by Neil Clarke
“Where will we stay?”
“There are four bedrooms here. Unless you want a neighboring house. The one next door has beds and linens.”
Maria smiled. “Here will be fine. How long?”
“Until you learn.” She glanced at the children, who clearly could not move very fast. “But I will exercise the dogs every day.”
“Whatever you want.”
“And you will have to feed yourselves. I do not eat.”
“We will forage during the day.”
“Come outside. I will introduce you to the chickens.” She glanced once more at the two dogs and two children. Callme watched, unperturbed, her ears relaxed. “They’ll be okay.”
By the end of the third day, Maria was making the dogs’ food and both of the children had demonstrated success in giving Mink orders. More importantly, Mink had started to follow the children’s orders. Maria began to sing from time to time.
Mink would make the family happy and bark if anyone neared them while they slept. He wouldn’t fight for them like Charlie might for Joel; it wasn’t his nature. But Charlie would never have allowed Belinda to brush him for hours.
It would be time soon.
Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
A robot would be good, but the only three other robots she had seen in this town for months were low-level senior-care bots; they would provide her with no help. Very few mobile humans had settled here.
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the back yard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink that she had trouble deciding about. Mink as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming. She had always had it. One of the five mantras. Dogs are to help human hearts. Even though she was still far taller than Callme when moving on all fours, she could look the border in the eye far more easily than when she stood on two legs. Callme had learned over three hundred and seventy words. She said none of them. Here in the wild, Julie had no devices that allowed Callme to use human words. But she reacted to them, and Julie’s core programming knew how to read dogs.
Dogs are to help human hearts.
Julie had no human heart. Neither, by definition, did the dog beside her. But Callme had helped her raise three pups. She chose to save the image of Mink as a pup, but the next three she deleted. She had only saved a hundred images of Charlie, and a hundred of Grace, and a hundred of each of the others. Of Max, Gandalf, SusieQ, Sasha, Odin, Whisper, Buddy, Nixie, Thomas, and Pearl.
Callme stopped in the middle of the road, so Julie stopped beside her. Two young ground squirrels raced across the road. The dark shadow of dark wings slid though a patch of moonlight. One of the squirrels gave a sharp cry as the hawk’s talons pierced its neck, and the other kept going until it reached a tree trunk. There, it stood on its haunches and screamed at the sky, then stilled and watched.
Attachment. A futile gesture for the squirrel.
She had to delete a hundred more memories of Mink before the red flag for attachment flipped to green.
Julie led Callme home and quietly entered the house, where the dog curled into a ball and Julie sat and mentally flipped through pictures of the dogs she had sent to protect humans.
In the morning, she took Callme and Mink to town while Maria and the children foraged for food. She allowed Mink his hour in the waves, which were low and soft, and she and Callme lay side by side on the warm sand.
It was impossible to tell whether or not Callme knew she was saying goodbye to Mink. Likely. After all, some humans like Jack seemed to guess her thoughts. Callme was nearly as smart and spent every day with Julie. Familiarity bred knowledge.
Jack’s Ice Cream was closed. A few old people and their minder-bots wandered down the main street with no apparent direction. No one unknown appeared to be in town. Her algorithms insisted on more about the difference between north and south, driving her to look for information all day before they petered out, the last of the looping calls to find more data stilled by the utter absence of information.
She walked back fully wearing her human form, ambling on two legs. A woman and her dogs.
Maria, Tom, and Belinda sat on the front stoop watching for them. Belinda brightened as they neared, and Tom carried her to meet them, setting her in the middle of the street so that Mink could nose her and lick her cheek. Belinda’s thin fingers stroked his side.
Maria stood, keeping some distance, watching. When Julie, the children, and the dogs neared, she said, “I found three cans that are still good. Kidney beans. And dug up an onion from an old garden. There were more, but most were rotting. We need to leave soon.”
Julie sat beside the woman, relaxing into a human-coded pose, her legs crossed and her spine soft. “I taught Mink to catch rabbits.”
Tom brightened. “I’m a very good hunter.”
Marie was silent a moment, her eyes on Belinda, who gazed at Mink as if nothing else mattered in the world. Maria’s eyes shone in the evening light, filling with tears she didn’t allow to run down her cheek. Her voice was soft. “Thank you.”
“He will be a guard dog as well as a friend.”
“You can come with us.”
Do not ally yourself with a single human.
“I cannot. But you can take a few chickens if you like. I will help you make a cage for them using a wagon. You can take it with you. I’ll have it ready by the morning.”
“I’ll cook the beans.”
Julie stood up and brushed the dirt from her pants. There was extra chicken wire in a garage four houses down. She signaled for Callme to join her and headed down the street.
She and Callme reached Jack’s at noon the next day. The door hung open and he rolled out to greet them, carrying a single bowl of frozen cream.
