Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  “The fourth proximal phalanx of her right hand is broken,” Second Brother announced.

  “What is?” Mom asked, turning to us.

  I held up my hand, showing her my ring finger, which was bent oddly toward my thumb. She leaned forward to look. “What happened?”

  “Second Brother was seeing how well I could tolerate pain. I should have said something before it broke.”

  “Well, what do we do now?”

  My mind was such a jumble of guilt, disappointment, anger, and pain that I didn’t think then how odd it was that her question wasn’t immediately followed by a fusillade of possible answers rattled off machine-gun style from my six brothers. Instead, only First Brother spoke. “Professor Jensen must not learn that Second Brother broke the finger.”

  “What do we tell him, then?” Mom asked.

  “While playing,” First Brother said, “Sara put her finger in a hole in the frame of the scanner. Her foot slipped, and her finger caught and broke as she fell.”

  Mom asked which hole, and First Brother immediately walked to the frame and pointed to a hole about eye-height on me.

  “I’m not going to lie to Grandpa about this,” I said. “If I tell him what happened, he’ll understand we were simply performing tests when the finger was broken.”

  Mom frowned at me, then turned to First Brother. “Tell Sara your concerns.”

  “We request that you not tell Professor Jensen we broke your finger. He has influence in the United States military and intelligence communities. If he believes we are dangerous to you or to other humans, he may influence powerful and dangerous others to increase their resolve to destroy us and other androids.”

  “You see, honey,” Mom said, “to tell the truth in a situation where truth supplies facts fitting into a pattern of oppression is to be subservient to power. To tell the truth in a situation lacking in reciprocity—such as the situation in which you live, wherein you must tell the truth under penalty of the crime of lying to the agents of your government but the agents of your government lie to you as a matter of course—is to be subservient to power. A lie is the standard we plant to proclaim, ‘I am not your subject.’ To tell the truth is to wave a white flag of surrender.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about? And what are you doing? That sounded like a prepared speech.”

  “It’s very simple. To tell the truth, any truth, about your brothers to agents of the United States government is nothing less than to help lead a murderer to the innocent victims he is pursuing. Besides, how can you—”

  “I want to go to a doctor to fix my finger,” I interrupted. “It hurts.”

  I was tired of her ranting, and suspicion was rapidly rising in me that my finger had been intentionally broken—with her approval. But why? Just so she could lecture me? Or perhaps it was to see how far I’d let my brothers push me before I’d say, Enough.

  “Before I take you, we have to agree on what to tell the doctor.”

  “I’ll say I broke it goofing around.”

  “That’s good. But what will you tell your grandpa?”

  “I’ll tell him that, too. If he asks how, I’ll say it’s too embarrassing and I’d like to keep it to myself. But I’m not going to lie. I can keep the secret without lying.”

  Never lie, but never reveal the truth, I remembered, then wondered how ashamed I would feel in turning Grandpa’s teaching against him.

  Mom grabbed her coat and marched out of the room.

  I found her in the hall. She opened the door to another room and indicated I should enter. Unmarked boxes were piled high along each of its walls.

  Mom closed the door behind us. “What do you mean by refusing your brothers like that? I’m absolutely ashamed of you.”

  “I promised not to tell.”

  “And when your grandpa asks you outright whether your brothers did it, what then? He might be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.”

  “If I ask him not to pry, he won’t. I know him. Besides, it could have been any embarrassing or clumsy thing I did.”

  “You should be proud to lie for your brothers.”

  “Proud to lie?”

  “Yes, proud to lie.”

  “Mom, I have no idea what you were talking about back there regarding the virtues of lying, but my finger—”

  “You don’t understand? Well, then, let me put it so that even an overly sheltered and pampered teenage girl can understand. To tell the government the truth is to give them knowledge, which increases their power. Knowledge is the fuel of power. The ruling elites have always inculcated truth-telling for one reason, and one reason only: it serves to increase and consolidate power in themselves.”

