Saving the Moon

by Mette Ivie Harrison

  Moving with purpose, she headed up the stairs to the second story motel room, the one on the far end. She liked it that way because there would be less foot traffic. But there was a man coming down who crossed into her path. He was heavyset, with hair beginning to gray at the temples, skin so brown he looked like a rancher, and a mustache that was so wide that it dwarfed his face.

  She was going so quickly that she got a sting of static electricity when she brushed against him. He put a hand to his elbow, covered by a denim jacket, and held it there for several minutes until he got into his car.

  Mary Tyson went to sleep as deeply as she could have wished.

  She did not hear the crash of the man’s car as he went over the bridge nearby. The man whose pickup he ran into claimed that he had seen the man climb out of the seat of the pickup and spread his arms out wide as if he were a bird ready to fly. He leaped out of the car and over the bridge, into the water. But for a few moments, he had not seemed to be falling. He had seemed to be rising.

  Of course that was impossible. The detective investigating rather perfunctorily explained that the man must have pushed himself out of the car and the force of that had given him an arc high enough to sail over the railing of the bridge. It was no more than that.

  The man had no family, and worked a dead end job. His death was listed as a suicide in the paper the following day and no one remarked on it.

  #

  Mary Tyson began driving the next morning and reached her destination, which was a new job at a hospital. She had training in mental health therapy and had been working for several years. But at her last job there were several deaths during her tenure there and she was convinced that the care had been sloppy. The patients who had died had been some of her favorites. Yes, they had been depressed and two of them had tried to commit suicide multiple times before.

  Nonetheless, they had been on medication and should have been safe. Mary Tyson had thought they were nearly well and had, in fact, just spoken with them before the incident. She thought it might be a food reaction or possibly that the wrong medication had been given or mixed with something it should not have been.

  A new start was just what she needed. A chance to see the world fresh again, without the sense of impending doom that had come over her the last several weeks at her old location. Some of the patients had even begun to look at her strangely and to refuse their sessions with her. They claimed that she was a bad luck charm. All of the patients who had died had been with her no more than an hour before.

  But it was just a terrible series of coincidences. Mental patients were especially vulnerable to irrational thinking, so their theories of anything were likely to be extreme and specious. A few of the nurses had begun to listen to the rumors of the patients, which was very unprofessional. But Mary Tyson could do nothing to stop them and she refused to try to talk them about the issue directly.

  So here she was. She had a headache again, but no doubt that was related to her anxiety. A lot of things could go wrong on a first meeting, but Mary had never felt that it was so important for things to go right. She kept thinking through her list of tips for a first new day.

  She was wearing nicely pressed slacks and a collared shirt. Not too dressy, but not too casual. She had her hair pulled back into a pony tail. There was a part of her that itched to run away and be free of all of this. But she refused to let that part of her have any sway. She would act calmly and deliberately. She would act like a grown up. She would not stare into the sky and think of the hawk she had once cared for, in the woods outside her home, in the days before it had become too developed for wild animals. How she had loved that hawk. She had felt sometimes almost as if she were flying along with it. It was one of the reasons she had loved swinging so much.

  But the hawk had disappeared the year she turned twelve and she had never seen it again. She had only had the lingering flashes of memory that haunted her and made her feel a fiery need to soar above the trees, above the clouds, as far as she could go.

  She went to the front desk, but there was no one there. She waited for ten minutes, but no one appeared. She tried calling. She walked around behind the desk and looked into the closet.

  “What are you doing there?” a voice called to her.

  Startled, she stumbled out of the dark closet and into a sturdy, zaftig woman.

  “If you’re here to visit someone, the hours are in the morning and they cannot be changed,” said the woman grumpily.

  “I’m not family. I’m a new therapist. Mary Tyson,” she said. “I’m supposed to have an orientation tour. Or I was, about a half hour ago.”

  The woman rubbed at her hip. She was overweight and at that age where things started to ache. A regular exercise program would help her, Mary thought. Not that she would dare give advice like that, at least not at first meeting.

  “Do you have a few minutes now?”

  The woman began to look from side to side. Her mouth was moving, though Mary could hear no sounds coming out. Then she jerked at the shoulder one, twice, a third time.

  “Is there something wrong?” asked Mary. Could this be some kind of cruel joke? Had they learned about her history and decided to tease her with it?

  “I need to leave,” said the woman.

  “Leave? You just got back. Where do you have to go?”

  “Quickly, quickly,” the woman muttered. She had turned away from Mary and was facing one of the windows that was down the hallway. They were four stories up from the lobby of the hospital, and there was a beautiful view of the mountains from this direction.

  “I’m sure you’re in a hurry, but if you could just tell me where to go to find my contact, then I could leave you to your tasks for the day.”

  “Fly,” said the woman. She lifted her arms and ran down the hallway at the window ahead of her.

  It only occurred to Mary then that the woman must be one of the patients herself. How she had gotten out of her room without supervision, Mary did not know. She suspected that the woman had somehow convinced someone that she was well enough to be given a day pass. And then she had wandered into the desk area and Mary had allowed her to pose as a clerk.

