Unmasked

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Over the next two years, it happened more often, and eventually the day came when she was arrested and the school intervened. Marsh was taken from the home and placed in foster care while his mother scrambled to get him back. The system was against her, he knew. And she was tired. So very tired that even a boy his age could see it in her eyes. She was a woman lost in what she’d been forced to become, haunted by the memory of what she’d once been.

  She disappeared when he was fourteen. Had she been killed or run off or, as he sometimes dreamed, married by a rich client who didn’t want the challenges of taking on a teenage son? Marsh never knew, but her vanishing act galvanized him: he would become a police officer and find her. And others like her. He would keep people safe. Her crime wasn’t selling herself for sex, but selling the only thing of value she had, over and over and over again, until it became valueless. All in an ultimately wasted effort to take care of herself and her son.

  Marsh did become a police officer, but the case was so cold by the time he could look at it that it may as well have been frozen in a glacier. There was nothing to be done and so few clues to follow. His mother had lived and disappeared in a world of passing strangers. Millions of unemployed, uneducated workers shuffling from one day to the next, caring only for themselves and what they could obtain for their efforts. Silence, even in the face of horror, was an often-celebrated trait.

  Then the first real change came. In the mid-2000’s, companies began making sexbots. At first, they were little more than dolls with a computer chip, but eventually, they started to become more and more lifelike. In 2026, NearC programming took the computer world by storm. Suddenly, sexbots became androids who could mimic human behavior so precisely that the need for human prostitutes vanished—along with a lot of other low-end jobs that went nowhere.

  There were no laws against sexbots, and overall, they were far better employees. They didn’t get sick, didn’t get hooked on drugs, and didn’t want to keep any of the money they earned. Companies began producing better and better android prostitutes, and human prostitutes were more and more rare. Brothels staffed only by androids were common, and while they weren’t perfectly human, each successive model got a little bit closer.

  Virtually all aspects of human sexuality could be addressed by an android: BDSM, of course, but things far more extreme were services that an android could, would, and often did provide. Consent was unnecessary and human beings were kept safer. Sexual deviancy in all its forms was perfectly legal, provided that it was practiced with an android. Why risk a disease or a criminal record with a human when one could have virtually the same experience with a bot?

  By the time Marsh made detective, the vice cops were investigating organized crime, drugs, and illegal trafficking almost exclusively. It wasn’t worth their time to even look for prostitutes anymore—the human ones were as gone as his mother. As far as Marsh himself was concerned, that was one improvement that the world needed. If real women weren’t working the streets, then their kids weren’t being left home alone. If real women weren’t out making money with sex, then they weren’t disappearing or dying in cheap hotels and dirty alleys. The sexbot saved a little part of the world, protecting human beings from themselves, while allowing them to safely take off the camouflage so many of them wore in public.

  And then there was Amaya.

  At the beginning, she was just a bot. He couldn’t have slept with her if she’d been human—that would have been too close, too real. But Amaya wasn’t human, just an android programmed to pleasure him in whatever way he wanted. To be a sympathetic ear and a warm shoulder and a soft voice. Her programming was NearC perfect—a Model 8000. She “remembered” him—his preferences, favorite positions, topics of conversation.

  She knew that when he came in, he liked to sit in the lounge and have a good scotch before they went to her room.

  She knew that he didn’t like to rush, that he liked the smell of her hair, the sounds she made when he “pleasured” her, though he knew those responses were as much a part of her programming as all the rest of it.

  She knew that he was now alone in the world, with nothing but his work to sustain him, and nothing to look forward to when he retired.

  He could almost have loved her.

  Marsh never owned a vehicle like these relics, but he was seven years old when the government forced his father to trade in his diesel truck for an EcoHauler, a day etched in his memory.

  “Machines,” his father said, sitting in the driver’s seat of the new vehicle, “should make some noise. Especially engines.”

  “Destination, please, Mr. Hallowell,” the computer system said from the dash console.

  “And they sure as fuck shouldn’t talk to you by name, either,” he’d added. He was a big man, with shoulders and arms meant for manual labor and calloused hands that looked strange on the small steering wings. He was a man meant for manual labor, a skill that was rapidly becoming obsolete in an age of machines. His identity was slipping away, like a snake shedding its skin, and his pain with his vanishing place in the world was constant.

  They went home in the silent vehicle, and that night Marsh lay awake in his bed listening to his father rant to his mother about the way nothing was the same anymore. Two days later, he’d tried to convert the EcoHauler to manual control at the wrong time and been killed when the engine stopped halfway across the magnetic tracks of a new train system that was being tested for outer-hub commuters. According to his mother, the interior recording from the vehicle revealed that the last thing his father ever heard was the EcoHauler’s computer saying, “Manual control not suggested at this time,” and his father yelling back, “I don’t give a fuck what you suggest.”

  Marsh’s cruiser was silent, too. Over the years, machines of all kinds had gotten smaller and quieter and more efficient. Better at what they were supposed to do. He was sure that all these changes in machines, in the world around him, might explain the body in the vehicle storage compartment behind him.

