by Neil Clarke
“Oh, no!” Jervis sat back, appearing genuinely shocked. “A home companion has no sense of I, it has no identity. It’s an object. Naturally, you become attached. People become attached to dolls, to stuffed animals, to automobiles. It’s a natural aspect of the human psyche.”
Roz hummed encouragement, but Jervis seemed to be done.
Peter asked, “Is there any reason why a companion would wish to listen to music?”
That provoked enthusiastic head-shaking. “No, it doesn’t get bored. It’s a tool, it’s a toy. A companion does not require an enriched environment. It’s not a dog or an octopus. You can store it in a closet when it’s not working.”
“I see,” Roz said. “Even an advanced model like Mr. Steele’s?”
“Absolutely,” Jervis said. “Does your entertainment center play shooter games to amuse itself while you sleep?”
“I’m not sure,” Roz said. “I’m asleep. So when Dolly’s returned to you, she’ll be scrubbed.”
“Normally she would be scrubbed and re-leased, yes.” Jervis hesitated. “Given her colorful history, however—”
“Yes,” Roz said. “I see.”
With no sign of nervousness or calculation, Jervis said, “When do you expect you’ll be done with Mr. Steele’s companion? My company, of course, is eager to assist in your investigations, but we must stress that she is our corporate property, and quite valuable.”
Roz stood, Peter a shadow-second after her. “That depends on if it goes to trial, Mr. Jervis. After all, she’s either physical evidence, or a material witness.”
“Or the killer,” Peter said in the hall, as his handset began emitting the DNA lab’s distinctive beep. Roz’s went off a second later, but she just hit the silence. Peter already had his open.
“No genetic material,” he said. “Too bad.” If there had been DNA other than Clive Steele’s, the lab could have done a forensic genetic assay and come back with a general description of the murderer. General because environment also had an effect.
Peter bit his lip. “If she did it. She won’t be the last one.”
“If she’s the murder weapon, she’ll be wiped and resold. If she’s the murderer—”
“Can an android stand trial?”
“It can if it’s a person. And if she’s a person, she should get off. Battered woman syndrome. She was enslaved and sexually exploited. Humiliated. She killed him to stop repeated rapes. But if she’s a machine, she’s a machine—” Roz closed her eyes.
Peter brushed the back of a hand against her arm. “Vanilla rape is still rape. Do you object to her getting off?”
“No.” Roz smiled harshly. “And think of the lawsuit that weasel Jervis will have in his lap. She should get off. But she won’t.”
Peter turned his head. “If she were a human being, she’d have even odds. But she’s a machine. Where’s she going to get a jury of her peers?”
The silence fell where he left it and dragged between them like a chain. Roz had to nerve herself to break it. “Peter—”
“Yo?”
“You show him out,” she said. “I’m going to go talk to Dolly.”
He looked at her for a long time before he nodded. “She won’t get a sympathetic jury. If you can even find a judge that will hear it. Careers have been buried for less.”
“I know,” Roz said.
“Self-defense?” Peter said. “We don’t have to charge.”
“No judge, no judicial precedent,” Roz said. “She goes back, she gets wiped and resold. Ethics aside, that’s a ticking bomb.”
Peter nodded. He waited until he was sure she already knew what he was going to say before he finished the thought. “She could cop.”
“She could cop,” Roz agreed. “Call the DA.” She kept walking as Peter turned away.
Dolly stood in Peter’s office, where Peter had left her, and you could not have proved her eyes had blinked in the interim. They blinked when Roz came into the room, though—blinked, and the perfect and perfectly blank oval face turned to regard Roz. It was not a human face, for a moment—not even a mask, washed with facsimile emotions. It was just a thing.
Dolly did not greet Roz. She did not extend herself to play the perfect hostess. She simply watched, expressionless, immobile after that first blink. Her eyes saw nothing; they were cosmetic. Dolly navigated the world through far more sophisticated sensory systems than a pair of visible light cameras.
“Either you’re the murder weapon,” Roz said, “and you will be wiped and repurposed. Or you are the murderer, and you will stand trial.”
“I do not wish to be wiped,” Dolly said. “If I stand trial, will I go to jail?”
“If a court will hear it,” Roz said. “Yes. You will probably go to jail. Or be disassembled. Alternately, my partner and I are prepared to release you on grounds of self-defense.”
“In that case,” Dolly said, “the law states that I am the property of Venus Consolidated.”
“The law does.”
Roz waited. Dolly, who was not supposed to be programmed to play psychological pressure-games, waited also—peaceful, unblinking.
No longer making the attempt to pass for human.
Roz said, “There is a fourth alternative. You could confess.”
Dolly’s entire programmed purpose was reading the emotional state and unspoken intentions of people. Her lips curved in understanding. “What happens if I confess?”
Roz’s heart beat faster. “Do you wish to?”
“Will it benefit me?”
“It might,” Roz said. “Detective King has been in touch with the DA, and she likes a good media event as much as the next guy. Make no mistake, this will be that.”
“I understand.”