“Thank you,” she told him. “They took Mink.”
He set the cream down for Callme and waited for her to start lapping at the white treat before he stood up and looked at her. “Will you be going?”
“Can I help you fix the walls?”
“Are you going?”
“Not until spring. And not if you let me help you fix the walls.”
He smiled.
If a human smiles at you, and is no threat, then smile back.
About the Author
Brenda Cooper writes SF, fantasy, poetry, and an occasional non-fiction essay. She is particularly interested in robotics, climate change, and the social change that must go hand in hand with fixing the human relationship to the natural world. She is the Director of Information Technology at Lease Crutcher Lewis, a premier Pacific Northwest builder. Her love of technology, science, and science fiction combines to drive her interest in the future.
Brenda lives in Washington State with her wife, Toni, and their multiple border collies, some of whom actually get to herd sheep. She loves to exercise, garden, read, and talk with friends.
To Se
t at Twilight In a Land of Reeds
Natalia Theodoridou
The train ride takes long, longer than I’m used to traveling lately. The city has its own sense of distance, underground or glass-clad and stainless steeled. Entertainment drones at you from above, eating up idle time. No thought left unclaimed.
Here, we zip through vast, open spaces. The landscape is a blur of burnt sienna and muted cypress green, nothing like the grays and neons of the city. But the biggest change is above. There’s no SkyVu here, so the firmament is just what it is, blank air, nothing. Thoughts galore. The sky is a made-up thing.
No one else shares my carriage. Who even visits the countryside by train these days? Lena used to wonder at the fact that they still run a semi-regular service. Or maybe I just keep strange hours, strange habits. No matter; I savor the silence.
Idly, my hand brushes my luggage. The old synthetic skin rests folded neatly inside. My own skin matches it: wrinkled, liver-spotted. I think of Margarita.
I see the harvester robots first, far away, their long limbs swinging blades above the crops, their bulky cube-shaped bodies like something out of an anime from bygone eras. Margarita is with them, supervising or keeping them company, who can tell? From the distance, they look like toys.
On foot now, my pace settles into something one might call leisurely. I haven’t felt myself move like that in a while. Since Lena, for sure. It’s the countryside’s doing. The wideness of it, the tall skies. It has a way of slowing you down, making a small thing of even a seven-foot robot with scythes for hands. Your meager meat-and-bone body doesn’t even compare.
It’s not long before Margarita spots me: I can tell from the way her back straightens, her shoulders tense. She relaxes as soon as she recognizes my gait—though, if I could see myself from the outside now, with my long flowing skirt and my leisure and my country hat, would I have recognized me?
She raises her arm and waves, starts walking with long strides to meet me on the road.
“You came early,” she says instead of a greeting.
It’s not an accusation, just an observation, but I feel the need to come up with an excuse anyway. For running away from that which cannot be escaped. I carry Lena, still. I can feel her weight on me, as real as the weight of the luggage in my hand. “I took some time off,” I say. “I thought why not spend it with my favorite—” person “—friend?”
If she notices the hitch, she doesn’t comment.
I have a better view of the harvesters now, with their big, staring eyes, their innocent eyebrow-shades, meant to pluck your heartstrings. To the right, a barrel-bodied robot with soft tubes for legs is ambling toward the stream in clumsy, gangling steps, carrying buckets. Margarita follows my gaze and we watch the robot for a while as it fills its buckets in silence. Her face lacks expression.
“We had some ideas, didn’t we,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “You sure did.”
She presses a button on her wrist monitor and then puts two fingers into her mouth and whistles. The harvesters come to a stop immediately; turn their heads toward us in unison. If they weren’t so damn cute, they would be creepy as fuck.
“Come on, boys!” she shouts. Then, to me: “Let’s put them to bed.”
By the time the harvesters have made it to the barn, the sun has almost set. Up close, the robots are even more towering than I had remembered, but their slow bulk and tin heads make it easy to dismiss anything menacing, dangerous. Scythes and all.
The robots arrange themselves in a circle on the dirt-covered floor, leaving space for Margarita, and, I realize, myself, without being instructed to do so. Margarita sits down cross-legged and pats the dirt next to her, so I follow her lead.
The robots wait, imitating breathing, slow and creaking. They peer at her eagerly with their huge eyes, their mechanical jaws slack, mouth-slits half open.
“There was a star, once upon a time,” Margarita begins the story, “that set at twilight on a land of reeds. It walked barefoot in the mud and wondered at every little thing: the chill on its face, the flow of the river, the song of the trees . . . It was lonely and it was sad, for there was no other in the world just like it, no one that knew the sky the same way it did.”
Margarita pauses and wets her lips, even though she doesn’t need to.
The robots purr and coo, pleased as cats, and continue listening to the story until their timers say they should feign falling asleep.
