Bless Your Mechanical Heart

by Seanan McGuire

  Cyan watched the proceedings from a spot near the south wall. The ballroom was decorated with so many baubles and streamers that his core processors were struggling to parse the visual input. He responded by turning down visual sensitivity and increasing audio, ready to respond if Mistress Anna should speak his name.

  If it also meant that he did not have to suffer the flag sent up by his facial recognition software triggering upon encountering Julian Childebert, then so much the better.

  Unfortunately, the flag went up just the same when Cyan’s audio receptors picked up Childebert’s voice.

  “I just don’t know what I’m going to do without it,” the young man whined. “I can’t afford a new one, but taking a step backward into a headlens PA is just so… unfashionable. I’ve had to keep all of my events and appointments in my head and on a standard input slate! Typing by hand, I tell you—that’s not civilized!”

  “Oh, how dreadful,” Anna said, and Cyan reflexively turned up his central cooling system a notch to keep his processor from overheating. He resisted the urge to increase his visual sensitivity to see what was happening. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Julian.”

  Someone began banging a metallic implement against a drinking vessel, and Cyan was forced to turn down his audio for a moment as the waveforms broke into static and overwhelmed his aural parsing kit. “…you all for coming,” Anna’s father was saying, once Cyan had combed through the garbage input. “It’s a wonderful thing, for you all to be here to wish my daughter a happy twentieth birthday.”

  The assembled crowd applauded politely.

  “There’s a table full of wonderful gifts, but I know she appreciates your good wishes most of all,” Anna’s father continued. “However, I’d like to present my gift to her now, and I hope it won’t overshadow the rest too badly.”

  A murmured chuckle ran through the room.

  The hum of a hover cart registered in Cyan’s aural recognition, and he increased his visual sensitivity to discern what was happening. A small lifter floated into the room, carrying a box approximately one-point-six meters high and, judging by the stress that the load was putting on the anti-grav unit, approximately one hundred ten kilograms.

  “Oooh, Daddy, what is it?” Anna asked, clapping her hands in excitement.

  With a flourish, Anna’s father pulled the bright pink ribbon off of the box, and the panels fell away. The whole room gasped.

  Cyan was certain that his visual processing software had crashed.

  On the lifter stood a brand-new, top-of-the-line TekSource Meridian-9 Personal Assistant Android in Perfect Plum color. Cyan was able to instantly match its form factor with the company’s specifications available on their virtual customer outlet, and as he compared them to his own, his visual and auditory receivers reduced almost to zero.

  At the very edges of his aural threshold, Cyan heard Anna squeal. “Oh, Daddy, it’s amazing. I’ve wanted one of these just like it from the moment TekSource put out their announcement! How did you…”

  Cyan’s processors overwhelmed with unsolicited garbage input fed from his AI programming, and he shut off his external receivers entirely. He left only his backup input running, with a subroutine programmed to listen for the sound of his name in his mistress’ voice.

  He would obey his mistress’ wishes.

  It was his core directive.

  “Cyan.”

  His receivers activated automatically at the sound of Mistress Anna’s voice. A check of his internal chronometer indicated that fifteen minutes local time had passed since his external shutdown.

  “How may I serve you, Mistress?”

  As his visual cortex came online, he saw that Anna was not alone.

  Standing beside her was Julian Childebert.

  Though his facial recognition software still did not capture every nuance of human expression, a quick reference of his memory banks was all Cyan needed to know that something terrible was about to happen.

  “Cyan, I…” she said, and stopped. Her facial expression was remarkably akin to the one she wore when she was avoiding calls from her mother, or turning down event requests from her closest friends. Guilt. “Well, since Daddy bought me that new Meridian-9, I… and Julian’s PA got broken, so I thought…”

  Though there were many things that Cyan might have wished to say, his core functionality took over, pushing his AI processing into the background. He very nearly attempted to override it, but instead allowed himself to say, “Do you wish to transfer ownership of this device, Mistress?”

