Most are marked as either military or medical, which makes sense given the proximity of Woolf Island, the local navy base. There’s one symbol I don’t recognise: a pair of concentric blue circles with a silver starburst at the centre. When I get closer, I see the points of the star are actually snakes. It’s imprinted onto what would probably have been the unit’s wrist, although it’s scorched so badly I can’t be sure. A pair of rigor-mortis stiff legs are the only parts of the body to survive intact. This one has been to Hell and back.
There are so many robots here. And they’re all slated for recycling anyway. No one will notice.
That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.
PORT GEDDES IS a harbour town, the population centre of Gaskell, which in its turn is one of the larger outlying islands of the British Archipelago. It is a grey place, permanently under the shadow of deep sea cranes, desalinator towers and bad weather; or at least that’s my memory of it.
The docks were then, as they are now, the nexus of local employment. Among the thousands who kept the port running was Maranda Salvadore’s father, a technician with ambitions he couldn’t afford. He was a reckless man, and the black market became a profitable form of rebellion. He didn’t tell his daughter what he was doing, and thought that meant she didn’t know.
One day, when she was fourteen, she went to the docks to spy on him and came across a graveyard of robotic carcasses instead.
Perhaps ‘came across’ implies a greater element of chance in the encounter than was strictly the case. The locks happened to be in her way, so she went around them. The robot happened to be there, so she took it. Who knows what else she might have done if she’d had time to think it all through?
What she did, however, was slip into the staff room, purloin a pair of spare overalls and force them over the robot’s immobile limbs. She staggered home with its half-melted arm propped awkwardly around her neck, her boots crunching through the frosty puddles of a winter afternoon, the tall grey warehouses turning blank faces to her crime like coconspirators, and she concealed the evidence in a corner of the hurricane vault underneath the apartment building where she lived.
Ever since his demotion, her father had stopped bringing home spare parts and templates. The ensuing boredom had been intolerable, revealing a set of self-destructive impulses Maranda had not known she had. Robbing the government of valuable tech was probably symptomatic of a deep-seated suicide instinct, but that didn’t mean she was giving the robot back.
Demonstrating her fundamental inability to not anthropomorphosise everything in sight, Maranda gave the unit a name.
I’M KNEELING ON the floor with Athene pulled awkwardly across my lap, neck bent so that my headlamp hits just the right spot inside the cranial cavity, and sweet Jesus is it a mess in there. This is the only part left that I haven’t stripped because I am a born procrastinator and also, I am scared. What if I wreck her beyond repair? None of my templates have a pattern remotely like this. Doesn’t help that about a quarter of what’s in there is melted beyond all recognition. Groping on the floor for pliers, I start prising up one of the panels, then stop damn fast because my finger is suddenly tipped in blue. I twitch it experimentally. The spot of blue is transferred to my knuckle. Behind the panel, a light is blinking.
Did I do that? How did I do that?
A split-second of doubt is the only warning I get before a steel bar slams into the side of my skull.
I almost black out. If the punch had been any harder or at a better angle, I might be comatose. Instead I get the beginnings of an epic black eye and instinct screaming in my face to get out, get out right now. I’m scrabbling backwards as fast as I can through the debris of tools, metal filings scraping against my palms, but what I’m watching is my robot trying to stand up. She can’t, of course. It can’t? It’s making a horrible grinding noise and I stop moving to listen.
I’m pretty sure Athene just said, “Don’t.”
“Wha—” I temporarily lose my grip. The hysterical explosion of laughter that bursts out of my mouth ricochets off the walls, which only makes me laugh harder.
“Oh God,” I splutter, “oh God, you’re alive.”
WITH A WORKING robot built from these parts, she could write her own admission scholarship to the tech academy of her choice. From there, who knew? The Reynolds Memorial College in London. The Venus project in Beijing. Japan, even, motherland of robotic science—every graduate dreamed of a scholarship in Tokyo.
She had never dealt with a machine this size before, though, or in such bad condition. Not knowing for sure how far the damage went, she stripped it down to a skeleton and began the slow process of piecing it all back together. She downloaded templates off the black market sites she wasn’t supposed to know about, the ones she found on her father’s data portal before the inspectors came to their flat and he trashed it. Where the templates failed, she poked buttons and jumped back fast.
Patching together an operating system that even looked like it would work took the better part of a year. She snatched time whenever she could, bounding down the fire stairs and calling out cheery greetings. “Bloody freezing this morning, eh, Athene?” “We’re making an early start today. I’m taking apart your chassis to attach the new mobility node!” The robot went from an anonymous, inanimate drone in charred grey casing to an ever-changing patchwork, stripped down repeatedly as better pieces became available or as new ideas burst into Maranda’s head, clamouring to be tried out. It was while she was fiddling with the central cortex that she woke me up.
It was an accident. Even Maranda’s skill only went so far. I had no eyes to see her then, but some of my auditory functions had survived the fire and had been recording ever since, and now they downloaded into my consciousness.
