Cracking the Sky

by Brenda Cooper

  We unpacked the house, all except the pallet of robostuff, which Aliss steadfastly ignored, and two boxes of art too lame for the new house.

  The third week, I woke up in the middle of the dark and texted a friend in the reserves, who brought his night vision goggles. She was warm—and alone. Human.

  Satellite shots from the city never showed a car, although they did show the girl out playing robot ball twice.

  Aliss made up names for her (Colette, Annie, Lisa, Barbie) and drew her picture. Not that we didn’t do our jobs (me—investing advice, her marketing), or make dinner, or make love. But the spare time that might have been nights out or movies all went to the robot’s girl.

  It wasn’t like we wanted kids. But she started to haunt our dreams for no good reason except that we were human, and she was surrounded by beings who weren’t. We walked by the house at least once a day. Always we saw the guard-bots. There were three of them. One too many for the two of us. Or maybe three too many. We hadn’t degenerated into breaking and entering. After all, the robot’s girl laughed and played. Her hair was neat and her clothes ironed.

  We walked, and watched, almost every day. Delivery trucks came and went from time to time, but no regular cars stayed, no friends, no family. Just groceries, and occasionally, bags or boxes that might hold shoes or clothes or books.

  Fall began to cool and shorten the nights. We were on our lunch break, walking out with the first yellow and orange leaves scrunching under our feet, the sky a nearly-purple-blue above us. After we passed the house and entered the stretch of forest on the far side, Aliss was silent for a long time before she said, “She’s too good. A kid her age should play tricks and make faces and all that stuff. She doesn’t do that.”

  “Do robots have a sense of humor?”

  “Shit. She’s been like this forever.” Her voice rose. “I keep hoping her mom is on vacation, and she’s coming back. She’s not. The robots really are raising her.”

  She fell silent, her feet making soft sliding steps on the road, her breathing faster than it should be for our pace, her lips a tight line in her face. “I’m going in.”

  “A little melodramatic, aren’t we? You sound like a TV cop show.”

  She swung around in front of me and stopped, blocking my way, head tilted up toward me. “It’s like she’s in jail. But she doesn’t know it. What if they’ve raised her forever? What if that little girl doesn’t know what a human hug feels like? What if . . . what if she thinks she’s inferior to those robots? What are they teaching her?”

  “Shhhhhh.” I took her shoulders lightly. She felt like a bird. “We have to keep perspective. Not get thrown in jail for breaking and entering. The cops won’t even go in—you called them.”

  She stared at me, eyes wide, then snapped her mouth shut.

  “I’m sorry, we can’t. There’s nothing illegal about robot babysitters.”

  “They’re not babysitters.” She thumped her fists against my chest and her breath overtook her ability to speak and she actually quivered.

  I pulled her in and stoked her hair. “We have to find another way.”

  She leaned back and smacked me again with her fists, hard enough it stung a little, and might leave a little bruise. “You just don’t care!” Now she was hissing at me. Not screaming in case the damned robos heard, but she wanted to, the sound building up in her and coming out in shakes and deep out-breaths. She looked deep in my eyes, probing me, looking for something.

  Whatever it was, she didn’t find it. She turned and stalked up the street, stiff-backed, unbound hair flying behind her, her shirt the only yellow in the green and gray and black and brown of the forest.

  I should have chased her. But I was trying not to laugh; Aliss seeing me laugh would have been worse than me standing there holding it in. Not that it was funny. She’d just overreacted so much it didn’t seem real. Two minutes before, we’d been walking happily beside each other.

  I didn’t move until she was opposite the house. I should have chased her, should have run as fast as two feet can go. I should have known she meant exactly what she said.

  While she hurried up the road, arms swinging, I stood still, trying for emotional control. She turned sharp left at the driveway and kept stalking, heading for the front door. She was small then, far enough away I could see her but couldn’t expect to run up and catch her. She looked beautiful and terrible, brave in the face of her stupidity.