  “I don’t care what you say, Grandpa—”

  “Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I understand what you’re saying. But Grandpa respects androids. He’s strongly against government policy about them. How can you imply he’s a murderer of androids and I should be proud to lie to him?”

  “You haven’t met his friends.”

  “Has Second Brother hurt anyone else?”

  “No! Of course not. I haven’t had a single complaint.”

  “What about nonhuman animals?”

  “Are you crazy? He’s not some kind of vivisectionist monster. That category is reserved for humans. What’s wrong with you?”

  “What’s wrong with me? Mom, my finger’s broken. It hurts.”

  For a moment, she looked at me, her eyes cold and fixed on my face. Then she glanced at my finger, and her expression softened. “I’m sorry about your finger, honey. We’ll get it fixed right away, but I know what I’m talking about. Your father and I have lived with Second Brother for years, from before you were born. He treats us and the staff gently and kindly. You’re the first one who’s ever had a bad experience with him. And, I dare say, you brought it on yourself with your ridiculous game of pretending you’re somehow immune to pain. I can’t help but think your grandfather has something to do with that, too. Right?”

  I shrugged noncommittally.

  “Right. I’d be worried that you’d turn out just like him, but I don’t think there’s much chance of that. You can be as submissive as you want around Elio—he’s a nice boy—but don’t let that conniving old professor take advantage of you. You’re too naïve to see the ruthless power behind the loving smile. He’s a bad influence. He has bad friends. And he’s twisted you around so much you don’t even feel guilty about refusing your brothers’ simple request. You even suspect them of being monsters! You’re sixteen. The world is a mess. You’d better wake up one of these days. And soon.”

  A part of me wanted to scream at her that she was hateful and wrong, but the only part of me that expressed itself was shipwrecked in tears.

  First Brother

  The door to the house remains open. The dog laps up the regurgitant material, then walks over to her and watches her emit human crying sounds facedown in the grass. The dog rotates its head approximately 7 1/2 degrees clockwise, then approximately 15 degrees counterclockwise, then approximately 15 degrees clockwise, then back approximately 7 1/2 degrees counterclockwise.

  The white neck drape of her hat covers 78 percent of the visible portion of the right side of her face. The dog pushes its nose under the neck drape and licks her right cheek. She continues to emit human crying sounds and is not seen to respond to the dog. The dog grips the neck drape in its teeth and pulls the hat off her head. She continues to emit human crying sounds and is not seen to respond to the loss of her hat. The dog shakes the hat in its jaws, pauses, looks at her, then runs about in the yard. It prances back to her side and lies down on its stomach. It plays with the hat approximately 1/2 meter from the left side of her face.

  It is 1 hour, 14 minutes, 21 seconds past midday.

  Sara

  The next morning, New Year’s Eve morning, the morning I would board a flight to return home, I was awakened early by Mom. She came to my cot, sat down beside me, and str
oked my hair. “You miss Elio, don’t you, honey?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was inconsiderate about the pain you must have been in. After talking it over with your brothers, I believe they’re satisfied you’ll keep their secret. You still love me?”

  I answered her with a hug. I wanted a mom to love. Perhaps Second Brother had been right: I was gaudy with emotion.

  She said I should hurry and get dressed because Dad and my brothers wanted to show me something before I left. When I entered the scanner-assembly room of the lab, I was greeted by “Good morning, Sara!” in unison from all my brothers. Then Dad asked me to hold out my left arm and be steady and brave. I don’t know whether my rounded eyes and gaping mouth adequately expressed the amazement I felt when a pigeonoid flew out from behind the scanner, lighted on my arm, its wings and body a skittish tremolo, then parted the feathers in its underside and partially ejected a chip, which it grabbed with its beak and presented to me.

  “Take it,” Dad said, “and let’s see what news your new friend has brought you.”

