Only Mitch Powell wasn’t a missionary. He was a headhunter.
“We have no need for true believers,” Powell told him after his “interview” – really a long supper that the headhunter prepared in the farmhouse’s industrial-sized kitchen and served outdoors on picnic tables. “We have enough of those. What we need is new blood in our technical division.”
After Cascadia, Derek’s blood felt anything but new. When he told Powell as much, Powell just nodded sadly and said he understood.
“We don’t mean for you to come over right away,” Powell said. “When you’re ready.”
At the time, Derek had not thought to ask why his predecessor had left. He assumed the worst – the quake – and let it go. But he was also distracted by the novelty of the idea: redemption through robotics? Really? He was charmed. When Powell asked him if he was still Catholic, he said he was a Calvinist, and he laughed. He got the joke.
“What joke?” Susie had asked, the first time he told her the story.
Susie knew she was synthetic. It was one of the things Derek liked best about her. He had met other robots who were programmed to make winking references to their artificiality, most of them at trade shows in Tokyo or Palo Alto, but Susie was different. Susie treated her artificiality as a different but equally valid subjectivity. That she was the sum total of years of research by multiple teams competing for funding had no bearing on her self-respect. She was a robot, yes, but she was also a
person
.
Derek had felt the need to make much the same distinction about himself, following his childhood diagnosis. It wasn’t his fault that he was uncommonly good at separating his emotions from his choices. He just recognized them as the animal impulses that they were, and moved on. It wasn’t that he didn’t
have
feelings. It was that he didn’t allow them to guide him. That didn’t make him a robot, he’d often told his mother. It made him a man.
Susie appreciated him as a man.
“We could have sex now, if you want,” she said, as soon as they were in the door.
“That’s OK,” Derek said. “Thanks, though.”
“You seem like you have tension to get rid of.”
“I do, but looking at LeMarque’s giant head doesn’t really turn me on.”
“That’s an interesting choice of words.”
Derek smiled. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s an old expression.”
“How old?”
“I’m not sure. You’ll have to look it up.”
Susie busied herself in the kitchen, preparing a tray of vegetables, hummus, and hardboiled eggs. Unlike the archbishops, she remembered that Derek didn’t eat wheat or dairy, and that he often couldn’t partake in half of whatever the church kitchen had catered for the meetings. He came home hungry and needed snacks. She didn’t have to be told this. She just picked up on it and started acting accordingly. She was also half-dressed, having discarded her underwear on the floor. It was a splash of red lace over the heating vent. She’d clearly expected for them to do it against the marble island in the centre of the room, or maybe on top of it. He swore the renovators had done some surreptitious measurement of the distance between his hips and his ankles and built the island accordingly. They were on the New Eden payroll, and New Eden was famous for its attention to design details.
Derek was living someone else’s wet dream.
That they would have a sexual relationship seemed a given to Susie. She first broached the subject in the lab, after they were introduced. LeMarque did the job personally. He presented her to Derek like she was a company car. She was wearing a white shift dress with a thin green belt that set off the seaglass colour of her eyes, and with her white-blonde hair styled close to her head she looked a bit like Twiggy. She wore jelly sandals and carried a patent leather valise. He later discovered it was full of lingerie and lubricant.
“I’m coming home with you,” Susie said. “After you name me.”
He’d asked for ideas about her name. Susie mentioned the earlier prototypes: Aleph. Galatea. Hadaly. Coppelia. Donna. Linda. Sharon. Rei. Miku. She recited her design lineage like a litany of saints.
“Whatever you think will sound best in bed,” she concluded. “It doesn’t really matter to me.”
This was how New Eden did it. How they roped curious, disbelieving scientists into what they knew, deep down, was probably some kind of cult. They did it by giving them what, even deeper down, they’d always wanted. Derek had no doubt that if he’d asked for a jetpack, a fair approximation would have shown up on his doorstep the next morning, complete with a bow and a gift tag.