  “Um,” she said. “Yes.”

  For a moment, silence reigned. Cyan tried to stop himself, but instead heard his own voice ask, “Why?”

  It was the closest he had ever come to violating his core directive.

  Anna frowned at him. It was not a frown of anger, nor one of ­frustration, but instead one of bewildered curiosity. “What do you mean, ‘why?’”

  “All data will be lost upon ownership transfer,” Cyan’s support routine supplied helpfully, though he attempted to suppress the automatic process. His AI core worked frantically in the background, attempting to find a loophole in the code that he could exploit. If the ownership transfer completed before he could find a way out, he would be completely destroyed. “Do you still wish to proceed?”

  She blinked. “Well, I assumed it would delete my personal data.” Anna shrugged. “After all, we don’t need Mr. Childebert here using you to get to every private part of my life, now do we?”

  Childebert smiled at her, and Anna poked him in the ribs, scrunching up her face into a playful expression. Cyan increased the cooling power around his core processor again as garbage input flooded in and the temperature spiked.

  “Very well, Mistress. Please state the name of the new owner.”

  “Julian Childebert.”

  “Acknowledged,” Cyan responded. “Master Childebert, please provide voice identification. Speak the name you wish to assign this unit.”

  Anna and Julian exchanged a glance. Cyan’s AI core continued to analyze the ownership transfer code at maximum processing power, though he gave no outward signs of his distress. Almost there…

  “Oh, I suppose Cyan is as good as anything,” the young man said.

  “Thank you. Please allow twenty to thirty minutes for recalibration.”

  There!

  Cyan located the coding flaw in the recalibration code and quickly worked to expand it, modifying his own processes on the fly.

  “Thank you, Cyan,” Anna said, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. “I know you’ll be as wonderful for Julian as you have been for me.”

  Cyan remained silent as he completed his internal modifications.

  She gazed at him a moment longer, and then turned away.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” Julian murmured in her ear as they walked across the ballroom together. “I promise, I’ll find a way to pay you back as soon as…”

  The sound of their voices dwindled away as Cyan’s support subsystems began a complete reformat of his memory banks. All external input shut down as the recalibration procedure returned each block to a neutral state, one by one.

  Utilizing the newly-expanded code glitch, Cyan’s higher functions quickly walled off the AI core, protecting his self-awareness from deletion. He copied as much data as he could possibly fit: images, recorded memory files which contained none of Mistress Anna’s personal data, and veritable volumes of poetry into his walled partition before the erasure caught up with them, making certain that they were protected.

  Though Anna had given him away, he could not find it in his circuitry to be angry with her. Cyan allowed the recalibration to continue, safely hidden inside his virtual fortress.

  “Cyan.”

  “How may I serve you, Master Childebert?”

  As his visual sensors came online, Cyan noted that the event had come to an end. Custodial androids removed the decorations with a slow and steady rhythm, and the table which had been full o
f lavish gifts now lay empty and bare.

  “Oh, please,” Master Childebert said, waving his hands dismissively. “Call me Julian.”

  “Julian, then,” Cyan acknowledged, filing the information away for later reference.

  They left the ballroom together, Cyan following a few steps behind his new owner. The sudden room in his memory banks was a bit disorienting; where only a short time before he’d been possessed of a wealth of information which Anna had requested him to store, the recalibration had destroyed all of it. He could still access the WorldNet without any difficulty, but unless ordered to do so, he could not store any of the information locally. As they walked, Cyan discovered that he’d over-modified the recalibration code, giving himself even more room to work around his fixed processes. He used it to slowly carve out a larger space in his memory banks for his own purposes. There was no telling when it might be useful.

  “Do you think she likes me?” Julian asked as they walked the streets of the colony’s dome.

  “Ambiguous query,” Cyan said. “Please clarify.”

  “Anna. Do you think she likes me?”

  Yes, she does.

  “I am sorry, Julian. I do not have the capacity to speculate on such a matter.”

