“What more?” asked Doug.
“We don’t entirely know,” said the doctor. “Movement, walking, certainly. Speech, hopefully. And more beyond that.”
I touched her cheek. It was warm to the touch, and I could tell that she was breathing. But that was all. She did not move, did not even flutter an eye at my touch.
She had not cried, not even that first baby cry after birth.
“This is your fault,” I shout at Doug, although it isn’t. “You were the one who insisted on fixing her.”
“You are the one who keeps thinking she’s dead,” he shouts back.
“Did you have a name in mind?” One of the lawyers, a young man who had seemed almost human. “We can use that, if you like. Otherwise a name will be randomly chosen by computer.”
I had not. “Amy,” I said. It had been the name of one of my childhood dolls.
He made a note on his tablet.
“Will you need my breast milk?”
“We would be grateful.”
And then a doctor came and took her away, and the hollow space was inside me, consuming me, and I couldn’t even cry. I couldn’t even move. Doug was crying, shaking, and I was nothing.
We will not be allowed to talk to Amy, to see Amy, until an unspecified time. Doug is furious, but the lawyers he calls are not encouraging. If Amy is a fully legal human, and that status is dubious, capable of making decisions without the facility, she is also an adult, and we have no legal claim on her. And since she has just traveled to Mars and back, we can hardly claim her as a disabled dependent. And if she is not a fully legal human — the conclusion of most of the attorneys — she is property, and not ours, and any attempt to push these boundaries is a crime.
The hollow place inside me is growing again, and I desperately need to return to work.
I never explained to anyone why I continued to pump milk for six months.
No one was unkind enough to ask.
They sent us the first pictures when she was five. An unsmiling child, looking straight at the camera, unblinking.
I begin to receive messages from Doug’s lawyers. I delete them. I need to focus, focus.
Doug received the status updates and read them regularly. I couldn’t. He told me tidbits, however: that Amy had been able to sit up, to move her legs and arms. That Amy had successfully downloaded the program that might help her control her urination. That Amy had connected with her vocal cords —
“Not Amy,” I finally shouted at him. “Not Amy. Her goddamn implant. The implant. The implant is making all of these goddamn connections!“
It is so easy, on a computer, to move a few pixels around, to change an image from sorrow to laughter. So easy to use the programming already there.
We got a divorce about two years after that.
Much later I heard that attempts had been made to get the children with implants to smile, to make laughing sounds, to move their faces. It had all been abandoned. Emotions were, it seemed, the one thing that a program could not fake, and a face was all emotions. Some of the caretakers at the facility had become physically ill just watching a computer attempt to move their faces.
On Ariela’s advice, I switched careers entirely, moving from insurance to marine biology. I focused on the microorganisms in mangrove ecosystems, forgetting, in my kayak, or on my computer, or snorkeling in the mangrove roots, that I had ever had a daughter, that I in some ways still had a daughter. Instead, I had spironemids.
Doug and I stayed in touch, meeting once a year or so. I went to his wedding, to a small fierce musician named Inari. He met some of the succession of boyfriends I had and disposed over the years.
And he kept me updated on Amy.
Whenever he did, I allowed myself to think of my mangroves, disappearing into them, into the images I created of spironemids racing up and down the mangrove roots.
I receive an email from one of the other parents, one of the few who understands. Their son and his implant have failed; they will be heading to the facility to say goodbye, and put some of the dust of Mars on his hand. “I feel as if we already said this,” says the email. “I feel as if I have to say this every day.”
I agreed to meet her. At the very least, it might help end Doug’s endless updates, coming at odd intervals through the year. I should have insisted to an end to those in the divorce agreement.
I made him drive us to the facility, and pay for the hotel stay. In separate bedrooms.
“One meeting,” I say. “Just one.”
“No.”
“I’m her mother,” I manage. I remember Ariela’s words. “I have to say good-bye.”
“Hello,” came a voice.
Something was wrong with that voice, terribly wrong, but I could not pinpoint the problem.
“Hello,” I managed back.
“Should I enter?”
“Yes,” said Doug.
And she stepped into the light.
Doug’s features. My mother’s hair. My eyes.
Our daughter. And yet, not our daughter.
It — she? — stepped forward with small, efficient movements, as if every step was carefully measured — which, I realized in shock, was actually what was happening. The face — Doug’s nose, his chin, in her face — was extraordinarily, perfectly still. Her hands brushed the chair in front of her, and she sat. The motion — I tried to find words for it, and then realized. She was not moving the way a human would. She was moving the way a computer thought a human would move.
She has an individual implant, my daughter. It can still be accessed, still be reprogrammed at the will of the facility. Doug and I have no rights over this, cannot stop the facility from turning her into whatever it wishes. That was part of the agreement we signed, to keep her alive.
“Hello,” Doug said, his voice remarkably steady under the circumstances.
The face turned towards him. “Hello,” it repeated. Its eyelids blinked, rapidly.
It’s processing, I thought. They had warned us of that facial tic, programmed to allow others to tell when the implants needed to pause to process.