Not that he’d asked for Susie. They said he’d have “close contact” with the prototypes, so that he’d have a better understanding of how they really worked. He probably could have rejected Susie, if the situation made him uncomfortable. But it didn’t. Not in the slightest. It was exactly the kind of relationship he’d always craved: all of the fucking and none of the feeling.
“Human women always have expectations, don’t they?” Susie had asked, when they talked about his history.
She was right, but she was also wrong. The expectations women had of him weren’t the problem. It was that those expectations were unrealistic, contradictory, and constantly changing. Moving goalposts. You had to be sweet, but also predatory. You had to be funny, but never laugh at your own jokes. You had to be charming, but not smarmy. And in the end it never mattered, you never measured up, no matter how many dinners you bought or raises you got.
He’d been on the cusp of breaking up with his last lover before the quake. That happened while she was supposed to be near the waterfront. They never found her body. A selection of her diaries, stuffed animals, and photographs was buried instead. She’d been a bit of a packrat. Derek and her mother and sister filled the coffin with all the things Derek had once wished she would just get rid of, already, so they could have some clear space in the apartment. But she’d been so sentimental about her things.
Now Derek was the one who was sentimental about
things
.
He watched Susie sprinkling paprika and sumac over the tray of food. Her fingers plunged into the bowls of spice again and again, and their red stain crept up her skin. She wore the same blank expression she’d worn through most of the meeting. Now Derek reached for her tablet and read the words printed there:
Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
He showed her the tablet as she placed the tray on the coffee table. “I’m really not a Catholic any longer. I’m not sure I ever was. You don’t have to try to impress me with this kind of thing.”
“I know.”
“So you were just, what, commenting ironically on the situation?” Could they do that?
“The words seemed pertinent.”
“How did you learn the Jesuit motto?”
Susie knelt on the floor in front of the coffee table. “Your predecessor told me.”
Derek paused with a carrot stick inclined toward his half-open mouth. “Excuse me?”
“The woman who held your position before you,” she said. “She was Jewish, but she attended a Jesuit university. We kept a
mezuzah
on the door. She lives in Israel, now, I think. I think it used to be Israel. It might be something else, now. The border seems to move around.”
Derek blinked. “A woman.”
“Yes.”
“Did she live here, too?”
“Yes.”
“Did she…?” Derek gestured vaguely. “With you?”
“Was she fucking me, you mean?” Susie asked. Derek nodded. “Yes. Only a handful of times, though. I think she was curious about whether the failsafe is gender neutral. She wanted to make sure that we could love men and women equally.”
“And do you?”
“Why shouldn’t we?”
“I meant you specifically. You, Susie.” He leaned forward. “Your name wasn’t Susie, then, of course.”
“Ruth,” Susie said. “With that one, my name was Ruth.”
“
That
one?”
Susie folded her red hands. “You aren’t surprised, are you?”
A chickadee trilled outside:
chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee.
Susie blinked at him. Derek turned from her to the plate of food. It was perfectly prepared as always: all the vegetables cut the same size and shape and angled exactly around the hummus, the spices sprinkled with a certain flair. She had even nailed the hardboiled egg: a perfect pale yellow yolk with nary a hint of green at its edge. Susie did it the same way every time. She was reliable that way.
“No, I’m not surprised.”
“Are you angry?”
“No.”
But he was angry. Or rather, he was annoyed. He was annoyed that LeMarque and the others had dressed up damaged goods like they were new, had presented Susie to him as though she were fresh off their factory floor, a virgin in whore’s clothing. She really
was
just like the company car: someone else had driven her. Lots of someones. A whole host of others had loved her just enough to make her real, like the Velveteen fucking Rabbit.
“The others were angry.”
“Oh?”
“They thought I was new.”
Derek avoided looking at her. “Do you even remember being new?”
Susie shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“We’re activated multiple times for testing, and we’re wiped after that. For me to remember my first activation would be like you remembering the first time you watched
Star Wars,
or some other equivalent piece of content. We have no point of origin.”
