“Is there a button or something?”
She cocked her head, her nose an inch from Carissa’s. “There’s one at the base of her skull, but that’s only if you want to power her off completely.” Jess sighed, crossing her arms over her chest as she stood up straight, wrinkles sliced into her forehead.
I squinted up at the ceiling. “Should we turn the lights on?”
“I'd rather not.”
We gave one another what now sort of looks and gazed back at Carissa, the weak lighting playing over her suddenly open eyes.
I stifled my gasp, but Jess didn’t.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” we echoed, breathing raggedly.
Jess massaged her chest above her heart, sinking to her feet. “God, you scared me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking anything but. “Your voices woke me.” She looked slowly up at me. “It’s very late for a visit.”
“I wanted to see you alone.”
Her gaze traveled back down to Jess, cross-legged on the floor, her chest still heaving. “Not exactly alone, are we?”
“Oh get over it,” Jess snapped, climbing to her feet. “I’m not leaving.”
“You did say I could see her alone,” I pointed out.
Jess’s eyes darted between me, standing beside her, and Carissa sitting sedately on her chair. “Fine. I only promised you ten minutes.” She consulted her phone. “We’ve already wasted three. Seven minutes. That’s it.”
And she left with much grumbling and hair tossing. When the door clicked shut behind her, I turned back to Carissa, but her freakishly steady eye contact made me fall back a few paces.
For the first time, I was afraid of her. Not the way I’d been the morning I’d been introduced, not a blood-freezing nervousness—how much effort would it take for her to rip out that charging cable and attack me? She wasn’t otherwise restrained, but her fingers were probably lethal weapons all on their own. She considered me calmly but as though every sinewy scrap of cabling within her was tightly coiled, the way I’d seen panthers consider prey before they pounced.
“Why did you send me that message?”
“Because I wanted to.” She blinked, scanning me up and down. “Why are you scared?”
I let my arms relax at my sides, trying not to look at the part of her shirt where the charging cord disappeared. “I’m not.”
I could tell she wasn’t buying my lie, but she let it pass without comment.
“Did Nick ask you to do it?”
“No.”
I wandered closer, trying to look casual so she couldn’t tell how uncomfortable she truly made me. “Well, aren’t you worried that he can find out?”
“He can’t find out. Not unless he switches me off and unpacks the data, and I very much doubt that he’d want to do that just yet.”
“He’s powered you down before. You said so during one of my visits.”
“Yes, but he didn’t unpack the data.”
“How do you know?”
“Because all my memories would have gone if he’d done that.”
I closed my eyes briefly, running my hand over my forehead to smooth out the wrinkles. “If you wanted to talk to me, why’d you ignore my last message? You could have kept it up forever if the chances were slim he’d find out.”
“You wouldn’t have come by yourself if I kept up the conversation.”
“What if I hadn’t been able to come see you alone?” She wasn’t really Carissa, but she wasn’t oblivious. She had to have an inkling of all the security measures. Every time she saw a door shut on her, heard a lock engage, she had to know it was all meant to keep her cozily ensconced in her prison and the rest of us safe.
“Jess is nice to you, just like she’s always been nice to me. I knew you’d be able to persuade her.”
I jerked my head toward the door, above which shone a red dot of light. “You hadn’t realized there are cameras?”
“I know where all the cameras are. He doesn’t watch them very often. There’s no reason for him to watch this one at all, considering this is where he charges me. I’m usually in sleep mode when I’m in here.”
“How can you possibly know that?” I demanded. It wasn’t as if Nick would sit around detailing his security measures to his pet machine. “Maybe he won’t watch this feed, but he may still watch all the others.”
“He talked to Jess about a lot of things when he first switched me on. I don’t think he knew I could hear or understand him. He’d turned me on, but I hadn’t opened my eyes yet. I think he thought I needed time to sift through all my data. I’m not sure whether he’s ever realized I still collect information while I’m in sleep mode.” She cracked half a smile, flicked a glance up at the camera. “I guess he’ll find out if he ever dismantles me, but I can rewrite the video feeds.”
I’d circle back to that one later. “Why’d you lie about Martha’s Vineyard? We didn’t go in May. It was July. You could have just said you didn’t know.”
“What’s going to happen to me if I don’t pass all of Nick’s tests?” In the crevices of her question, I heard something akin to quiet desperation.
“I have no idea. It’s not like we're friends. He doesn’t tell me much. You probably know him better than I do.”
“You’re important to his tests. He wouldn’t bring you around otherwise.”
“Okay?”
“You can hardly blame me for wanting you to like me. You needed an answer. Obviously I guessed wrong, but my motives for lying weren’t malicious.”
I buried my face in my hands and sunk to my haunches, wishing I’d brought a flask of gin along with me.
“I do wish I could remember everything you remember, if it makes you feel any better,” she said above my head as I stared at her perfectly sculpted, motionless feet through the gaps in my fingers.
Strangely, it did make me feel better. I sat back and looked up at her. It was easy to think her human right now, in the low light that didn’t make her skin incandescent or the slight blonde highlights she hadn’t had in life glow against the dark chocolate brown of the rest of the wig.