I was going to throw up. I knew it. I stood, wobbled, and pushed my way out of the door, not sure I could even make it to the nearest bathroom, feeling the floor rock beneath him. Behind me I heard Doug say something, but I could not be sure if he was talking to me or Amy.
Amy.
I am in the middle of finishing up a presentation for an important conference when the email arrives. Doug, of course, telling me that he has contacted people in the facility, who say that Amy is not completing all of her programmed tasks, that she is instead sitting at a window staring up into a sky.
That sounds most unlike Amy. I have never known her to stare at anything.
I threw up, again, and again, then leaned against the toilet for a while, body shaking.
The second meeting went better.
I refused to think of it as my daughter, as anything remotely related to me, even if its eyes were the same color as mine. Oddly, what helped was the voice, the same voice that had made me so sick. I had never heard anything like it; the “computer” voices I’d heard before were either the recorded voices of actors, or clearly mechanical synthesized sounds that had never approached human vocal cords. This — this was different; the sound of a mechanical voice pushed through human vocal vocals, precise, emotionless, flat, with no accent that I could think of. At Doug’s request, it demonstrated 50 languages for us, all with that same precise flatness. It explained how it spent its day, in regular exercise and eating and downloading. I watched the eyelids blink each time it answered our questions.
I signed the papers.
“Thank you,” it said.
I find myself wondering what she is thinking. If she is thinking. Can she think? She is programmed to process, to sift, to keep herself alive while analyzing vast amounts of data and transmitting it back to computers for further analysis.
I know she cannot see the stars. But I cannot stop w
ondering if she looked at them anyway, in those quiet hours between the earth and Mars. If something in her looked at them. I clench my fists and rub them against my legs.
We made other visits before the launch. She had downloaded more languages, which she demonstrated for us. She did not listen to music, but could list off every song and album from any artist I named, knowing the exact length of each song, the record company, and where it was produced.
She could not use my daughter’s eyes to see. But a million million images had been downloaded into her brain, including mine. She navigated by touch and utter precision, and had been updated with the very latest in voice recognition software.
We arranged to meet her outside. For some reason, this seemed more natural, easier on both of us. I could not tell if this affected her or not. But when we were outside, she sometimes turned her face to the sky.
After she left for Mars, I almost forgot about her.
Almost.
I receive an urgent email from the facility. It is not an update on Amy’s medical condition. It is a request, typed by her and signed with her electronic thumbprint. In it, she asks that we authorize her return to Mars.
“She says she wants to go,” I tell Doug.
I cannot believe that I am saying this, that I am the one arguing for her, that I am the one saying that she — an implant, a computer, should be allowed to make her own decisions.
“You said it yourself. She’s a computer program. She can’t want anything.”
My voice is barely a whisper. “Maybe she wants this.”
It would be easier to have Amy away from here, on a spaceship, or on Mars.
I do not think that is why I am arguing for her to leave. But I cannot be sure.
After the launch, people found us — all of us, every parent that had given, donated, lost a child to the implant program. We got calls, emails, twitters, comments. Hellish. I had to slam my sites down, only to find myself stalked at work and home by media, by religious zealots, by advocates of one side or another. People who thought I had done the right thing, people who thought I was the living embodiment of evil. I changed my name, my address.
My colleagues would not meet my eyes at biological conferences. I understood; I had, in a way, created Frankenstein’s monster, or at least consented to it. And it was easier to handle than their curiosity would have been.
I sometimes imagine breaking into that facility, and wiping away all of its computers with a single program, or perhaps just taking an axe to its servers. (My practical mind whispers that with a program like this, the facility must have multiple backups in multiple places, but my imagination will not be silenced.) I imagine the implants twitching in response, the bodies falling into heaps on the ground, puppets suddenly cut from their strings.
I imagine putting flowers on a gravestone, and weeping.
My eyes remain dry.
Doug insists on another visit.
“You look terrible,” he tells her.
Amy does not respond. To me, she has never looked well, even when she has looked fit. But looking at her closely, I see she is less fit, less trim, than when she originally emerged from the ship and headed into the facility without talking to us. She looks slightly — loose, if that makes sense. Perhaps her programming has not adjusted to the gravity, or perhaps she is merely getting old. I realize with a shock that she is middle aged by now, and even regularly programmed exercise can only do so much, especially when combined with the radical changes in gravity she has been undergoing.
A shock because of her unlined face, her almost childlike skin. Any dermatologist claiming that wrinkles are an inevitable part of aging, and not a result of emotion and stress, should take a look at her face. She does not even have lines between her cheek and her mouth, or around her eyes.
The hollow part inside me rises up again, swallowing me, and I am at a loss for words.
Doug is right about something else as well. I cannot pinpoint it, but since she has returned, something is… missing.
“How can we tell them that you are physically able to make the trip?” asks Doug.
“I am programmed with a word,” my daughter says, in the flat, toneless voice that no human vocal cords should ever make. “The word is lie.”