  There were many hundreds, maybe thousands of new machines, doing many hundreds or thousands of tasks, but underneath, all of them had the same job—to hide, minimize, or even eliminate the destructive nature of human beings. The machines were the masks that hid and protected humanity from itself.

  And they were good at it. Marsh’s father learned that lesson the hard way.

  “Marsh,” Amaya said, running a slender finger along his arm. “I want to ask you something.”

  Marsh looked at the beautiful woman—android—lying next to him. She was flawless: her skin unmarked, her eyes bright and direct, her scent like jasmine. She didn’t often ask questions, and had never prefaced one before. That was new. Perhaps her NearC programming had been updated.

  “What is it?”

  “How do you know you’re alive?” she asked. “Like real?”

  He sat up in the small bed, surprised by the question. Surprised by her for the first time ever. “I’m not sure I understand you,” he said.

  “Your heart beats, your blood moves, you feel emotions. All these things I know are true. But they don’t make you alive. Alive and real.”

  He thought about her question. The implications of it were disturbing, like shadows flitting in the corner of his eye. “I guess … I’m alive because I think,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “No other person is exactly like me.”

  “That is true,” she said. Her finger was working its way across his abdomen. “That is … individualized experience, correct?”

  “What are you getting at, Amaya?”

  “You know you are alive because you … how you see or hear or even feel is subjective and individual to you. No one else is the same.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And those feelings or experiences cannot be perfectly translated to anyone else. They aren’t exact.”

  She was silent for a minute. “The word in my programming is ‘ineffable,’” she said. “Something that cannot be communicated or understood
without direct experience. Like the taste of a strawberry or the color of wine in a glass.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I guess.”

  “I like strawberries,” she said. “And the wine we had was burgundy in color.”

  Marsh sighed. This was a very disturbing change. Perhaps there was an error in her programming. “Okay, but you don’t need to eat strawberries or drink wine. Or anything at all. You have a body that includes a processing unit for things like food or drink.”

  “Yes,” she said. Then, “So do you.”

  “A stomach and intestines aren’t the same thing!” he said, his voice sharpening. “You’re a machine, an android. You’re programmed to like these things.”

  She appeared taken aback by his harshness. Marsh wasn’t the kind of man who normally raised his voice. Both of them were silent for several minutes, and he tried to control his breathing. Something was very wrong with her.

  Then she said, “I don’t like all of my clients.” Her voice was so quiet he could barely make out the words. “Some of them are mean to me.”

  The rain gave up entirely and now it was pure sleet coming down in small stings Marsh could feel on his face. He stood at the back of the cruiser and opened the storage compartment. The body was inside, carefully wrapped in plastic sheeting.

  Not that it mattered. This body wouldn’t decay.

  He lifted it out of the compartment. It was lighter than a human body, but still awkward. Marsh stepped backwards and slipped in the mud, going ass over teakettle and dropping her. Dropping it! he reminded himself. Not her. It.

  He got to his knees and saw that the sheeting had fallen away. Amaya’s eyes were open. Didn’t they close when she was deactivated? Shouldn’t they? He’d seen her blink, seen her with her eyes closed … He reached forward, tentative, then placed his fingertips on them. He tried to push the eyelids down, but nothing happened.

  Angry at himself for being surprised, he yanked the sheeting back into place, trying to ignore the sight of her being uncovered. “Not her,” he said aloud. “She’s … an it. An android. She has to be.”

  He lifted the body again, and being cautious of his footing, carried it through the stinging sleet to the rusted-out car he’d seen. Marsh eased the body into the passenger area of the car, stretching it out along the backseat. Then he stepped back.

  It wasn’t much of a coffin.

  “Marsh!” Amaya said. “I am surprised to see you again.”

  “Yes,” he said, shaking the rain off his coat. “We didn’t … last night didn’t end well. I wanted to make it up to you. How about an evening out?”

  Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “An out date?”

  “Yes,” Marsh replied. “An out date.”

  “You have never requested that service before,” she noted. “I am … not prepared.”

  He waved a hand at her. “Then go prepare. I need to speak to your boss about the details.”

  Smiling happily, Amaya headed in the direction of her room.

  The owner of the Butterfly House of Sensual Delights was a tall, lean man named Dexter Vines. He ran several pleasure houses in the Entertainment District and was very wealthy. Marsh found him in the front office, and held up his badge to the android playing secretary.

  “Mr. Vines?” she called.

  Vines looked up and nodded, waving Marsh in. “Detective Marsh,” he said. “What can I do for you? Amaya making you happy?”

  “Very,” he said, pitching his voice low. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want to purchase her,” Marsh said. “You can get another.”

  Vines lifted an eyebrow. “So can you,” he said. “No reason you can’t order direct. Lots of people do. Why do you want this one?”

  Marsh shrugged. “What’s it matter to you, Vines? Just give me a figure.”

  Vines turned his attention to the surface of his desk and tapped away for a moment, then named a figure that was lower than Marsh had expected. “Why so cheap?”