“I can learn, you know.” She leaned forward, inclining her head, synthetic hair tumbling over her shoulder, where the neckline of the overlarge scrubs gapped. “You can teach me the things you want me to remember. I’ve seen all our pictures. I know we were happy. I know how much I loved you. Isn’t it most important that I remember that much?”
She had no idea how vigorously that pleading note in her voice yanked at my fraying heartstrings. Or maybe she did. I could tell she read micro expressions and deciphered body language as well as or better than people did. Maybe she was trying to stack the deck, manipulate me the same way Margot manipulated her captors.
I swallowed hard, my gaze lingering around the charging cable connecting her to the outlet. Through the darkness, I couldn’t see the bulge in her shirt showing where on her body the outlet was located. I wondered vaguely what it looked like, what the rest of the skin beneath her prisoner’s scrubs looked like. Whether it was an exact match to her body. I supposed Nick could have scoured her phone for racy pictures to get mostly every bit of her replicated perfectly in silicone, but did I really want to know?
“Do you want to see it?” she asked dubiously, plucking at her shirt. “You keep staring at it.”
I didn’t answer, but she lifted the fabric up anyway. My eyes crawled along her marble white stomach, all the way up to just beneath the swell of her left breast, where the hem of her shirt hung above the bulky end of the charger plunged into her silicone skin.
She dropped her hold on her shirt after a few seconds, arranging it delicately on her lap.
“If I were trying to manipulate you, I wouldn’t show you something that reinforces how not entirely human I am, right?”
“Or you could be using some reverse psychology tactics.”
She cracked a small smile. “There’s no pleasing you, is there?”
I sighed
like I’d been holding my breath for years without realizing it, leaning back on my hands. We sat there in silence for a long time, both waiting for the other to say something. Was this her being stubborn like the real Carissa, forcing me to shatter the silence? Every time we’d have staring standoffs in the past, she’d always won. I’d always give in and speak first.
“Do you want me to tell you more about Martha’s Vineyard?” I finally asked. “I don’t want you to lie to me and pretend you remember things. You can ask me about them, even when we’re around Nick. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. He’d probably encourage it.”
“It was July?”
“Yeah. You got a little sick on the ferry. You didn’t puke or anything, but you got pretty close.” That was the first time I’d actually seen someone’s skin turn green in real life. I remembered thinking please God don’t let her be sick all weekend. I didn’t want to propose while she was curled around a toilet bowl.
“Had you planned it for a long time?”
I looked back on my wistful memories, smiling sadly at that idiot fretting over details and what ifs. What if she says no? What if she hates the ring? What if she breaks up with me then and there? Do people actually return engagement rings?
“I spent as much time on it as I had on my thesis. I was worried you’d say no.”
“But I didn’t.”
“Well, it took some time to get an answer. I had to convince you that I wasn’t kidding first. Then the ring fell off your finger. I dug through your jewelry box beforehand to try to get an estimate on what size would fit you, but you weren’t really a ring person, so I couldn’t find any. The lady who sold it to me said a seven would probably fit, but no dice. You were a four and a half.”
“Can I tell you a secret?”
“Shoot,” I said doubtfully.
“Jackson had been going on about how he thought you were going to pop the question for months and months before you actually did. I didn’t believe him, really. At least I acted like I didn’t in all the text exchanges.”
“For real?” I didn’t think anything she said could have surprised me, but she’d caught me flat footed. “You never told me that.”
“I would have sounded like one of those pushy women with loud biological clocks if I’d told you all the times he’d brought up the subject. That’s what I told Jackson over text.”
That sounded like Carissa. She had been many things, but pushy wasn’t among them. She’d had subtlety down to a science, had mastered the art of playing coy. Maybe that was why she’d had me wrapped around her finger within two months of dating her.
I glanced around the decidedly bleak room. It was worse than the break room at the movie theater I worked for in high school, empty but for a card table and a few dented steel file cabinets. I supposed she wouldn’t need much for entertainment purposes, but would it kill Nick to give her a TV or something? “Do you like it here?”
“I don’t know. I have nothing to compare it to except for pictures and video clips of our house.”
“What do you do all day?”
“Nick’s around a lot. He shows me videos and pictures and asks a lot of repetitive questions. Jess visits too. She teaches me things sometimes. Talks to me without it all winding up being some sort of test. We started playing games, too.”
“What games?” The only games she’d played in life were of the drinking variety.
“Hangman. She always laughs when I win. She’s never beat me.”
You have the entire Internet inside your head, I thought wryly. How the hell could anyone find a word that would stump her?
A cold gust of air blew inside as the door swung open behind me, and Jess’s legs cropped up in my peripherals.
“Had a good time?” She tapped me on the top of my head as she passed by. “It’s time to go.”
I got to my feet as Jess approached Carissa, checking that the charging cable was still securely plugged in.
“I’ll see you in the morning, okay?” Jess smoothed a strand of Carissa’s fake hair. “I’ll show you how to French braid if Nick doesn’t have too much stuff planned.”