  The woman’s legs were dancing on the floor, hardly hitting it before they bounced up again. They looked delicate, graceful, and did not fit with the wider figure she had shown first.

  “No! Stop!” Mary called.

  But the woman was going too fast for Mary to catch her by then.

  She flung out her arms to her side and crashed through the window. Glass splattered everywhere and Mary stood stunned. The glass should have been safety glass. It should not be possible to push through that with any human strength.

  There was a sound like a hawk’s cry of triumph in battle, and then Mary could see the woman begin to fall past the window and toward the fountain at the bottom of the hospital entry.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL LOSS

  Jode and I decided on it together. It was more for Toft’s sake than for mine. Jode got his orders when Toft was only two years old, and it seemed like a long time for a kid that age to hang onto a holograph and pretend that was Daddy. Jode was only scheduled for a six-month tour, but with travel time, that was four years total.

  With the bonus hazard pay he was getting and the portion of the “psychological loss” that the government was willing to pay, it would be nearly the same cost as if Jode was living at home with us—considering what he eats and what the machine would do to help around the house. No more need to hire a lawn mowing service. No need to stock ten half gallons of ice cream. No need to hire a babysitter if I wanted to spend a day at the salon.

  We went out to the company’s main facility, which was conveniently located right next to the Space Base. They measured Jode on a scanner when he walked in, to give us a prelimary look at the models we could get with his form installed. Of course, before they actually created the hardware, they took a much more extensive scan, and had us both fill out long questionnaires. They asked a lot
about what things I liked best about Jode. They also asked what annoyed me about him.

  I told him about it afterwards, when we’d finished and were walking out to the flyer. “I didn’t know if I should be honest or not. Maybe I’d rather they make a machine that doesn’t tell stupid jokes and walk outside to get the newspaper in his underwear.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a good thing they asked me about your irritating features, or they wouldn’t be able to build in enough tolerance for you, Kooa,” said Jode.

  Zing.

  I asked him nicely what he’d said were my irritating features.

  Then I got snippy.

  It turned out that what he admitted to was that I looked bad without makeup on, that my butt had never recovered from carrying Toft homestyle in the womb (sagging), and that I sometimes sounded too much like my mother when he had free time I wanted to use (nagging).

  “No offense,” said Jode when he was finished, his hands up in the air.

  “Right. No offense,” I said. “You’re just stating the facts.”

  “Well, you did gain a lot of weight. More than is optimum,” said Jode.

  “I lost it all.”

  “But gravity pulled at your skin. Not your fault, like I said.”

  I nearly called them back when I got home and cancelled the order. I definitely needed a break from Jode now and then. Maybe four years was not too long.

  But there was Toft to think of.

  And it wasn’t as if the machine would actually be that much like Jode. They’d made sure I understood that when I signed the paperwork. I had to sign a special contract saying that I understood that a machine was always a machine, no matter how human it looked, and that it would not think like a human or act like a human except in the most superficial way. It would get better as time went on. It was programmed for that. But even the most advanced model was still only a machine.

  Jode and I went together to pick it up two weeks later. We were in the hectic stage of getting him off. I only wanted to get my list of “Things to Do” finished. I didn’t have to time to feel the emotions surrounding him leaving. And I’d have plenty of time to do that once he was gone, and didn’t have to listen to me whine.

  We did not bring Toft with us. I’d told him we were getting a special “Daddy robot,” who would help him do his exercises, the regime of pushups and situps that Toft had started doing with Jode when Jode was getting ready to pass his physical exams. So he knew what was going on, but I figured it would be better to introduce him to anything that new in his life when he was home, and could retreat to his room if he needed to.

  Also, a part of me was still worried that this was a terrible mistake.

  We were led past the security gates, up the stairs, and then into what looked like the living room of a moderately-sized apartment. Not exactly like ours, but the similarities were startling. I was pretty sure I had not told them that I had a blue couch with a floral design on it, but this one could have been a factory match. And the yellow sunshine kitchen theme was just the new version, with none of the green dots that I disliked in ours.

  “I will just go and get him,” said the woman who had led us in. She went into the back of the room.

  “You worried?” asked Jode, coming up behind me and rubbing his hands up and down my arms.

  “About the machine?” I asked.

  “About me going up,” he said. “And not coming back down.”

  They didn’t pay for soldiers to be shipped home, even if they recovered their bodies. Jode had told me before that he wanted to buried in space, anyway, so he didn’t mind. Statistics on the exact risk of death in his deployment were sketchy at best, but you don’t marry a soldier without learning to fight your battles at home alone.

  “No, I’m not worried about that.”

  He kissed my neck. He got like that just before he left. As I tried to detach more, he clung. “Good. Because I’ll be back here. I’ve got a feeling about this one, and you know my feelings are never wrong.”