  One bot moved in front of her, the line of its squat body hard to make out except when movement gave it ghost-like visibility. Another one seemed to float toward her, its body easier to see as it moved between me and a green hedge starred with small white flowers.

  I shook myself loose and bounded toward her, waving my hands over my head as if the guard-bots would decide I was more threatening even though I stood on a public road and Aliss was doing a full frontal assault.

  They ignored me.

  Red lines illuminated her jeans, bisected her knees, her calf, above her ankles.

  I raced all-out, finally driven to ignore the property line.

  She stepped onto the front stoop and jerked, then collapsed, her long hair a curtain across her face. I almost made it to her side when I felt the sharp jolt of a taser and my mouth was too busy being stiff to let out my curse. I went to jelly, crumpling just too far away to touch her. I didn’t lose consciousness, but my head had a muzzy shockiness and my body didn’t really want to move right away, even though my heart was willing.

  The guard-bots withdrew a respectful distance.

  The door opened.

  A silver form in Dockers and an Izod T-shirt bent down and gazed at Aliss, an inquisitive expression on its face.

  The guard-bots whirred off, surely going back to watch for more nosy neighbors.

  Aliss sat up, looking the robot in the eyes, which were like tiny camera-irises set inside lids with no lashes. From the distance of our third-story porch, their eyes had looked nearly human, but here the emotion came from subtle changes in the shape of the smooth, silver face. Robos can come with human-colored skins and rose lips, and blond or dark or even gray hair, but whoever chose the bots for this house liked them to look like science fictional beings. I’d seen similar models up close at home shows, except they’d looked even less real, maybe because people in bad suits were selling them like refrigerators.

  This one had an air of authority.

  “You were trespassing,” it stated convincingly. It glanced at me, as if making sure I knew I was trespassing, too.

  I nodded at it. “Sorry. We’re the neighbors.”

  “Yes.” It looked back at Aliss. “We have been watching you watch us. That’s why Jilly told the bots not to kill you.”

  Good for Jilly. I struggled to sit up, pulled my hands under me, folded my legs, and noticed my back hurt.

  “Is Jilly your little girl?” Aliss asked.

  For just a moment, it looked like the robot couldn’t decide what expression to wear. “Jilly is our head of security. I am Roberto.”

  I managed not to laugh. I stood up, happy to be above him. “Glad to meet you.” In spite of the fact that he was a machine, his authority felt absolute. “We came to visit. The girl who lives here, she must need friends.”

  I was rewarded with a sweet look from Aliss, who took my hand, and also took the half-step or so necessary to keep it naturally. A man and his girlfriend, standing together on borrowed ground on a quest for warmth and humanity for a single little girl.

  Roberto stood, too, half-a head taller than me, a full head taller than Aliss, and a lot shinier. Roberto seemed to gather himself up, or maybe align was the right word, like coming to perfect parade rest, making every bit balance just right. There was no blame in his smooth voice as he said, “I presume you mean human friends?”

  I was clearly out of my league. “We see she’s taken care of,” I stammered.

  Aliss put some serious pressure on my foot. “Can we meet her? Please?”

&nbs
p; “She will be finished with her classes in three hours. Would you like to come back after that and join us for afternoon tea?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  Aliss let up on my foot. “Thank you, Roberto. We appreciate the offer.”

  As we walked hand in hand up the driveway, the guard-bot ignored us, a dark rock-colored splotch the size of small dog, turning around and around softly at the base of a deep green rhododendron bush.

  We went in through the garage door. I eyed the pallet of robo-whatevers in various states of repair. Aliss pecked me on the cheek. “I’m going to go get ready. Why don’t you see if you can find a good vac?”