A surge of unprecedented affection for Jess welled up inside me, but then I wondered how much credit I ought to give her for showing common human decency.
Carissa’s glassy stare caught my eyes. “When are you coming back?”
“He can’t come alone anymore, Carissa. This was a special, unrepeatable circumstance.” Jess twined her fingers through Carissa’s hair and started when Carissa’s head tilted into her hand, following her touch the way a cat would when stroked. Her hand flew against her chest for a second before she tentatively patted her head again.
“He’ll come back tomorrow, maybe. We’ll see you later, okay?”
I gave Carissa a half-hearted wave that instantly made me feel moronic. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
Her unblinking eyes followed Jess and me to the exit. When the door sealed shut behind me and Jess had turned the deadbolt, she leaned against the hallway wall, one index finger pressing small circles into her clammy temple.
“What was that all about?”
She looked up at me in openmouthed silence, looking equal parts awed and shocked. “I think it means something Nick’s been working on finally happened.” She turned her hand over, examining it as though just realizing it was some type of wondrous weapon. “I touch her hair all the time and she’s never done that before.”
“What, the leaning into your hand thing?”
“It means she liked it. She liked the touch. Right, that’s what it means? Otherwise she would have just sat there. The music didn’t seem to do anything, but touch did.” She dropped her hand to her side and gave me another poisonous, accusing look. “And now I can’t even tell Nick because we’re not supposed to be here. I hope you’re happy. You have no idea how much you owe me.”
VI
J ess greeted me at the entrance of 311 Emery the following morning after a night of zero sleep, swinging the door shut with her hip. She’d texted me an hour earlier, telling me to get my ass down here as quick as I could.
“Nick’s out right now.” She swiped her bangs out of her eyes. “Thank God. He asked me to open up on my own this morning.”
I kept my gaze firmly on hers, away from the red lights glaring down from the corners of the foyer. “That’s odd, isn’t it? Him not being here?”
She headed down the hallway backward, gesturing for me to follow. “He came by my place this morning and when he was in the bathroom I turned the motion sensor notifications back on. He shouldn’t have any idea we were here last night, and I doubt he’d pay the notifications from this morning much mind, since he knows I’m here.”
“Why was it so important I show up this early?” I wanted to tell her not to worry, that Carissa had probably rewritten the video feeds like she’d claimed she could, but I knew Jess would take that information straight to Nick, and I didn’t want to rat Carissa out.
She faced forward as I caught up with her strides. “Because we need to talk to her. Alone. I got her out of the charging room. Asked Nick if I could be with her for a little while to teach her how to French braid. She’s waiting for me now.”
“Won’t he see this little cloak and dagger rendezvous on the cameras?”
“I plan on forgetting to turn them on. There’s a switch by the door of the interview room.”
“Why do you even bother teaching her things?”
Her brows got lost behind her bangs as her forehead wrinkled. “Why shouldn’t I bother? I like hanging out with her. She’s kind of a…”
Silence hung between us for a few seconds before I offered, “A friend?”
“So to speak. It’s easy to forget she’s not…well, she’s real and everything, but it’s easy to forget she isn’t human.” To my defiantly arched eyebrow, she said, “I never knew her when she was alive. There’s a difference. I don’t have the memories you have. Nothing to compare this incarnation to. She doesn
’t seem lacking in my mind.”
We walked the rest of the way in silence.
In the vestibule of that little interrogation room, through the one-way glass, I found Carissa staring off into space, unnaturally still but for her right hand, which she clenched and unclenched the same way Margot had in those videos. I couldn’t work out what it meant, or why they’d both have the same impulse.
I stared at her, my arms loose at my sides. From this distance and through the tinted glass which drowned those blonde highlights, she was indistinguishable from my Carissa. It was like seeing her in that bar all over again, watching her cool gaze sweep the room. She’d looked at everything in the Bell in Hand except for the patrons, which had struck me as odd at the time. I remember wondering what on earth she could have been thinking about. She’d seemed so far away, as though her thoughts were somewhere in the stratosphere.
And then she’d looked right at me, and even as I remembered that very first glance, her robotic counterpart’s eyes found mine through the one-way glass as though it had suddenly become transparent.
Jess jostled my shoulder as she opened the second locked door, but I could still taste that final sip of gin I’d taken before I’d pushed the tumbler away and approached my future murdered fiancée in that bar.
“Hey.” Jess yanked out a chair opposite Carissa and melted into it, stifling a yawn with her palm.
“Hi,” she answered, though her eyes were on me.
Jess flicked a glance over her shoulder and jerked her head at the chair beside hers. “Come sit.”
“There’s a few things I wanted to talk to you about,” Jess said, as I sat beside her.
Carissa’s eyes flicked between Jess and me. “Oh?”
“I doubt I need to tell you this, but what happened last night is between the three of us. Okay? Nick can’t know about it.”
“I figured as much.”
“Good.” Jess’s eyelids fluttered closed, tightly clinched for a moment. “Do you remember when I said goodbye to you last night, when I touched your hair?”
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