A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  But now this thing was here and it sort of even looked like those old dummies, with clothes and all. Very plasticky. With empty eyes, but they had some sort of light behind them. And the chest that never moved because it never breathed. But it had hair, breasts, the shape of a woman. And lips that were more than a slit, lips that moved astonishingly like anybody’s lips. After extreme concentration, inspired by the sneaking feeling that something was wrong, Ivy realized that the movement of the lips was stilted, odd. as if of all the many smooth, graceful movements that human lips could make, this pair of lips could perform only a few. And the movements of the body were like that, too. She, the thing, didn’t move with the flow, the naturalness, of even the most awkward person. To watch her, the thing, move was even sort of funny. And it was sort of like watching a helpless animal you one day find in your backyard. There’s only one way you can feel toward it.

  I am a machine designed and constructed to register external stimuli. I have been placed in cars, sometimes with and sometimes without my family, in order to discover the physical reactions humans would have in similar situations. I have been used in the re-creation of accidents involving injury, the data in my memory destined as testimony in a lawsuit, although that is something recent. After each testing, they empty my brain of data and repair any damage to my body. But a residue of impressions remains: images and registered sensations stay within me. I cannot discern one from the other in any verifiable manner. If memories have any veracity, then I have died many times. I have lost an arm once and a leg upon another occasion. Or perhaps it was during the same accident.

  Ivy asks me if I feel pain, and I tell her that I do not know what pain is. It is the same with sight: I do not know if I can see what humans see or if we see in the same way. Claire says she looked it up in an old Scientific American at the library and that I see in black-and-white patterns. That holds no meaning for me. When Ivy points at an object and says it is yellow, I can point at most other objects and say if they are yellow or not. Sometimes I am wrong, but Ivy tells me I am close enough. Claire laughs. Along with “I feel sad,” I do not comprehend laughter.

  Claire says that if I cannot feel pain and I cannot laugh, then I cannot have feelings. Ivy tells me that Claire is just being sarcastic and mean. I do not comprehend why Ivy calls it mean. I was not designed to calculate the response to such questions.

  I am at a loss. A character in a book of Ivy’s states that: I am at a loss. Although I cannot quite analyze its significance, the words appear appropriate. I lack something. I can register sensations, but I cannot feel. It is a missing dimension. In one of Ivy’s books, a woman becomes a prostitute and charges money for her sexual services. She meets a minister and later they call each other friends. She later says she believes in God and that what she was missing in her life she now has. She stops being a prostitute and promises to love God forever. My deductions are perhaps inaccurate because I am not designed for much deductive reasoning, but the prostitute lacks God in the same way I lack feelings. The differences between humans and me are so great that even after reading so many of their books, it still is improbable that any words I write will be understood by the humans I write them for. If I still cannot comprehend why I fled, it is impossible that they will.

  The day Ivy took in the robot, Claire walked home, avoiding the crowded rush-hour Metro. It was an hour-and-a-half walk home from what had just become her ex-office, but the walk seemed longer still due to her six months’ pregnancy, which left her feeling awkward and heavy. She had been doing the same work as her mother (her mother had even found her the job), and she originally had been saving up money to pay her own way through college. Now, with the kid on its way, she’d never get to college, and she’d never be meant for better things. The kid’s father had transferred to the San Diego office and was now living there with his wife of five years. Mother kept telling Claire to see a lawyer (to take advantage of the presummer discount months) about a paternity suit. But then Claire would only have his money, along with his hatred. She already had his disrespect. And although she couldn’t understand why he felt that, his disrespect for her seemed to grow within her along with the baby, leaving her feeling useless, fat, and awkward. And she did not respect herself for letting that feeling find nurture within her.

  The walk home didn’t help. She kept thinking of the things she should have said to the dumbshit execs in that dumbshit office who had fired her, finding enough excuses to fire a pregnant woman so the law couldn’t do anything. If it had been a union office it wouldn’t have happened, she wanted to yell at her mother. Or at the man who had left her for his wife the moment Claire had first missed her period. Or at the expected baby. Or at herself for not going to college, for not letting her mother help pay her way. Or at Daddy for . . . She didn’t want to think about that.

  With all that, of course, it couldn’t help but seem like a huge cosmic joke aimed right at her when she got home after an hour and a half of walking to find her mother standing on the back porch and telling her in that nervous voice of hers that she had a surprise for her daughter.

  “You made my bed for me,” Qaire said, hating the snottiness in her voice. She knew by the tone of her mother’s voice that the surprise would be a bad one.

  Her mother shook her head. The nervous smile seemed odd. “Oh, damn! I don’t want to cook tonight.” I’ve been fired, but she didn’t know how to say that. “Or is it the dishes? Look, I didn’t have time this morning to do the dishes.” I had to hurry off to work to get fired two hours ago for some dumbshit document that got sent to the wrong person.

  Her mother shook her head again. “It’s not something you have to do. It’s a person.”

  “Mother, really?” Claire’s eyes grew wide, and she almost forgot all the feelings trapped within her. “You finally did it?” Her mother looked confused. “Did what?”