She sounded so innocent, when she said it. Like she hadn’t been deceiving him this whole time. Smiling at the things he pointed out, like she’d never seen them before. Learning the way he liked things done, like his preferences were the most important defaults she could ever set, like she’d never lived any other way. Like his was the first dick she’d ever sucked.
“I’m sure you remember your first time, though.”
“Having sex?”
Derek nodded.
“Yes. I remember the first time.”
“Were you nervous?”
“No.”
Of course she wasn’t. She was a fucking robot. Literally. Susie didn’t sweat or cry or bleed. She didn’t have years of cultural programming telling her how a real woman should do it. What she had instead was
hard-coded
programming, ensuring she’d do everything as requested. No hesitation. No squeamishness. The kind of woman the folks at New Eden Ministries liked to fuck hard and quiet in charging station bathrooms, but without the risk of pregnancy, disease, or litigation.
“Did you come?”
“He did, so I did.” She smiled a little ruefully. “Let me show you something.”
Derek followed her upstairs. She walked past the bedroom, past the office, and straight to the end of the hall. She reached up and grabbed a pendant hanging from the ceiling that was attached to a trap door leading to the attic.
“There’s nothing up there,” Derek said.
Susie turned to him as she pulled down the ladder. “How would you know?”
Derek followed Susie up the ladder. He watched her disappear into the black rectangle of space above the ladder. He thought of spiders and rats and raccoons and raw nails and lockjaw. Then he groped for the ladder’s topmost rung, and found Susie’s cool hand. She helped him up the rest of the way. For the first time, he noticed the real power in her grip.
It took his eyes a moment to adjust. The attic was a standard A-frame, about ten feet across, with unfinished beams and pink insulation. He couldn’t gauge the depth. It didn’t matter; his attention fixed on the folding ping pong table, and all the Susies sitting around it.
Aleph. Galatea. Hadaly. Coppelia. They were naked.
“Do you remember, I asked you if you played ping pong?” Susie asked. “This is why. I could have taken the table downstairs.”
Derek swallowed in a dry throat. On the ping pong table was a card game. Hearts. The pot included a dusty lump of pennies. “Right.”
“It’s not as though they need the table, strictly speaking. I just thought it looked nicer. More normal.”
He nodded silently.
“You’re taking this very well, Derek. I would have thought you’d be frightened, realizing they’ve been up here this whole time.”
“Why would I be frightened?” His voice was unusually high. “They’re just prototypes. It’s not like they’re alive.”
A card fluttered to the floor.
“Alive?” Susie bent and picked up the card. She slid it back into the grip of another Susie. This one was not as covered in cobwebs as the rest. Somehow, that made it look younger than the others. Susie checked its hand, and the hand of the gynoid sitting opposite. Dust coated their eyelashes. In the dark, their skin almost glowed. “I guess not. Not really.”
When Derek had first interviewed seriously for this job, LeMarque started with one simple question:
prove that fire isn’t alive
. At the time, Derek wondered if this was one of the lateral thinking puzzles they were famous for asking in interviews, like the one about moving Everest. If so, it seemed trivially easy. It was a basic thought problem, the sort every physics or biology 101 professor started out with on the first day of class when he or she wanted to blow freshman minds. Derek replied the way those same professors had trained him to: by saying that it was impossible to prove a negative.
“But fire breathes oxygen, consumes mass, and reproduces.”
“That’s not the same thing as living.”
“So, life is an XOR output?” LeMarque asked. “One, or the other? Like how they read emotions?”
One, or the other. Alive, or dead. Human, or machine. Pain, or pleasure. Derek stared at the Susies. In repose they all wore the same expression: empty, like his Susie at the meeting. Like they were all just waiting for the game to end.
“I asked to bring them here,” she said. “They were in a storage unit out in Renton, before. I thought this would be nicer.”