  I blinked at her, startled. “Sure.” It took me almost an hour to free three robovacs, test them, and decide which one had a prayer of actually cleaning the floor. The one I eventually chose wasn’t silver, but rather a rounded bump of burnished wood with rubber edges and a long scratch from one time when it slammed a wall hard enough to knock a glass vase down on its back. I squatted and rubbed its familiar top, talking to the damned thing as if it were a dog or something. “You’re sure a whole five or six generations removed from the neighbors bots, aren’t you? That silver thing over there might be the brightest crayon in the box, but I kinda like you.”

  It made no reply.

  I carried it up the steps from the garage, fifteen pounds of robot tucked under my arm. When I opened the door, the scent of warm molasses lifted my spirits. I put the bot down carefully, noting that it looked even more beat up in the gleaming kitchen than it had in the garage. I patted its back, then stood and curled my arm around Aliss’s lovely stomach and kissed the top of her head. “Thank god Jilly let us live so you could make cookies for me.”

  She swatted me with a kitchen towel. “The cookies are for the girl. I wasn’t worried about the guards. They knew we were neighbors. I mean, we might have been borrowing a cup of sugar, right? It wasn’t like they were going to shoot us.”

  I decided to take the high road and ignore the fact that they had shot us, changing the subject by stealing a cookie. The cookie became a rock in my stomach. We were returning to the place that had tasered us on purpose. No matter what the rest of me thought, my body didn’t like it.

  Aliss freshened her makeup and pulled on a clean blue shirt before we walked over, carrying her offering of cookies carefully.

  The silver garden-bot I’d often watched tending the flowers was outside raking up the few leaves that had dared to fall on the perfectly square lawn in front of the house and depositing them in a red plastic bucket. She straightened as we approached, clearly the sentry designed to watch for us. One of the guard-bots sat at her feet like a dog. The other two were nowhere to be seen. When the door opened, I expected Roberto.

  Instead, the girl herself opened the door. She was a head shorter than Aliss, and thin, but with muscle on her arms and legs. She was dressed in a schoolgirl uniform; Dockers and a white shirt, green tennis shoes and green socks. The bow in her honey-wheat hair was green this morning. Her wide-set eyes were a startling blue flecked with gold and black. She looked poised for her age, which was probably eleven or twelve. She had the barest hint of hips and breasts, but was still more a promise of a woman than a real one. What mostly struck me, though, was that she had almost as much emotion as the robots.

  No kidding.

  The silver female holding the broom wore a welcoming smile. She stood in a relaxed posture, one arm leaning on her rake. The girl at the door looked . . . blank. If I had to define a look on her face, I’d have said fear. But it was a ghost of fear, governed by control. The kind of look you see in an executive’s eyes during a stock-fall, or a politician’s eyes on a tense election night.

  Aliss didn’t react to the fear, but held out the plate of cookies and she smiled. “Hi! I made you cookies. Can we come in?”

  The girl didn’t take the cookies. “Roberto asked me to guide you in.” With that, she turned lightly, pivoting on the balls of her feet, and led us through an open entryway lined with pictures of humans and up a wide set of wooden stairs to the kitchen. She didn’t look at us again until she sat at the kitchen table and tipped her hand toward us, as if asking us to sit. The kitchen felt warm and inviting in spite of her cool appraisal and the silver beings hovering by the sink. The walls were peach and brown with light charcoal accents, and the table was a polished cherry with small woven cream mats at each place. Our seats were obvious: there were three places with silverware and glasses already full of water, and the girl was already in one of them with her hands folded in her lap. Everything—the house, the girl, the robots—it all belonged in an upscale ’zine, and it all made me feel a bit like a visitor in a museum.

  Aliss set her tray of cookies down in the middle of the table, still fresh enough to give off a strong scent that made my mouth water. She looked at the girl, clearly yearning to say something to her, but she managed to hold off and just sit beside me, the two of us assigned to be opposite the girl and able to look up at our deck.