“It walked and walked until it found a village, and in it, a villager. The villager saw the star walking naked among the trees and called out to it. He decided the star was a young woman. She needed to be clothed and fed and taught the ways of humans. He married the star, and the star, ignorant of its own heart, did not object. It bore the villager’s children—all boys with strong limbs and faces that shone in the dark. At night, it went out. It walked through the village until it reached the river. There, it sat in the mud and looked at the sky and all the stars. But never, not one did set again at twilight in this land of reeds.”
The story done and the robots powered down safely in the barn, we sit at her kitchen table and Margarita puts the kettle on. She doesn’t drink, but she knows I like tea in the evening, strong and bitter. Lena liked hers sweet, so sweet it turned thick, like molasses. We used to drink our tea while staring out the window at the electric sky of the city, women smiling above us, white-teethed, fake skin pixel-perfect, untouchable.
I can’t breathe.
“Do you tell them stories every night?” I ask, if only to make sure I can still expel air from my mouth.
“I’m running out of new ones.”
“Why do you do it?”
She shrugs, but the sideways glance she gives me does not escape me. “It makes them happy.”
I let it go. “I got the parts you asked me for.”
“The skin, too?”
“Yes.” I look at her, now. A mind that’s a hundred years old, and skin still smooth as alabaster. I wonder what that must be like.
We met at a rave, before the conservation act, before I was Margarita’s maintenance person, back when all our skin was young. Lena hooked up with Margarita and I watched. It was fun. They kept seeing each other without me for a few years after that. It eased off slowly as I volunteered to take over Margarita’s maintenance. We were all happy.
I’m staring. Must stop. “Couldn’t find a replacement for your heat regulator, though. I’m sorry.”
“Ah.” She sighs. “Well, what can you do.”
She pours the hot water over a tea bag and I wrap my hands around the cup too quickly, burning my skin.
“How long are you staying?” she asks.
“Not long,” I reply. “Just a few days.” I pause, hesitate. “And, Margarita . . . ”
She turns to look at me. “Yes?”
“This is the last time I do your maintenance. Here.” I beam her the information of the new maintenance guy. “This is the contact info for the new contractor. He’s agreed to come out from the city every three months.” Her face remains painstakingly expressionless. “There’s an emergency number to call, if you need anything urgently.” If you break.
“Is it because you’re sad?”
I inhale sharply, then let the air out slowly. Lena, again and always. It’s like a stab wound, this pain. What I imagine a stab wound would feel like. “How did you know?”
“Why are you sad, Dora?”
My hands shake, so I wrap them more tightly around the cup. “Lena. She was . . . She passed.”
Margarita does not respond for a few moments. I wonder what happens in her mind. Then she leans across the table and touches my hand lightly. Her skin is freezing. “I’m sorry,” she says. It sounds genuine.
“We had a good life,” I say. I think of saying, she loved you. Loved us both, but I don’t. I’m not that bighearted.
“Yes.”
I finish my tea while it’s still scalding hot. It leaves a tingling in my throat.
“Ah, yes,” she says, as if she’s forgotten. She hasn’t. “The conservationist has to be conserved.”
We go into the lab at the back of the cabin.
Margarita climbs onto the examination bed and opens up her chest compartment for me. I run the diagnostics and make small adjustments, then replace a few corroded nerve endings. So far so good. I can see the heat regulator—it’s fried through and through, but they don’t make her model anymore, and I couldn’t come up with a work-around. Maybe the new guy will have better luck.
“Now for the fiddly part,” I say.
Margarita observes me as I peel off her skin. Her eyes are completely still—perhaps the thing that will always give her away, that will always mark her as not-quite-human. Not the fact that she doesn’t need to breathe unless she chooses to, but this unflinching holding of your gaze.
I fold up her used skin and put it away for storage, then dig out the aged skin from my bag. Margarita runs her metallic fingers over it, traces the wrinkles and moles.
“How does it feel?” I ask.
She takes some time to respond, but then she says: “Perfect.”
I start from her head and move downward, wrapping her in her new skin as I go. Her body is giving off heat now, like a furnace. I wonder what Lena felt like when she ran her hands over Margarita’s skin.
I wipe sweat from my forehead before it drips into my eyes and keep going.
“Were you thinking of ending your life?” Margarita asks as I layer skin over her chest.
For some reason, the question does not catch me by surprise, and so I don’t get the urge to lie. “Yes.”
“But you won’t?”
“No. I won’t.” I glance at her eyes, then back at my work. “Have you ever thought of doing that, Margarita?”
“I have, yes.”
“What kept you?”
“Caring for another is reason enough to go on,” she says, and I’m sure the irony is not lost on her. She motions vaguely in the direction of the barn. “I had to stay here to care for them.”