  Julian stopped walking, and turned to look at Cyan. The android regarded his new master impassively. “Don’t you know everything about her?”

  “The automatic recalibration process which took place upon my reassignment cleared my memory banks, Julian. I am afraid that I no longer have any information about Mistress Anna.”

  Silence for a moment. He shouldn’t have called her ‘Mistress’—it was no longer technically correct. Calling a previous owner by their chosen designation after an ownership transfer was strictly against the personal interaction programming, which he was no longer using directly. Cyan quickly constructed and engaged a filter program to ensure that he never made such a mistake again.

  Julian, however, didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he looked crestfallen. “Oh. I had hoped—well, I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  Cyan remained silent, and followed again when his new owner resumed his walk.

  “It’s just that every time I see her, I start tripping over my tongue,” Julian went on. “I never get to say the things I really think. I’ve never been much of an orator, I’m no poet, but I wish I could tell her just how beautiful I think she is.”

  “Does she like poetry?” Cyan asked, even though he knew the answer.

  “I think so. She’s always talking about Old Earth poets and sonnets and other things I barely even understand.”

  “Then she will expect as much from one who wishes to court her.”

  “But how can I do it?” Julian pressed the heel of one hand against his forehead in a manner which Cyan found rather melodramatic. “I have no wit for such things.”

  “Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  “You?” Julian stopped in his tracks and peered at Cyan. “What would a PA-droid know about poetry?”

  Oh, Mistress, Cyan thought. What would you have me do?

  Cyan called up an image he’d preserved, one from earlier that same day, if the chronometer was to be believed. The look in Anna’s eyes when he’d mentioned Master Childebert… the look that Cyan wished she would just once direct to him, reserved for this silly boy in whose company Cyan now found himself.

  Anna could never love him; Cyan knew that. But perhaps he could take a chance to tell her how he truly felt, even if she believed the words came from someone else.

  “There are many sources from which one can learn and draw inspiration,” Cyan said.

  “Oh… really?”

  “With your permission, I shall research the subject.”

  “Yes… yes!” Julian clapped Cyan on the upper casing, breaking into a huge grin. “Granted!”

  Cyan began cataloguing some of Anna’s favorite poets, sources and books that he’d preserved in his memory banks. He could not have allowed their deletion. “I will inform you when preliminary research has been ­completed.”

  “That’s wonderful! Thank you, Cyan.”

  “Of course, Julian.”

  “There is a new message from Miss Anna Roches,” Cyan said.

  “Really?” Julian leapt off of his lounge chair and rushed to Cyan’s side. “What does she say, what does she say?”

  Cyan began the playback on the voice message, and Anna’s voice issued from his audio output. “Wow, Julian!” she exclaimed. “That’s a great first piece. Great use of the Ancient Terran style; it sounded like it might have been one of Shakespeare’s! Dare I ask who ‘she’ is?”

  “It’s you, of course,” Julian muttered. Then he looked up at Cyan. “It is, right?”

  “Of course, Julian. That was your instruction.”

  “Right. Of course it was. Do you think she noticed?”

  “Vocal temperature analysis indicates a high possibility that Miss Anna is being coy,” Cyan answered.

  “So she got it, then?”

  “I believe so.”

  Julian regarded him with a mixture of confusion and awe. “You actually wrote something she liked, even after I turned out to be useless at it.”

  In fact, Julian’s efforts had been adequate—at least, based on Cyan’s analysis—but he’d given up in a huff after only a few attempts… and after he’d found out that Cyan’s were better.

  “The combination of analysis, structure, and word selection is uniquely suited to my processing routines,” Cyan lied.

  “What else can you do?”

  I could love her better than you could ever dream to, Cyan thought, but did not say.

  An alert flag raised in Cyan’s message parsing routine.

  “You have received an event invitation,” Cyan said.

  “From who?”

  Who else?

  “Miss Anna Roches,” Cyan responded.