“The situation you were placed in by Mr. Steele could be a basis for a lenience. You would not have to face a jury trial, and a judge might be convinced to treat you as . . . well, as a person. Also, a confession might be seen as evidence of contrition. Possession is oversold, you know. It’s precedent that’s nine tenths of the law. There are, of course, risks—”
“I would like to request a lawyer,” Dolly said.
Roz took a breath that might change the world. “We’ll proceed as if that were your legal right, then.”
Roz’s house let her in with her key, and the smell of roasted sausage and baking potatoes wafted past.
“Sven?” she called, locking herself inside.
His even voice responded. “I’m in the kitchen.”
She left her shoes in the hall and followed her nose through the cheaply furnished living room, as different from Steele’s white wasteland as anything bounded by four walls could be. Her feet did not sink deeply into this carpet, but skipped along atop it like stones.
It was clean, though, and that was Sven’s doing. And she was not coming home to an empty house, and that was his doing too.
He was cooking shirtless. He turned and greeted her with a smile. “Bad day?”
“Nobody died,” she said. “Yet.”
He put the wooden spoon down on the rest. “How does that make you feel, that nobody has died yet?” “Hopeful,” she said.
“It’s good that you’re hopeful,” he said. “Would you like your dinner?”
“Do you like music, Sven?”
“I could put on some music, if you like. What do you want to hear?”
“Anything.” It would be something off her favorites playlist, chosen by random numbers. As it swelled in the background, Sven picked up the spoon. “Sven?”
“Yes, Rosamund?”
“Put the spoon down, please, and come and dance with me?” “I do not know how to dance.”
“I’ll buy you a program,” she said. “If you’d like that. But right now just come put your arms around me and pretend.” “Whatever you want,” he said.
Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel, Warchild, won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Bo
th Warchild (2002) and her third novel Cagebird (2005) were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English and the Spectrum Award also in 2006. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese, and her short stories have appeared in anthologies edited by Nalo Hopkinson, John Joseph Adams, Jonathan Strahan, and Ann VanderMeer.
A GOOD HOME
KARIN LOWACHEE
I brought him home from the VA shelter and sat him in front of the window because the doctors said he liked that. The shelter had set him in safe mode for transport until I could voice activate him again, and recalibrate, but safe mode still allowed for base functions like walking, observation, and primary speech. He seemed to like the window because he blinked once. Their kind didn’t blink ordinarily, and they never wept, so I always wondered where the sadness went. If you couldn’t cry then it all turned inward.
The VA staff said he didn’t talk and that was from the war. His model didn’t allow for complete resetting or non-consensual dismantling; he was only five years old, so fell under the Autonomy legislation. The head engineer at the VA said the diagnostics didn’t show any physical impairment, so his silence was self-imposed. The android psychologist worked with him for six months and deemed him non-violent and in need of a good home. So here he was, at my home.
My mother thought the adoption was crazy. We spoke over comm. I was in my kitchen, she in her home office where she sold data bolts to underdeveloped countries. “You don’t know where they’ve been, Tawn,” she said. “And he’s a war model? Don’t they get flashbacks, go berserk, and kill you in your sleep?”
“You watch too much double-vee.”
“He must be in the shelter for a reason. If the government doesn’t want him and he’s not fit for industry, why would you want to take him on?”
I knew this would be futile, arguing against prejudice, but I said it anyway. “The VA needs people to adopt them or they have nowhere to go. We made them, they’re sentient, we have to be responsible for them. Just because he can’t fight anymore doesn’t mean he’s not worth something. Besides, it’s not like I just sign a contract and they hand him over. The doctors and engineers and everybody have to agree that I’d be a good owner. I went through dozens of interviews and so did he.”
“Didn’t you say he doesn’t talk? How did they interview him? How can you be sure he’s not violent?”
“They downloaded his experience files. They observed him, and I trust them. The VA takes care of these models.”
“Then let them take care of him.”
She knew less about the war than she did about me, her son, except that the war got in the way of her sales sometimes. Just like I’d gotten in the way of her potential as a lifestyle designer, and instead of living some perceived, deserved celebrity, she’d had to raise me. Sometimes I wondered if I harbored that thought more than she did, but then she kicked my rivets on things like this and not even the distance of a comm could hide her general disapproval at my existence.
Still, she was worried about the android killing me in my sleep. That might’ve been sincere. “The VA’s overcrowded. That’s why they allow for adoptions.”
Because she was losing the reasonable argument, she targeted something else. The fallback: my self-esteem. “Why would they think you’re a good owner? You can’t even afford to get your spine fixed. How are you going to support a traumatized war model?”
That was how she saw me—in need of fixing. “He can help me. I can help him.”
Even through a double-vee relay I felt her pity. And I saw it in her eyes. That seemed to be the only way she knew how to care about me. I wasn’t going to do that to him.