When she left for Mars, I did not watch her leave. I stayed on my computer, modeling, modeling, writing, writing, drafting, organizing, too lost in my work and my words to catch the faintest roar of burning engines, the faintest cheers that humans — well, humans of a sort — were headed to Mars at last.
At my request, a nurse arranges one more meeting, in one of the gardens on the edge of the facility.
When I arrive, it — Amy — my daughter — is facing into the sky, eyes unblinking. It is the first time, I realize, that I have ever seen her focused on anything.
“This is not my programming,” she says.
It is so easy to sign documents, to watch those documents get swallowed up in a machine.
When I tell this story, I can see its events taking place, one after another, as inexorably as life and death.
When I remember this story, I can feel myself holding my daughter, my baby, and rocking her back and forth, a moment that has never quite stopped.
I dream of giving Amy a doll, a doll covered in wires and strings. I help her cut the strings. But with each string I cut, another wire grows on Amy’s head, until she is held in place, unable to move.
She is alive, I think. She breathes. She moves. She processes. She communicates. She knows the songs and titles of every album published since the invention of those old phonographs.
She is alive.
I think.
This time, I watch the launch, from ten miles away, on a comfortable beach chair, surrounded by loud beachgoers and picnickers. And children. Hordes of children, all seemingly determined to out-scream each other as they leap in and out of the waves.
I have my net radio on, with the broadcasters comparing this to the old moon and shuttle launches that I have seen only in documentaries and history shows. I cannot focus on their words, although I try. I can only look at the endless blue of the sky, keep my eyes trained on the spot where a golden flame will soon be lifting into a sky.
The countdown starts. I stand.
It is more beautiful, this launch, than anything I could have expected, a bright golden streak against the sky, trailing steam and mist behind it. And I am crying, crying, as the gold hits my eyes, as if the flame is burning through me. I feel it traveling through my eyes, my arms, my chest, feel it burning in the hollow place inside, the hardened still place that has been my center for thirty-three years. I feel it burning, splitting, fading. Tonight, I promise myself, tonight, I will watch the stars, and imagine what it is like to be moving towards them.
About the Author
Mari Ness lives in central Florida with two cats who think her fingers should spend less time on a keyboard and more time in their fur. Her fiction and poetry have previously appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Daily Science Fiction, and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. On Thursdays, she blogs about classic works of children’s fantasy literature over at Tor.com. You can also follow her on Twitter at mari_ness.
A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight
Xia Jia
Awakening of Insects, the Third Solar Term:
Ghost Street is long but narrow, like an indigo ribbon. You can cross it in eleven steps, but to walk it from end to end takes a full hour.
At the western end is Lanruo Temple, now fallen into ruin. Inside the temple is a large garden full of fruit trees and vegetable patches, as well as a bamboo grove and a lotus pond. The pond has fish, shrimp, dojo loaches, and yellow snails. So supplied, I have food to eat all year.
It’s evening, and I’m sitting at the door to the main hall, reading a copy of Huainanzi, the Han Dynasty essay collection, when along comes Yan Chixia, the great hero, vanquisher of demons and des
troyer of evil spirits. He’s carrying a basket on the crook of his elbow, the legs of his pants rolled all the way up, revealing calves caked with black mud. I can’t help but laugh at the sight.
My teacher, the Monk, hears me and walks out of the dark corner of the main hall, gears grinding, and hits me on the head with his ferule.
I hold my head in pain, staring at the Monk in anger. But his iron face is expressionless, just like the statues of buddhas in the main hall. I throw down the book and run outside, while the Monk pursues me, his joints clanking and creaking the whole time. They are so rusted that he moves as slow as a snail.
I stop in front of Yan, and I see that his basket contains several new bamboo shoots, freshly dug from the ground.
“I want to eat meat,” I say, tilting my face up to look at him. “Can you shoot some buntings with your slingshot for me?”
“Buntings are best eaten in the fall, when they’re fat,” says Yan. “Now is the time for them to breed chicks. If you shoot them, there won’t be buntings to eat next year.”
“Just one, pleaaaaase?” I grab onto his sleeve and act cute. But he shakes his head resolutely, handing me the basket. He takes off his conical sedge hat and wipes the sweat off his face.
I laugh again as I look at him. His face is as smooth as an egg, with just a few wisps of curled black hair like weeds that have been missed by the gardener. Legend has it that his hair and beard used to be very thick, but I’m always pulling a few strands out now and then as a game. After so many years, these are all the hairs he has left.
“You must have died of hunger in a previous life,” Yan says, cradling the back of my head in his large palm. “The whole garden is full of food for you. No one is here to fight you for it.”
I make a face at him and take the basket of food.
The rain has barely stopped; insects cry out from the wet earth. A few months from now, green grasshoppers will be jumping everywhere. You can catch them, string them along a stick, and roast them over the fire, dripping sweet-smelling fat into the flames.
As I picture this, my empty stomach growls as though filled with chittering insects already. I begin to run.
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