
They lay together in a tangle of skirt and blankets and discarded cords and chips. Clara could feel her heart slowly settling from surprise toward something like an alert contentment.
"Clara?"
"Mm?"
"I like you."
Sal said it in a quiet, almost ashamed way, hesitant. The tone left no doubt as to her meaning, and Clara's heart, finally calming, began to pound again. She swallowed around a dry throat, turning her face more into Sal's shoulder, burying it there.
"I like you too," she said into Sal's dress sleeve.
"Even though...?"
Sal didn't finish her sentence, but maybe she didn't need to. There were a lot of potential 'even though's. Even though she was a robot. Even though she was still attached to, still grieving for, her old love. Even though Clara would want to move on sometime or, at least, not stay here, while Sal would want to stay. Even though they both knew that eventually history would repeat, that Clara would grow old and die and leave Sal with whatever memories she had as Sal lived on.
"Well. Yeah," Clara said weakly.
"Oh," Sal said.
Another few heart-pounding moments passed, and then Sal curled closer, rolling from her back to her side to press more tightly to Clara, hold her close. "I can't—physically," Sal said. "I mean, I'm not designed to be sexual. That's to say, I can act on others, but I don't want—"
"That's okay. Me neither."
"Oh, but—"
"It's not something I need from someone else," Clara said firmly, willing Sal to understand. It wasn't something that needed explanation, but something that too many people had wanted one for. Love, romance; those were things she'd felt before, even if she wasn't often inclined toward them. But she didn't need anything from or with that person, never felt attracted to them even with the addition of love. If her body wanted something, she could spend five minutes with her hand. Another person never needed to factor into that for her.
But she didn't say that, just waited to see if Sal understood.
Whether she did or didn't, Sal accepted it; after a moment, she just let out a soft laugh. "That's good," she said, quietly. "With Karinne, it was always—always a little unbalanced."
"Yeah. That can happen."
"Mm. So I'm glad. This is fine?" Sal arms tightened around Clara a little.
Maybe it was the exhaustion, the rush of relief after the tension of working so long and so hard on something with such high stakes, but Clara found herself shaking, eyes prickling, tears coming to the surface a little. She tried to pretend they weren't there, breathed deeply, face still pressed into Sal's shoulder.
"This is fine," she said.
*~*~*
They fell into what Sal found to be a surprisingly comfortable pattern. She wasn't over every night or anything close to it, but she went to visit Clara many nights. Even if she was just recharging, not really sleeping, there was something much nicer about doing so in a bed instead of seated in a kitchen, something much nicer in doing so with company nearby. She didn't make the excuse of thinking it made her feel more human, but it made her feel, at any rate, less like an object.
She still woke early in order to have time to start up the shop for the day. It wasn't a long walk, and the early morning air was pleasant, wet and refreshing. She would get up and slide out of bed silently at first, excruciatingly careful, but she soon learned Clara wasn't so easy to wake. Joanie would complain about it constantly, though Sal privately thought that Joanie liked the effort of waking her just about as much as she liked complaining about it.
Once she got used to those mornings, she tried to make Joanie's job easier. She'd prepare the kettle, set out tea in a strainer, get food ready to start with the timer set to the same time Joanie would be waking Clara. They would chat, just the two of them, in hushed voices as she started this new early morning routine, then Sal would lean over, drop a light kiss on Joanie's small head, and head out.
She began to acquire more things as well through the sheer need for them when going out. Shoes that could be worn outdoors properly, an outfit or two so she wasn't always wearing the same thing—not much, of course. The majority of her earnings always had to go to maintaining the tea shop. But she changed things enough that it was a little bit of excitement. Life felt different somehow, despite still being the same routine for the majority of the day. She wondered, sometimes, how she could have spent so many years, so many decades, not changing anything.
She tried not to get used to it. Clara would most likely move away within a few months—years at the very unlikely outside—and Sal would probably fall back into old habits. Leaving the shop wasn't an option, or at least, not one she wanted to take. It felt too much like letting go, or perhaps like admitting defeat.
It was easier to do what she had always done. She'd always thought that it would take an external force to change that, not an internal one. At least until the three-hundred-year mark, she'd run the shop unless she was stopped from doing so. What she'd do after that, she'd never been sure.