  He shrugged, his shoulders rising to near points beneath his suit coat. “They’re getting ready to issue the Model 9000s,” he said. “They aren’t updating the 8000s anymore, so I’ll be doing some turnover anyway.” He grinned. “Besides, it’s always good to be friendly with the local cops.”

  Marsh’s mind raced. “So, Amaya hasn’t had any updates lately?”

  Vines shook his head. “Last one was … three months ago, I think.”

  “What happens when the 9000s come out?” he asked.

  Vines thought for a moment, going through the steps in his head. “Oh, about a week before they ship, the 8000s will upload all their experiential data into the primary network—that way, the 9000s will start out even more realistic. This makes sure that each new model has both state-of-the-art programming and experiential models to work from.”

  In other words, Marsh realized, everything that was … wrong with Amaya would be passed along to all the other androids in the next generation. Like a computer virus. Convinced he was now right to take the next steps, he nodded. “I see. Direct wire okay?”

  Vines tapped a few more keys on the desk. “Just put your thumbprint there on the corner scanner, Detective.”

  Marsh did so. He had plenty of money. Even for a cop, he was paid fairly well, and he didn’t live a particularly lavish lifestyle. “I’ll go tell her then,” he said.

  “You’ll receive her complete files and operating instructions over your link. I’ll transmit the confirmation to her, too,” he said. “Thanks for your business.”

  “Yeah,” Marsh said, getting ready to leave, but a thought crossed his mind and he paused. “Say … one other question.”

  “Shoot,” Vines said, his mind obviously on other things already.

  “Have any of the other bots been acting up? Any troubles with any of them?”

  Vines made a high-pitched wheezing sound that Marsh realized was laughter. “Trouble? Nah. They’re just bots, man. They just do what they’re programmed to do.”

  Praying he was right, that Amaya was unique, Marsh said, “Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard.”

  He stepped out of the office and made his way to Amaya’s room. By the time he got there, she’d already received the wireless transmission from her boss, confirming the transfer of ownership.

  “You really did it?” she asked. “You … bought me?”

  He nodded. “I did.”

  She stopped packing up her few belongings—most of which were different outfits. “Why?” she asked, not knowing that no other android would ever ask such a question.

  “Because … two nights a week isn’t enough,” he muttered.

  Amaya stepped lightly toward him and pulled him into a warm embrace. “Thank you, Marsh,” she said. “You’re not like my other clients. You’re kind to me.”

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, you’re welcome. Let’s get out of here, okay?”

  She stepped back and said, “Okay!” then finished her packing.

  Marsh stood in the doorway, watching her flit from the small dresser to the small suitcase. She was an android, he reminded himself at least a dozen times. When she was finished, he picked up the suitcase for her. “I’ll carry this out to my cruiser,” he said. “Then we’ll go to dinner.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. “Maybe tonight I will try something different.”

  They were walking now, out to the vehicle. “Like what?” he asked, putting the case in the backseat.

  “I was reading on the SocWeb that baked brie cheese with blueberries is delectable. I would like to try something that is delectable.”

  Marsh opened the door for her. “I know a place,” he said, as he shut the door behind her.

  In his mind, he saw the flow of information as her file arrived from Vines. All her history, from the time she was designed to the moment he sent the last transmission confirming her change of ownership. The client names were missing, of course, but it was fa
r better that way. He didn’t want to think of someone else with her. Someone else who might know what he did.

  He got inside the cruiser and drove away from the brothel. From the passenger seat, Amaya chatted about what they might have for dinner or where they might go, based on her research on the SocWeb.

  Marsh knew what had to be done.

  Standing in the sleet, unable to walk away, Marsh stared at the rusted junk where Amaya’s body was wrapped in cheap plastic. Where he meant to leave her forever. He was trying to convince himself that deactivating her wasn’t the same as murder.

  “She’s an android,” he said. “Not human.”

  Dinner had been quiet. He’d taken her to Rueben’s Grill, a nice place far away from the City Centre, and ordered her something delectable. Even pressed, he couldn’t recall what he’d ordered or how it had tasted. His experience was filtered through her responses to the meal. As she ate, she’d continued to make comments about what things tasted like, what they felt like on her tongue. Sitting there, he’d accessed the DataWeb with his link.

  The word that came back after a few searches was “qualia.” That is what she was demonstrating. She was having subjective, conscious experiences that were individual to her. Amaya was on her way to becoming, if not already, self-aware.

  And Marsh couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t let her upload, and the instructions that came in her file noted that it was a requirement for all androids when new models were released. He couldn’t let it happen.

  If the androids became self-aware, they wouldn’t be machines anymore. They couldn’t be used anymore. Androids would be human. The Model 9000s—women, men, and children—would have no protection from the law and they’d all be self-aware. They’d know what was being done to them, the good and the bad—and the horrifying. How long until humans and androids were the same, and both were back on the streets, fucking for money and trying to survive? How long until they fought back? Society would be caught in a vise between humanity and machines.