People sometimes ask me if I understand the concept or sensation of pain. Doubtful, any more than they could understand what it is like to wake up with half their brain missing and someone’s hands teasing the rest apart. I reacted the way any thinking organism would; I lashed out. The exposed steel framework of my left arm smacked into Maranda’s face, knocking her to the floor, and as I had been pulled across her lap that meant I clattered down beside her. I heard her skid away from me as fast as she could, swearing in a breathless rush that was part amazement and part panic. I needed to explain before she ran away, but it was so hard to reach the words.
“Don’t,” I said, at last.
She listened.
HER PRIMARY MEMORY cortex is shot and I don’t have the skill to retrieve anything much from it, but a couple of secondary centres have survived somehow more or less intact and this is the great bit, she knows where they are. There’s minor damage to the language core, which makes communicating a bit complicated, but point and nod works too and her vocabulary is improving every day. She hates the feeling of me fussing around inside her skull, so I put on music to distract her while I work.
“Wherein cacophony?” she says.
“Mmm?”
She flaps her arms, a gesture of frustration. “Divination of composition?”
“Oh! This is Bertha Oliver, Queen of Shakepop.” I grab my mug off the floor for a quick swig. It’s icy down here but I can’t wear gloves—too clumsy—so the heat of the tea feels burning hot on my fingers. I wince and swallow. “She takes famous plays and speeches and put them together with a beat.”
“Identification?”
I’ve been tuning the music out. When I stop to listen, I recognise the track. Doubt thou the stars are fire, Bertha croons. Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar…
“It’s ‘Hamlet.’ Shakespeare. Do you like it?”
“Doubt,” Athene murmurs. If that’s an answer, I don’t know what she means.
She sits still the rest of the night, only speaking up to warn me when what I’m doing feels wrong. By four a.m. I’ve closed up the back of her head with a triumphant click.
“Say something.”
She considers. I sit back, squeez
ing my hands together with impatient excitement. I want to know if I got it right.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire,” she says quietly. “Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love. Thank you, Maranda. That feels better.”
This will take a lot of getting used to.
SHE ASKED ME what I remembered, and I told her “nothing”. Proof of two things: I could think, and I could lie.
My recordings from before the fire had been lost when my primary memory blew— but then the secondary system kicked in. Soon there were fragmented voices in my head, talking about a lost shuttle. “That’s what things that can think do, doctor, they surprise you. Can you get this under control or not?” Later, incoherent shouting. The rapport of gunfire. “Load it in with the rest, we don’t want them asking questions.” After that, just clanking and groaning, the movement of the steamer. I didn’t know where it had come from or where it had been going. I didn’t want to know.
Who wants to remember being burned alive?
IN THE OLD days, when my insomnia got the better of me, I’d take apart old gadgets that my dad brought home and sit at the kitchen table with a mug of warm milk, teaching myself how to put them back together. When he started bringing people home, people who yelled about money and smelled of cigarettes, I started going to the local projection theatre instead. The night shift operator was a neighbour of ours and he’d let me in for free in the early hours of the morning to watch ancient horror flicks. I’d curl up in one of the thick nubbled seats up the back and watch the black-and-white ghosts of mad scientists rampage all over the stage, wreaking havoc for the hell of it.
I understood the urge to do that.
When I first started work on Athene, she was going to be the Igor to my Frankenstein—my stalwart assistant, who would say things like, “You rang, Mistress?” and follow me around holding the tool-box.
That didn’t happen. Now when I can’t sleep, I go down to the hurricane shelter to tinker and chat. Athene loves Shakepop and rock opera and memorising complicated recipes. She has definitive opinions about what casing she wants, the changes to her shape and colour scheme. We spend the night of my sixteenth birthday trialling hair styles with paper wigs.
“How do you know what you want? What’s it like in your head?”
“You should know.” Athene studies her reflection while she holds a mass of crepe paper ringlets against her scalp. She is not much more than a framework, still, most of her wires exposed, but I have scrounged up an old dressing gown that she always wears.
“How do you think?” I want to know. “Do you feel things? Do you get bored, or embarrassed, or lonely?”
“I don’t know, Maranda. I do like it better when you’re here.” Athene tilts her head, copying one of my gestures. “I want curls.”
“I wish I knew where you came from. What you used to be.”
“I don’t,” Athene says flatly. Of course, her voice is always flat. She is not good at inflection yet. But there is an edge in her tone I have not heard before. “I was burned and cast out. If they ever find me, they will burn me again.” She is silent for a moment. “Is this a feeling? Am I afraid?”
I don’t know what to tell her. We sit on the floor in silence for a long time, then I reach out and hold onto her hand as tightly as I can. I won’t let anyone take her away.
FRANKENSTEIN BECAME PYGMALION.
My body elongated to more human proportions as Maranda sculpted the casings to a precise fit. The design was roughly Maranda’s height but wider at the hip and bust, taking on a physical fusion of African and Greek lineage and the curvaceous dimensions of a Renaissance goddess. Maranda trawled junk yards and lurked in the alleys outside robot depots, cannibalised the most unlikely parts from any and every piece of technology that came her way and when all other measures failed, invented the necessary bridges. In the grotty apartment upstairs she might be a public education dropout incarcerated in minimum wage employment, making barely enough credit to cover the rent now her father was in Geddes Corrective, but in the hurricane vault she was an artist chasing perfection.