  “Don’t play games, Mother. You brought a man home, didn’t you? It’s about time.”

  Mother’s face dropped, the way it did when Claire didn’t receive her presents like they were gifts from the gods or something. “Follow me.”

  Mother led her through the back door, through the small kitchen, and out into the living room. Sitting in the one hundred percent plastileather chair was some thing, a plasticky, artificial thing. It slowly stood up, and its unexpected movement forced Claire to step back, the abrupt fear and a thought running like a current through her head, surprising her: I’ve got to protect the baby.

  “Mom . . .?” She didn’t like sounding so scared while her mother stood there so calmly. “Is that your person?”

  Her mother nodded.

  “Tell me it’s a joke. Please.”

  “She’s not a joke, Claire.”

  “But what is it? A robo-waiter or something? And what is it doing in our house?”

  Her mother shrugged.

  “Did you rent it or something? Come on, tell me. Is it for a party?”

  “It’s not a robo-waiter.”

  Claire’s eyes expanded as the idea sank into her. At the office they kept the radio playing all day to reduce the monotony. WRUR, for the best in pure music, without incense, without lights. The news came on every half hour. “Mother,” she said firmly, fear transforming into anger, “be serious. Is that the escaped robot?”

  Ivy sounded almost defensive. “They were going to kill it, with its family.”

  “Oh, Mother! It’s a test robot. That’s what it’s for!”

  “But it can talk and feel.”

  “What? So you invited it in for a beer? Don’t you know it can be dangerous?”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s more scared of me than me of it.”

  “Mother, listen. I’ve been listening to the radio all day. This one was built before the robo-waiters were used. It has one of the first artificial organic brains or something like that. After every test they take it—”

  “You mean every accident.”

  Claire let her face reveal her annoyance.
“After every test, Mother, they collect the data and clean out its memory. Right now it’s gathering up data with all its senses. No one knows how much data it can hold. They’re afraid it might overload and go berserk.” Mother looked as if it didn’t make much sense. “Mother, don’t you see, this thing can be dangerous. Why don’t we solve the problem by calling the police or a newspaper or something?” Mother shook her head. “I sort of knew you’d want to do that.” She paused. “So I disconnected the phone and hid it. Our visitor is going to stay. I’m not going to have them put her into any more cars that they’re gonna wreck up. It just isn’t right.”

  “What’s gonna happen next, huh? Are we gonna save all the robots?”

  “This one came to us.”

  “Mother, be serious. I won’t live here with this thing.”

  Her mother thought for a moment. “Your father and I worked hard to pay for this house. So it’s my decision on who stays or goes.”

  “That’s not fair. I live here, too.”

  “You can take it or leave it, Claire. But she’s staying here. If you don’t like it, you can move.”

  Claire found herself speechless; she had no choice but to take it. So, instead, she told her mother about getting fired.

  On more and more occasions I resense and reregister the residue of memories. I once again register all the levels of input I felt in the accidents. I see the car approaching—its color, size, and shape alter with each seeing and sometimes it is only a wall or it is a parked car—and I know it is approaching but I have been programmed to be talking with my brother beside me until it is too late, or I am in the backseat and am screaming at my father to wake up because he suddenly dozed off, or I am still trying to convince Mother that she has drunk too much to be driving. And then it happens: the sound, glass imploding and flying, metal coming inward, flying objects, something cutting through my arm and—

  I temporarily deactivate the circuits through which the memories are traveling. I do not know how I do that. I have never done it before, but it is the only method I have discovered to avoid information overload. It seems that the more I watch Ivy’s television screen, the more these images take shape within me. I have deduced that I am learning how to see. With the books of Claire and Ivy I can write these images better. I think, or I conclude, or I believe (the last being the words of the prostitute, the words that seem the most appropriate and least definable) that my builders are unaware of these capabilities. But now I am storing so much data; no one clears it out; it is hard to control.

  Every morning during the next two weeks, Ivy woke up, made herself coffee and toast (always letting Claire sleep in), and sat down to talk with the robot. At first, Ivy was uncomfortable, unsure if she’d done the right thing, anxious about this strange creature she’d let into her house. Claire’s whining protests about how dangerous the thing could be sounded selfish and cruel, and they drowned out the background noise of Ivy’s inner protests. As if that wasn’t enough, Ivy found herself feeling more and more at ease with the robot as it spoke to her in its artificial, squeaky voice.

  It—no, she—always seemed to be asking questions about colors and human sight and what was this and what did that mean; they were the sort of innocent, enthusiastic questions Claire asked when she was a kid and thought her mom knew something. Then she, the robot, began to ask questions about the books she began to read during the day while Ivy was gone, about things the three of them saw on television at night, about things Ivy liked to do.

  Ivy fantasized taking it—no, her—out for a weekend and showing it all the things that were human. One evening she risked taking it out into the little backyard where Claire had grown up playing so that it/she could feel the cool evening breeze. It left Ivy heartbroken when the robot couldn’t feel (detect?) the gentle movement of the air.

