IT WAS EVERYTHING you’d expect from an institution that initialises as GIT.
There was a good reason that students were supposed to have prior qualifications before entering; the workload was gruelling, the awarding of scholarships a gladiatorial contest. Maranda would never have got her foot in the door without me as a bargaining chip. As it was, she walked a tightrope of negotiation—I hated being ogled, but there were too many people she couldn’t afford to offend. When she took me on-campus for a session with her most persistent professor, he stripped the skin off my arm without asking first, and every time I spoke he either directed the answer at Maranda or ignored me altogether, like we were ventriloquist and dummy. When he reached for my head, I swung off the examination table.
“We didn’t agree to that,” Maranda told him.
“There’s no point if I don’t see inside the cranial cavity,” the professor said, reaching again. I walked out the door without another word, leaving him to shout useless orders in my wake.
“I’m so sorry,” Maranda said, on the way home. “I didn’t know how to put him off any more—”
“You have to learn.” I turned on her, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of my coat. It was an affectation I’d stolen from her. I could gauge the temperature with pinpoint accuracy, but I never got cold. “People will always treat me as an object. I expect better from you.”
She cried all night, even when I climbed into bed beside her and whispered my own apologies in her ear. It was like that, the first year. She was always overtired, often to the edge of hysteria. So I did what any highly advanced robot of dubiously legal status would do; I filled the gaps.
I could learn at treble her speed and could study twenty four hours in a day if necessary. Spending as much time as I did jacked into the administrative cloud, hunting clues to the latest exam, I was in a uniquely advantageous position for spying. By the start of the second year, I had amassed enough compromising data that I never had to go back to campus. It was a good thing Maranda wasn’t out to make friends, because the only one she had was me.
I should have realised that someday I wouldn’t be there to catch the bullet. Even I can be naïve.
HALFWAY THROUGH MY second year at the institute, I transfer into the Armaments course. There are two tracks—government service, which requires a background check, or private security. I take option B and end up studying internal defence. Essentially, that means learning how to turn a modern family home into an intruder’s death trap without ruining the decor. Maybe I have paranoia issues to work through, because I ace every class and the professor starts giving me a cautious berth.
Athene spends a month immersing herself in architectural design while I fake a moneyed accent and call around checking defence packages with the big contractors. Each has its own jargon, but really all you get for a hefty consultation fee is the same standard set of features. For my end of semester project, Athene sketches the layout of a Tudor manor with the precision of a graphics printer and I go to town with a tailored defence system that includes stun darts shot from portrait frames and labyrinthine earthworks to swallow the unwary. We haven’t had so much fun in way too long. I wish it was always like this, lying on the floor with shoulders bumping, surrounded by coffee cups and crumpled notes.
“It would be nice,” Athene says eventually, “to have a house like that.” She offers me a smile, close-lipped, because she’s still getting the hang of teeth. “Protected by you.”
The only places she’s known have been a string of shabby apartments as I chase the lowest possible rent. The idea of one day owning a house on the mainland—a house centuries older than Gaskell itself—is about as achievable as planning to live on the moon, but in that moment I want desperately to make it happen.
One day, maybe it will. How can it hurt to dream?
I SIT QUIETLY and watch them take my wife apart.
Doctor Cross has tried to keep me out of the surgery, switching arguments three times as each one fails her, but the fact of the matter is that no one has the authority or brute strength to physically remove me. I sit with my hands folded primly on one knee, watching intently as Cross opens Maranda’s skull. Initiating my higher functions, I compare the work against a mental log of similar operations. I have no reason to suppose Cross or any of her team are incompetent, but mistakes happen. They’re human. I would have preferred to do the surgery myself, but management of the situation is difficult enough without alienating the medical team appointed by my wife’s lawyers.
The truth is, no one knows what to do with me. On the one hand, I’ve been married to Maranda for the last twenty years and am her official next of kin. On the other hand—the one I wish I could cut off—I am a robot and therefore by definition a possession. A possession cannot manage other possessions. That, the lawyers of Copperfield and Co. told me, straight-faced, would set the wrong precedent.
Hoping to clarify the situation, I went into the firm’s main office, prepared to undergo whatever evaluation they considered necessary to prove my personhood. The psychologist asked very personal questions, but it all seemed to go well enough. That is, right up until I went outside to sign some more forms and the woman—unaware of my auditory acuity— described me as having “an astoundingly well-constructed identity”, but “about as much right to make decisions for a real human being as a toaster.”
I know it won’t be good news long before Cross says anything. If the operation was going to be successful, it would have been over hours ago. The survival rate for ECS victims is less than one in a thousand; from the moment the first shot hit, unloading a syringe’s worth of serum into Maranda’s blood stream, it’s been a battle just to keep her alive.
Humans. They only live about ninety years anyway, but they go ahead and weaponise cancer.
At last, Cross murmurs to her assistants, “Close her up,” and glances at me, gesturing to the door. I follow her out.