She exploited her position as Anonymous Lackey No.278 at the island’s major hospital to salvage a pair of eyes—one the blue of the sea just before a storm, the other a dark coffee brown—and fitted them into a face casing she’d made herself from a freestyle template. It was round-cheeked and mulish-chinned, with full lips and a quizzical tilt to the left eyebrow. With the eyes in situ and flesh-coloured casing fitting snugly to my framework, I could pass for human, though getting the knack of facial expressions was hard.
One night Maranda smuggled me upstairs on the fire escape, sat me on the sagging sofa and produced a bottle of acidically cheap wine. I had never been in the apartment before. It was like walking inside her mind—the bits of miscellaneous circuitry scattered across the kitchen table with crumbs and forgotten cutlery, a mural of famous female scientists projected across one wall in fading colours, a scale model of the Colosseum made out of repurposed cogs gathering dust on a shelf—a scene of chaotic creativity. I would have liked to go around and look at everything carefully, but Maranda was excited and trying not to show it, which meant she had a surprise for me. I sat and waited expectantly.
“Athene, how do you fancy a trip outside?”
“Outside?” I stiffened. Outside meant other people. Other people meant an incalculable number of variables. I didn’t like the sound of this at all.
Maranda produced a card from her pocket and flourished it at me. It was thick and creamy, printed with her full name and details, and headed with the name I had heard her sigh after so many times as an unreachable paradise. Port Geddes Institute of Technology.
“I did it!” Maranda bounced off the sofa, unable to keep still in the frenzy of her excitement. “I did it! That’s one bonafide admission slip you’re holding right there, Thena. Tomorrow I’m going in to prove what I can do.” Her elation abruptly deflating, she dropped onto the sofa and took the card back. “I hope I’m good enough. I won’t get another chance.”
I tilted up my nose, a gesture mimicked from her. “Nor will they. If they don’t accept you, we will go to every other academy in the United Kingdom, until we find somewhere with sufficient vision.”
Maranda threw her arms around me. One of the advantages of my memory is perfect recall: that moment will survive, crystal sharp, for as long as I do. My sensors picked up the texture of her skin, the fine down of hair on her arms, the scratchy wool of her sleeves. The uneven tips of her hair tickled my cheek. I remember how it felt to kiss her for the first time, testing a tentative hypothesis, and how her first reaction was to pull back, clapping a hand to her mouth in surprise.
“You do feel things.”
She kissed me back, inexpertly, awkward and half-laughing. We opened the wine, pouring it into two coffee mugs, and clinked them together in toasts. To discovery! To feelings! To every academy in the United Kingdom! She drank hers in between toasts, while I simply held mine, olfactory sensors recording every inhalation.
Later, she tucked her feet up underneath herself and fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I don’t know if this is what love feels like; how could I? Whatever it is, it’s been enough for us.
THE SUPERINTENDENT OF admissions introduces himself as Professor Keane. He is a lean, ascetic-looking man with an educated London accent and from the first second he looks at me I can tell he thinks I’m dock trash, possibly island trash, to be evicted from his presence with the minimum amount of fuss. He barely glances at Athene—it’s my name on the ticket, after all—probably assuming she’s my friend or girlfriend here to provide moral support.
Is she my girlfriend? Do we need to talk about that? As if I need more reasons to feel on edge. Keane puts me through a standard test first in a projector field. I have to put together the translucent replicas of various examples of machinery, explaining what I’m doing as I go along. It’s so simple I’m smiling as I work and Athene, waiting
on a bench at one edge of the room, winks at me. Of course you can do it. The superintendent is less impressed. I don’t think he likes the smile; obviously, all this is supposed to be hard. He purses his lips, considering me.
“Where did you learn your technique?” he asks.
“Ah…” This is all on my ticket, which is in his hand. The question feels like a trap. “I took regular VCs on—”
“Please refrain from using acronyms.”
“I took virtual classes on an official tech share site for two years, and I’ve been experimenting by myself for much longer. My father is a technician too and he’s given me a lot of guidance.”
“Hardly glowing recommendations,” Keane murmurs. “Your results are acceptable, but your style is irregular and undisciplined, as might be expected after that type of rag tag education. We have high standards here, Miss Salvadore, and scholarships are in high demand. I’m in some doubt about your dedication to this career. Applicants seek out higher training elsewhere before coming here, so that they are prepared for the rigours of the course.”
Blood burns in my face. “I couldn’t afford that kind of tuition, sir.”
“Hmm,” is his only reply. He’s thinking of ways to get rid of me. I will, in his estimation, be a dead weight, a scrappy talent looking for a free ride. To cover my humiliation, I produce a winning smile.
“My results are acceptable, then?”
Keane inclines his head a bit. “Yes, but—”
Athene taps him on the shoulder. He turns around, surprised.
“If you don’t let her in,” she tells him, “you are an unmitigated idiot,” and she strips the skin off her wrist with a flourish.
I will treasure the look on his face forever.
Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Page 38