And Clara wasn't enough to break her routine, she was sure. Clara was external, and helped Sal change, but didn't act on her except where she allowed it. That respect was perhaps why she was willing to change her habits for Clara at all, even if just for now.
And then one day, an external force came. She'd stayed over at Clara's that night, and in the morning she got up, prepared food and tea, and jolted as the sound of sirens nearby split the early morning quiet.
"Ugh, what's that nonsense?" Joanie muttered. "It's even gonna wake Clara at that volume!"
Sure enough, Clara muttered, turned over, covered her head with a pillow. The sirens were already fading some, though they sounded as if they weren't going far.
"I think she's still asleep," Sal told Joanie and smiled through her uneasiness.
"Nah, she's waking up, I can feel it," Joanie sighed. "She's pretending to still be asleep in the hopes she'll trick herself into it, but she'll be up soon. Man, she didn't get enough sleep to go to work on. No good at all!"
"No good," Sal agreed, and leaned over to kiss Joanie's head. "Well, take care of her, then. I'm off."
"Have a good day!"
As she walked, her sense of discomfort grew. There was no reason for it, she thought as she went, reassuring herself. It was just impulse, a leftover memory of the earthquake. But she couldn't convince herself, anxiety making her move more and more briskly, hands clenched into fists. It's nothing, she told herself. It has nothing to do with me, but rounding the corner to the narrow side-street her shop was on, she saw the billowing smoke, the parked fire engine, the police car, the flashing red lights. The sense of anxiety turned into fear and shock with the force of a physical blow.
She burst into a run.
Hyeon was there already; he caught her around the shoulders, dragging back on her with all of his weight. "You can't go in there! It's not safe, Sal."
"I'll be fine, I'll be fine," she insisted blindly, struggling. The flames were billowing hotter than ever and she didn't know what she'd do if she got in, how she could stop this, what she would save if she could save anything at all. She just knew she shouldn't be out here watching as it burned.
"It's not worth it," Hyeon said. His feet were being dragged along the pavement, but he held on anyway. "C'mon Sal, we're old friends, aren't we? Don't do this to me. Don't do this to me, Sal. We gotta keep you safe."
She pulled herself forward, caught the edge of the doorway, felt it crumble under her fingertips, and then the firefighter nearest her grabbed her as well, a tall and heavily-muscled woman who threw her strength into pushing her back.
"Sal, you have to let them do their job," Hyeon said. "You don't know, they might be able to save something! But if they're trying to protect you, they'll let the shop go
instead—"
"There's no reason to protect me!"
"Shut up with that," Hyeon said sharply, a tone like a blow, and Sal sagged.
She let Hyeon lead her away, let Hyeon sit her on a curb up the street, and watched her shop burn. She listened to Hyeon numbly. It looked like the same people had gone after her shop as before; they'd arrested them this time a few blocks away. It had all gone down just a minute before she showed up.
Understanding what had happened didn't make her feel any better.
She hadn't been there. If she'd been there, she'd have realized when they'd broken in like she had before. She'd have been able to send out an alarm right away, not after they'd spread the fuel, not twenty minutes after the fire had already started burning, not after someone arriving early to work at the bakery nearby had seen the fire, not after it had already started to spread to the next building over.
She mumbled something to that effect, and Hyeon sighed. "You don't know that," he said. "They could have blocked your exit. You could've burned up in there before you could even send the alarm. Could have, should have... in this line of work, they don't mean much."
Her hands felt funny. It was like what she knew to be symptoms of shock, but she wondered if that would even be physically possible. Disassociation, at least, would be. That was something.
"I need to call someone," she told him. Her voice sounded wrong to her own ears.
Waiting felt painful; she was hyper-aware of the seconds passing, churning inside her. It didn't take long—Clara was awake, if somewhat incoherent. Sal explained, made brief by her inability to get words out properly.
"The tea shop is burning," she said. "Please come."
After, she sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, her arms looped around them. She knitted her fingers together loosely and watched as the firefighters got things under control. She was unable to do anything else, didn't have eyelids to lower, didn't want to look away. After shaking her head repeatedly to Hyeon's questions and concerns, he sighed.
"Don't go anywhere," he said. "I have to talk to the other officers, and they might need your statement."
The Cybernetic Tea Shop Page 6