“The damage is more extensive than we thought,” Cross begins. “Growing the cells for partial reconstruction will take time and she’s got a limited window of that, but the real problem is how far the tumours have already spread. This is a particularly virulent mutation and it’s proven highly resistant to all the conventional treatments.”
“So what do you intend to do?”
My unshakeable composure often unsettles people who don’t know me, but it brings out something close to open hostility in Cross. I’m not really surprised. Although medical researchers are not supposed to accept grants from the Humanity Line, the anti-robot activists are experts at professional recruitment. Scientists have spent centuries talking about the possibilities of artificial intelligence, but now AIs are actually out there, walking and talking and thinking for themselves, no one seems all that pleased with the discovery any more. I understand a fear of the unknown—that’s how I feel about humanity all the time, messy, chaotic creatures that they are—but that doesn’t mean I feel like putting up with a stranger’s crappy attitude. It was someone like Cross, someone who thought of Maranda’s work as an abomination against her own race, who shot her on her way home from work.
It wasn’t Cross. I have to remember that.
“It’s time to move her,” Cross says, her undertone of belligerence grating on my already strained patience. “The facilities are too limited here. She needs to get to a real hospital.”
“She stays. Any equipment you need can be brought here.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Cross snaps. “The decision is in the hands of her lawyers and as her medical representative my strong recommendation will be that she is moved as soon as possible. This charade has gone on long enough—”
“What charade would that be, doctor?”
Cross shivers. Just by speaking it aloud, I have turned her title into a curse. Me and my terrible powers—I wish I felt like laughing. I have a wonderful maniacal laugh, even better than Maranda’s, and that’s saying something.
Instead of answering, Cros
s turns on her heel and goes back inside the makeshift surgery. I stand facing the door, thinking about the passive-aggressive resistance waiting on the other side and the series of inevitabilities lined up like dominoes, the momentum that will build from the instant the first one falls. That is how bureaucracy operates.
It’s enlightening, being the avatar of demonic science. Everyone should try it.
I GET EVERYTHING I need from the academy on Gaskell in three years. By the time I’m twenty, we’re travelling around the southern hemisphere, studying in Melbourne and Sydney, contracting in Hong Kong and Beijing. Everyone wants to meet us, particularly Athene. She’s basically unrecognisable from the charred husk I rescued in Port Geddes, but she worries anyway and we’re careful how much we say. I gain a reputation for being enigmatical.
One day we meet with a friend of a friend for yum cha and spend the whole time talking about the future of AI technology. No one understands this like Athene. The friend starts off aiming all his remarks at me, then goes quiet as he watches us bounce ideas like tennis balls, me scoffing dumplings and waving my chopsticks around to illustrate various points, Athene making deadpan jokes and breathing in the scent of her favourite jasmine tea. We look like any other expat couple in our mid twenties. Well, perhaps a bit more eccentric than some; I am scruffy and punkish in an oversized woollen jumper and steel-capped boots, while Athene is all thick black ringlets and Regency-style dresses. She is a centre of calm. I can’t keep still. We are the perfect team.
Our new friend asks abruptly, “How would you like to work in Tokyo?”
“DOCTOR CROSS WANTS to see you. She’s waiting in her office.”
I spent the night sitting beside Maranda’s bed, lost in circular arguments with myself. I vaguely recognise the assistant in the doorway, but haven’t bothered to register a name; most of Cross’s team reflect her prejudice to varying degrees and some, like this one, add to that an air of badly controlled fear. I sometimes like to experiment with their tolerance levels, but today I’m too worn out to care. It feels as if I’ve been co-opted into a farcical drama in which everyone expects me to play Fool.
I kiss Maranda on the forehead and go down the hall to the spare bedroom that has been requisitioned by Cross as an office. My heels click a familiar rhythm against the glass floor. This house is a Heritage site with architecture dating back to the Tudors and traces from every era since, all maintained behind preservation glass and lit by decorative baubles suspended from the ceiling. This hallway, for instance, is lined in layers of Regency wallpaper, stripped into rows of floral memory. The bedroom is more Victorian, with an ornate fireplace emerging from the glass surface of the wall. Its present occupants are criminally unimpressed.
Dr Cross is indeed waiting. The assistant omitted to mention that she is backed up by six new minions, none of whom I have seen before. “My team are moving Ms Salvadore today,” she says. “I have permission.”
“No.” My tone is polite, so polite, push-me-one-inch-further-and-you-die-a-painfuldeath polite. “The only permission that counts is mine, Dr Cross, it says so in her will, and I quite definitely have not consented to any transfer.”
“The will is not valid.”
I pause to consider the statement. “Who told you that, doctor?”
Instead of answering my question, Cross activates a wrist projector. The image of a document appears in the air between us, a close-written paper with the Copperfield and Co. letterhead; never a good sign, in my experience. It takes me only a few seconds to absorb the contents of the letter. Maranda’s father—with whom she severed all contact nineteen years ago—has been exhumed from his latest incarceration to replace me as her legal guardian. Apparently even a petty criminal with a lengthy history of fraud is preferable to the robot.
It’s over. I did everything I could. Maranda will understand.