  At the office, Ivy found that she was glad to be away from Claire and the guilt she felt: if only she’d raised Claire differently. More and more, however, she began to realize how little she enjoyed being at the office. She noticed how little she talked with the other girls and how much lunch was just a time for eating.

  Ivy took her coffee breaks on the hour so she could go to the lounge and listen to the news on the radio. They never played the radio in the typing room because it was considered distracting. There was always something about the escaped robot. No one understood how or why it had escaped. It could overload and become dangerous.

  Ivy began to worry that the other girls would notice her interest, become suspicious of her. She was already anxious about leaving Claire at home with the robot; how was her daughter treating it—no, her?

  It was the third night that the robot had been with Ivy and Claire when they announced on the evening news that the searches had turned up nothing. They concluded that the robot must be in hiding or was being hidden by someone. They warned caution, again, and then offered a reward for information leading to the capture of the robot; the amount of the reward was substantial. Claire withdrew her attention from the television screen and faced her mother. Her hand dropped to her six-month belly in a gesture that Ivy knew was not unconscious; Claire had never been good at dropping subtle hints. “Mom . . .?”

  The visitor sat in the wooden chair and watched the TV with her expressionless face as if she weren’t the one who was being hunted down. Ivy didn’t know how they’d take care of the baby on her salary, and she hated herself for the thought.

  “Think about it, Mom.”

  Ivy turned on her daughter. “Don’t you even dare suggest it.”

  At work, Ivy tried, unsuccessfully, to hide herself in her typing. But she kept making mistakes, kept drifting off. “Get yourself together, girl,” said the nice black girl whose VDT was next to Ivy’s. Ivy kept thinking about how Claire might leave the house and find a pay phone to call in for the reward. Or Rosa Martinez might come over for some sugar, or old Mrs. Buloski might limp over for some company. How long could she go on hiding her (it?)?

  Mr. McHinry, her supervisor, made a joke about bringing back the bells, just for Ivy. She laughed, and knew she sounded nervous. Her anxiety, she feared, would give her away. But Mr. McHinry seemed not to notice; he just kept cracking the same joke until it stopped being funny.

  When Ivy had started work umpety-ump years ago—working as a temp, thirty-five hours a week—the machines she used were tied in to a program to monitor her progress. Each keystroke, each error, each cessation of activity was duly recorded so that a supervisor, using his own VDT, could check on her progress. It was as if some huge, invisible figure were hunched over her shoulder, always watching, always ready to criticize. In one or two offices, the VDT was rigged with bells that would ring each time she mistyped a word programmed into the machine’s memory or each time she went back to correct an error. The bells reminded her of the invisible form just behind her; they pulled her concentration away from her typing and made her concentrate on doing well—typing so hard to prove herself—that she lost the natural fluidity of her fingers. More bells, more errors.

  Once again, she felt just as harried, although the union had gotten rid of the bells and the monitors. There were other forms hunched over her shoulder this time, and Ivy knew someone would figure out that she’d started making all those mistakes the day after the robot had fled, and it would all be over.

  Every morning at breakfast, Ivy found herself surprised that, for a while, the tension no longer clutched her belly and kept her nerves jangling. She enjoyed sitting at the breakfast table, watching the robot, listening to its squeaky voice, and answering its questions: explain to me your family; why did they leave Detroit; what was your husband like; why do people love their families? How could a robot who asked such questions be at all dangerous?

  For a brief moment, Ivy thought of the factory where Jerry had died, then forced the thought out of her mind.

  For lunch, like usual, she’d go out with some of the girls, and, when she could, when no one might think she was making a big deal abo
ut it, she would pick a place with a television so she could see the noontime news. On the second Monday the visitor was with them, Ivy and the other girls ended up going to a place with a fancy new holovision. Ivy couldn’t take her eyes off the screen, if that’s what you called it, the images were so clear and lifelike. The newscaster, who looked like he was sitting behind a counter that had been set up in the comer of the dining room, reminded viewers of a murder that had taken place Friday afternoon. A woman had been strangled in an alley near Henry’s Superbar. (“That’s right near where I live,” remarked the black girl who sat next to Ivy in the typing room.) Police authorities said they suspected that the murderer was the escaped robot.

  As the newscaster recapped the info on the escaped robot, Ivy found herself looking away from the screen and at the simulated grain of the wall. She began to wish the water she had been drinking was whiskey, even though she hated the stuff. Her insides turned soft, and she suddenly had to go to the bathroom and was too scared to get up. Ivy knew she (it?) couldn’t have done such a thing; Claire was always at home. “I do sure hope they catch that thing soon,” said one of the girls, “before it kills anybody else.” No one would understand, not if they found her now, not with news like this.

  The image of the newscaster was replaced by the image of the robot. One of the girls sucked in her breath as if it (she!) was really in the dining room. The image looked just like her—same face, shape, everything—but she still wore that somber blue-gray tunic, and the fabric wasn’t tom. However, there was something else wrong with the image they showed of her. There was something in the eyes and the red light behind the eyes that looked dark, looked evil.