  A fembot handed Roberto a wooden tray with a sage-green clay pot and three small Japanese-style tea cups on it. She wore a white sundress and blue sweater that probably came from a Nordstrom catalog. Roberto nodded at her, said, “Thanks, Ruby,” and delivered tea and a small plate of pale, thin cookies to the table. He glanced at Aliss’s offering, her cookies fat and homey next to the robot’s cookies, and simply said, “Thank you.”

  The combination of feeling so out of place and the absurd thought that Roberto looked like a protocol ’droid from old movies almost made me burst out laughing, stopped really only by the sheer earnestness of the girl and her green bow.

  I curled my fingers around the tea cup and sipped slowly. Warm, but not too hot. Minty.

  Aliss succumbed to the girls’ silence and said, “Thank you for having us over. We’re pleased to meet you. My name is Aliss, and this is Paul.”

  “I know.” She swallowed, as if unsure how to talk to us.

  The silence stretched until Aliss filled it. “How was school? What are you studying?”

  One side of the girl’s mouth rose in a quirky grin. “Today’s physics topic was gauged supergravity.”

  It didn’t faze Aliss, who probably recognized the term about as much as I did—which was zero. She plowed forward. “What about English or art? Do you study those, too?”

  The robot’s girl nodded. “Of course.” Then she stopped, and the fear came over her features again for a minute and was gone. “We didn’t invite you here to talk about me. I would like you to stop watching me.”

  I blinked and Aliss flinched.

  The girl continued. “I can see you from here. I am not happy there is a house there, or that you can see me from your deck. It makes me uncomfortable and I want you to stop.” She looked directly at us, her tea untouched. She hadn’t taken either kind of cookie.

  Aliss licked her lips and the ear-end of her jaw muscle jumped, but otherwise she looked smooth and unruffled, a trait she’d learned from dealing with irascible marketing clients. Probably that wasn’t much different than dealing with irascible pre-teens. She leaned forward. “We’re only watching you because you seem to be very alone. We don’t need to keep watching. But would you like to come over and see us some afternoon? We’d love to show someone our new house.”

  Roberto stiffened, if a robot can be said to stiffen. Emotion doesn’t really exist for them; they’re programmed to pretend. But he became a bit taller, and a bit more imperious.

  The girl glanced back at him as if asking for advice, and he inclined his head ever so much as if to say, go on, you’re doing fine.

  She looked back at Aliss and shook her head. “I really just want you to stop. Will you promise me?”

  Aliss chewed on her bottom lip.

  I couldn’t take it anymore, myself. The very air in the room had become awkward. This was a kid who didn’t want to be watched, and I got that, understood that maybe we’d seemed like voyeurs. Heat bloomed on my cheeks. I wanted to mak
e her more comfortable. “All right. I’ll stop watching you.”

  Aliss shot me a look that said she wished I’d let her handle this, and I reached for one of the pale cookies and nibbled at the edges. Vanilla and sugar, with a touch of flour and egg to keep it all together. It melted in my mouth.

  I looked back at the girl, who nodded at me, her humorless eyes fixed on my face. She reminded me of a doll. I wanted—needed—to see her smile. “I’m sorry if we upset you. We didn’t mean to.” I paused, and when she didn’t say anything, I asked, “Would you tell us your name?”

  She closed her mouth and glanced back at Roberto, and then at Ruby.

  Apparently neither of the robots were willing or able to guide her here. She looked down at the table and mumbled, “Caroline.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Caroline. Would you like to try one of Aliss’s cookies? They are my favorites.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t eat things that strangers make.” She stood up, raising her voice for the first time. “Go now, please. Please go.”

  Aliss flinched, as if Caroline’s words were little darts.

  I stood and took her hand, whispering, “It’s okay.” Then I looked at Caroline and said, “We would very much like to talk with you again soon. We don’t mean any harm, we’re just used to knowing our neighbors.” A flat-out lie, but how would she know?

  Caroline nodded and spoke to Roberto in a quite commanding voice. “Please see them out.” She turned again, her back to us, gliding gracefully out of the room and down the stairs, while Aliss and I watched her, openmouthed.