“You have ten minutes to get out of my house,” I announce. “In fact, I’d advise you get as far away from here as you can. I would have worked with you, doctor, but if I’m honest, I’ll like this way better.”
“I received the notification this morning,” Cross retorts. “You have no legal right to make decisions on my patient’s behalf. A state warden has been appointed in your stead.”
“Is the situation that difficult to compute?” one of the assistants demands, sounding indignant. How dare the robot talk back! You’d almost think it was alive. “The warden will be here in an hour. If you have any sense of duty to Ms Salvadore, you’ll recognise this is the most logical course of action.”
Cross shakes her head impatiently. “Oh, don’t bother, Gao. How can you expect a robot to understand death?”
On the tenth anniversary of our wedding, Maranda gave me an adorable little antique pistol and showed me how to use it. It would be completely pointless against all modern weaponry, of course, but I placed a lot of sentimental value on the thing and now I’m glad I kept it operational. Is there any surer way to get a human’s attention?
“Well,” I say, “it’s funny you should ask.”
IN TOKYO THE revolution happened a long time ago. Robots are everywhere—driving trams and collecting rubbish in the big cities, operating the bulwarks and power plants on the coast, doing anything really that requires undivided concentration and a complete lack of ego. There is even an all-robot children’s pop group, who have the commercial advantage of never getting sick of each other. This is a part of Japanese culture now, something so natural people look at me funny when I get excited about it.
To me, this is seventh heaven. Athene is not so sure.
“Are there any real AIs at all?” she asks one night as we’re walking through the bright city centre, striding along at a relentless pace that parts the crowds with ease. It’s lucky my legs are longer than hers or I would never keep up. “I don’t like it, Maranda. There are robots everywhere and I can’t talk to any of them.”
“Maybe we’re looking in the wrong places.”
Athene thrusts her hands into her coat pockets. “Maybe I’m the only one.”
We get a flat close to Hachi Academy, a soaring university complex on the outskirts of Tokyo that is so new it has disciplines you can’t find anywhere else. I join a research program into multisensory simulations and pursue my own projects on the kitchen table at home (we have not used that table for anything food-related since our first meal there). Whatever surface is not coated in my microchips and partially completed models is occupied by Athene’s stacked reference texts. She has always been a voracious learner, accumulating more than a dozen degrees that count for less than nothing just because she’s the one holding them.
In Japan, it’s different. The dean at Hachi offers her a junior lecturing post and within a month it seems like every university in the country is trying to poach her. Together we publish a series of papers on the future of AI technology. Athene agrees to let a select few of our scientist friends study her internal systems, the ones I have built and rebuilt out of all recognition over the years, but no one is allowed inside her head except me. One day I take footage of myself working so she can see what it’s like in there and she watches it later that night while we’re in bed. I know that because she wakes me up at three a.m. by shoving a screen under my nose.
“Do you know what this is?”
“Uh?”
“This is the design you found when you first opened me up, yes? Most of what you’ve done in my head is just repairs and research, isn’t that right?” Her tone is urgent. Suddenly alert, I sit up, take a look at the screen and nod. “Maranda, I think I know how they did it. This is a brain. Someone recreated an actual human brain. It operates on electronic pulses anyway, that’s not so great a step—some of your friends have been experimenting with the same thing—but whoever made me didn’t do it from scratch. You know how surgeons use neural overlays when they’re doing brain surgery?” I don’t, I’m not the one with three medical degrees, but she’s still talking, holding the screen so tightly that the casing
cracks. “I think that’s what they did here. Maranda, there is only one way to get a scan this detailed. The brain could have been living when they started, but it wouldn’t have stayed that way for long.”
MOST OF DR. Cross’s team are only too happy to get out the door when asked politely by the deranged robot with a gun in her hand. Cross is made of stronger stuff. She says a lot of things like ‘you’ll never get away with it’ and ‘it would be better to just let go’, as though she thinks she can actually reason me out of this. She gives up when I fire a warning shot at the ceiling (thank you, Maranda, for insisting on blast-proof glass) and runs to join the rest of the medical team. As I watch them disappear across the long sloping lawn, I finally get a message from Copperfield and Co.
While they are grateful for my cooperation, the psychological test has come up with a negative. In short, I’m not really a person. Have a nice day!
“Oh, fuck off,” I sigh, and bring up the drawbridge.
Over the next few days, the authorities make concerted efforts to breach the household’s defences, but are left baffled by the boundless creativity of one Maranda Salvadore. She’s always thought that locks are something that happen to everybody else, and took precautions to make sure it stayed that way. The defence systems embedded in and around the house could probably hold off a full-scale military invasion, at least for a short time, and that’s good, because time is what I need.
No, that’s not quite true. What I really need is Maranda.
I’M KNEELING ON the carpet in our flat in Tokyo, adjusting the work lights to the exact angle I need. Athene sits cross-legged, her back to me, the mass of her hair carefully removed and perched on a stand in our bedroom until the procedure is over. The back of her head is open. We’re looking for clues.
Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction Page 39