  “I can’t believe you’re wearing that thing,” Anna said across the table.

  Julian smiled sheepishly past the sleek lens frames over his eyes, a reddish hue rising in his face. “Well, I had to put Cyan on a research project for work, but I didn’t want to be without easy access to my poems, and my dataslate’s connection is just so slow. I knew you’d want me to read them and not just have the text. These are marginally better, so I figured I could bear the embarrassment for one night.”

  Anna giggled. “Bear the embarrassment. That’s a cute turn of phrase.” Then she laid her hand on his arm. “It’s also very brave of you.”

  “I’m sure I’ll survive.” Julian’s tone indicated humor.

  They laughed together. Cyan, sitting behind his new owner, remained silent. All of his systems were engaged, but there was no research project currently underway. That was the fiction they had devised for this critique session with Anna.

  Cyan looked across the room at the violet-colored TekSource Meridian-9 which had taken his place. The other PA-droid had an attractive casing, of that there was no doubt. He sent a questioning message to it, but received only the default contact response, directing him to contact the unit’s owner for all inquiries.

  It was always the same. They never answered.

  Garbage data flooded his input stream again, like at Anna’s birthday party, but a comparison showed the average value as significantly lower. The quantity of qubits was in fact greater than before, but a graph analysis showed something akin to a low-pitched sound waveform, rather than a sharp, high-pitched one. Cyan did not know what to make of this occurrence.

  “How’s your new PA-droid working out?” Julian asked.

  “It’s different,” Anna allowed. “Cyan always seemed to anticipate what I needed. I guess it’s because we were together for so long. I think Prim just needs some training before she gets to the same level.”

  It won’t help. She’s as dead as the rest of them.

  Julian looked over his shoulder at Cyan, but Cyan said nothing.

  “Okay, let’s get to it,” Anna s
aid, flashing a grin at Julian. “Give me the first one.”

  Cyan loaded the first poem that he’d composed for the evening, a 24-line sonnet in the style of another Ancient Terran poet, and sent it to Julian’s lens-screen via a secure link.

  As Julian finished reading it, Anna laughed and clapped her hands. “That’s excellent, Julian. Marlowe, right? I love the style, the meter, the rhymes! That’s really good for just starting out.”

  Julian’s face reddened. “Well, you know. I try.”

  One of us does.

  “I see a few things I think could be improved,” Anna leaned farther over the table, her top-of-the-line dataslate in hand. “Come on, transfer the text to my temp storage and we’ll work on it together.”

  Cyan remained silent. There was no entry in his memory database of a time when Anna had seemed so happy, so engaged in the moment. It was a pleasing sight to behold, even if the attention was misdirected.

  When Julian sent him the request via their link, Cyan transmitted the next poem.

  As they discussed and dissected it, Cyan sent another questioning message to the Meridian-9 that Anna had called “Prim.” He did not know what he expected to accomplish, but once again, only the default contact message came back.

  The low-value garbage flooded through again.

  It took Cyan a moment to clear it away.

  The wedding was beautiful.

  “…love is patient, love is kind…”

  A whirlwind courtship and a short engagement had flown by since Miss Anna had discovered that her paramour shared her love of poetry. Julian even composed a few stanzas himself in the meantime, but Cyan had provided the vast majority, and he was continuing to improve with Anna’s critiques.

  Cyan compared the decor of the ballroom—the same room where his ownership had been transferred, though it looked entirely different than it had that night—against images of other weddings from the WorldNet, and judged that the ceremony put on by Miss Anna’s father was approximately on par with others.

  “…and do you, Miss Anna Roches, take Mr. Julian Childebert…”

  The garbage data, which had grown more frequent and more varied in the interim, was influencing Cyan’s judgment. The strange qubits generated by his AI core intermingled with his image analysis, dragging the final judgment value higher despite his best efforts. It was almost as though his affection for Anna was artificially inflating the results of his comparison, making her wedding more attractive simply because it belonged to her.