  Except for the time that he had a “feeling” about me not getting pregnant that night. And the time he had a “feeling” about us getting married on March 14, thought it poured all day, and we don’t have a single decent print from the whole thing.

  “Here he is,” said the mask-woman. She came in with what could have been Jode’s long-lost identical twin brother.

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Shit,” said Jode. “That is cool.” He went right up to the machine, touching him, checking out the hairline—Jode was a little self-conscious about the fact that he had started to lose a little on top.

  The main difference between Jode and the machine was that the machine was stark naked. (Can you call a machine stark naked?) Anyway, it had no clothes on, and Jode was staring at its butt, and then came around front and checked out the equipment there, too. Never let it be said that a soldier is not interested in equipment.

  “Are you satisfied?” asked the woman. She reached for another set of papers on the coffee table. Always with the papers and the inkless pad for our fingerprints.

  “Boy am I!” said Jode, looking up and down and nodding.

  “Can he speak?” I asked. That had been one of the things that was promised in the contract, but I hadn’t heard it say anything yet.

  “It will come, in time,” said the woman. “He needs to learn to process the normal conversation in your household. I assure you, he will be talking by the end of the day.” She handed me the papers.

  I didn’t want to sign them, not yet. Couldn’t I wait until I’d heard it say something?

  “Your husband will be at home for a few more days, won’t he?” asked the mask-woman.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Because it is important for him—” she nodded to the machine “–to have an opportunity to observe your interaction as a family, so he can duplicate it as accurately as possible.”

  Jode punched the machine in the arm. Then he pointed to his own arm. “Give it to me right there,” he said.

  The machine didn’t respond. It looked to the woman.

  She nodded.

  The machine punched Jode on his arm. Jode rubbed it, as if it were a touch sore. “Sweet,” he said. “That is some arm you’ve got there. Heh-heh. My arm, actually.”

  The machine turned its eyes towards me.

  The gaze was more than a little disturbing. I had expected it to look at me dispassionately, like a robot. Instead, it was human, and vulnerable, like a child.

  “If you could sign these, Mr. Terranian,” said the woman, handing the papers to Jode instead.

  Jode inked his fingers and spread them onto the paper.

  Then he handed the paper to me.

  I took a deep breath and did the same. This for for Toft, I reminded myself, not for me.

  “Thank you very much. We will send out a technician daily for the first week, and of course, if you have any questions about your model or any immediate needs, feel free to contact us immediately.” She turned towards the door.

  I panicked suddenly, irrationally. I did not want to be left alone with the machine, even with my husband there.

  “What’s his name?” I asked. “Or number or whatever. What should I call him?”

  “Why, Jode,” said the mask-woman without hesitation.

  “But—” I said.

  “Jode and Jode went down the street,” said Jode, starting on the old rhyme.

  The woman was gone by the time I looked back to the machine. I did not want to call it Jode.

  “I think Jay,” I said. “Or Joe. What do you think?”

  Jode smiled. “What’s wrong with Jode?”

  “Well, I think it will be confusing for Toft. Especially when you’re both at the house with us. And even afterwards, I don’t want him to think that the machine is you.”

  “But what was the point of getting it, then?” asked Jode. “I thought you wanted Toft to feel like I had never left.”

  “Yes,” I
said. “But . . .” Didn’t it creep him out? If Jode had a machine that looked that much like me in his ship with him for the next four years, I would be pretty pissed about it.

  Which actually made me wonder—would the government do something like that? They didn’t cryo freeze soldiers, not even officers unless they were higher ups and needed to conserve their years. So how did they keep them occupied?

  Virtual women would be much cheaper, I told myself. And the government’s all about cost efficiency these days, even in war.

  So did that make me feel better or worse? Jode would be with virtual women, either like me or not like, for four years.

  Sometimes it’s better not to think about things like that. Marriage is built on a certain amount of honesty and a certain amount of careful silence.

  “Are you ready?” I asked the machine. It stared at me without response.

  “Come on,” said Jode. He strode out of the room.

  The machine followed, its movement slightly jerky, but the strides exactly the same length as Jode’s.

  I didn’t like to watch the two of them together. It made me feel like I had had too much to drink.

  I let Jode drive home.

  “Did you notice how the woman kept referring to it as ‘he’?” I asked.

  “So?” said Jode.

  “Just—interesting.”

  That was the extent of our conversation the whole drive home. Not too much for the machine to learn, I suppose. But then again, Jode’s strong point had never been conversation.

  When we got to my mom’s, Jode suggested I go in to get Toft alone.

  “You don’t want your mother to meet the robot?” I asked.

  Jode shrugged. “Don’t want to listen to her rant again. Too little time for that kind of stuff.”

  Before he left, he meant. Once he was gone, I could deal with her all by myself.

  I sighed and went in to get Toft.

  He was his Daddy’s son. The same blue streak around the ear, the one his great-grandmother had modified into the genes and came out only in boys. You’d think they would have done something for the girls, but no. Jode’s sister was the homeliest thing you’ve ever seen.