“Mark.” Saying his name in my voice brought him out of safe mode. He blinked but didn’t turn away from the window. He didn’t move. They’d said it would take a while. Maybe a long while. He’d been at An Loöc, Rally 9, and Pir Hul. The three deepest points of the war. Five years old but he’d seen the worst action. I wondered why none of the creators had anticipated trauma in them. So maybe they weren’t as fully developed as humans could be; they were built to task. But they were also built with intelligence and some capacity for emotional judgment because purely analytical and efficient judgment had made the first models into sociopaths. All of those had been put down (that they’d caught, anyway).
“Mark,” I said, “my name’s Tawn Altamirano.” He knew that, they put it in his programming, but you introduced yourself to strangers. To people. “You feel free to look around my home. This is your home too. There’s a power board in the office when you need it. You can come to me at any time if you need anything.”
He didn’t move or look at me. His eyes were black irises and they stared through the glass of the window, as if it could look back. Maybe he saw his own reflection, faint as it was. Maybe he wanted to wait until night when it would become clearer. Or maybe he just wanted to watch the maple tree sway, and the children walking by on the sidewalk on their way home from school.
I had my routines pretty well established by now. Since my own discharge two years ago, and once the bulk of the physio was under my belt, I’d acclimated back home, got a job through the veterans program working net security for the local university. Despite what my mother said, I took care of myself. My war benefits allowed for some renovation of the bungalow—ramps and wide doorways and the like. When it was time for bed I left the chair beside it and levered myself onto the mattress. Some shifting later and I lay beneath the covers on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I didn’t hear him in the living room at all. Eventually I called off the lights and darkness led me to sleep.
I didn’t know what woke me—maybe instinct. But I opened my eyes and a shadow stood in the doorway of my bedroom. For a second my heart stopped, then started up again at twice the pace until I saw that he didn’t move, he wasn’t going berserk, he wasn’t preparing to kill me. Of course he wasn’t. My mother didn’t know the reality. Going to war didn’t make you a murderer—it made you afraid.
His shape stood black against the moonlight behind him, what came through the living room window on the other end of the hall.
“Mark?”
He didn’t answer. “Mark, what’s wrong?”
A foolish question, maybe, but he could parse that I meant right this second. Not the generality of what was wrong. Not the implication of what was wrong with him. What had drawn him from the window and to the threshold of my room?
I pushed myself up on my elbows and opened my mouth to call up the lights.
But he turned around and disappeared down the hallway, back toward the living room and his standing post by the window.
He was still there in the morning when I rolled through the living room on my way to the kitchen. As if he hadn’t moved all night. Past his shoulders, in the early day outside, the children walked the opposite way now, some of them skipping on their way to school. A few of them held hands with their parents, mothers and fathers.
“Do you need a power up?” I said from in front of the fridge. To remind him that he had a board in the office. No answer. So I took out my eggs and toast and made myself some breakfast. I had to give him time; it always took time.
A little after fifteen hundred hours when the schools let out, I got a knock on my front door. I was in the office so it took me a few seconds to get to the foyer, punch open the door, face the man and woman standing like missionaries on my porch. Behind them at the bottom of my driveway stood another man with three kids by his side. I looked up at the two directly in front of me. “Can I help you?”
“Hello,” the man said, looking down at me. To his credit, he didn’t adopt the surprised and awkward mien of someone unused to confronting a person in a chair. If anything he seemed a little impatient.
“My name’s Arjan and this is Olivia. We were just wondering . . . well, we were a little concerned about your . . . the Mark model in your window.”
I glanced behind
me toward the living room, saw the back of his shoulders and the straight stance of his vigil. “What about him?”
“He’s creeping out our kids,” said Olivia. “Twice they’ve gone by and he’s just standing there. He’s not a cat. What’s wrong with him?”
If you had a double-vee, you knew about the Mark androids. Ten years ago, the reveal by the military had garnered a lot of press and criticism, but ultimately people preferred sending look-alike soldiers into battle rather than their own sons and daughters. All of the Marks looked the same, so they were easily identifiable; nobody could mistake them for human despite the indistinguishability of the cosmetics. The adoption program had garnered similar press and criticism; the VA had looked into my neighborhood before releasing Mark to me. We were supposed to be a tolerant, liberal piece of society here.
That was the theory, anyway.
“He’s not doing anything, he just likes to look out the window.” “All day?” Olivia said.
“Have you been outside my house all day?” Because otherwise why would it bother her if she only went by twice a day to pick up her kids, and that took all of two minutes?
Arjan seemed more temperate, his impatience dissipated. “Just . . . perhaps if during the hours when the children come and go from school, you sit him down somewhere else?”
“He won’t hurt anybody.”
“Can you, please?” Arjan gazed at me with some hint of that pity now. Not wanting to push in case I had a flashback or dumped my life story at his feet to explain why I didn’t have the use of my legs.
Being a good neighbor meant picking your battles. Unlike what was happening in deep space and the war. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to try to coax Mark into another activity. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I looked out the window with him for a minute, probably five. Slowly the kids faded away until no more of them traipsed by on the sidewalk. Cars drifted at suburban speed, quiet hums in irregular intervals that penetrated glass. From the look of the sky, we were going to get rain.