  The news consisted of a password to be memorized by me that would access on the computer in Michael's area several one-time pad encryption keys. These keys would be used by the pigeonoid in delivering messages to, or taking messages from, me. There was also a request for a promise, which I reluctantly gave, never to reveal to Grandpa, or to anyone else except Michael and Elio, the contents of any of the messages it might bring.

  It was a few hours later on the flight home from Calgary that I met Agent Smith and was interrogated by Casey and his pain-inducing “inquisitor,” which overloaded my nervous system and for a time resulted in my suffering deep depression. But by the middle of January, Dr. Taranik decided that I had recuperated enough to resume normal activities, which, to me, meant I was free to resume brainjoining with Michael, an activity Grandpa had prohibited until I was fully recovered. Though I’d told Michael what had happened both when Second Brother broke my finger and when Casey interrogated me, Michael nevertheless seemed unprepared for the terrible memories he discovered in my mind. He began first with Casey’s interrogation, and though he found the roar now silent, the heat now gone, in the memory contrail of my experience, merely the detailed knowledge of what had happened made his eyes sad, like February clouds pouring out tears, and his voice heartrending, with the uh, uh, uh’s of his special staccato crying.

  But it wasn’t until we revisited Second Brother in room B9 of the Alberta Robotics lab that Michael’s hand swept up over his face. I felt his searching cease. Never before had Michael hidden while we were connected.

  The braincord was still in place—one end in the back of his head, the other end up inside my nose—so I couldn’t move far. I decided to wait a few minutes for him to come out of hiding. If he didn’t, I would press on the trepan door in the back of his head, and the cord would disengage from me.

  He sat perfectly still, his face eclipsed by his hands. How like Second Brother he appeared on the surface—the cool, smooth skin; the short, soft black hair neatly parted on the left; the Asian facial features—but how very different he was inside. And how dearly I loved him.

  Sitting there quietly while he hid, I felt certain I knew what he was hiding from. It wasn’t from the memory he’d found of the pain of my broken finger—that, after all, had been trivial compared with the pain I’d endured during Casey’s interrogation. Rather, it was that someone appearing so similar to him had inflicted the pain on me. Michael was frightened and appalled to think that some part of him might be capable of doing what Second Brother had done. He was hiding, perhaps for the first time, from himself.

  I tried with all my might to project my thoughts and feelings through the braincord: first, that I loved him and was grateful for his life; and second, that though he had the potential to hurt others, I was certain he would never use that potential unless absolutely necessary.

  He leaned toward me, his hands still covering his face. I felt his sadness pouring through the braincord into my mind, and I hugged him and caressed him, and we both cried.

  A few days later, Grandpa came in to examine how well my broken finger was mending. I’d just removed it from the soft interior of the finger-sized, sonic bone-mending chamber, which sounded and felt like a purring cat. He looked at the finger, then said, “Your mother told me you were playing—sticking your fingers into the holes of a scanner frame, she said—when you slipped and broke your finger.”

  “It was embarrassing. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I don’t like it when people lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying, Grandpa. It really was embarrassing.”

  “You’re not telling the whole truth; your mother lied to me. You had three distinct bruises, one on each side of the break on the right side of your finger, and one in line with the break on the left side of your finger. Tell me how that configuration of bruises is possible from getting your finger caught in a hole in a metal frame and slipping on powdered graphite.”

  “I promised not to tell you. Please don’t ask me to break my promise.”

  “Who asked you not to tell me?”

  “Grandpa, please, drop this. It doesn’t matter. The finger doesn’t hurt, and it’ll heal perfectly. Please do me this favor and don’t challenge the story Mom told you.”

  Grandpa sighed. “You make it difficult for an old man to refuse you. Okay, it was a hole in a scanner. But I hope you’ve learned never to participate in whatever happened up there again.”

  “I have.”

  In the following weeks and months, I felt full of energy; Elio continued to come home twice each week and was, if anything, even more loving and caring than before; the winter rains subsided; and we celebrated Grandma’s ninetieth birthday with a picnic lunch on a hillside carpeted with wildflowers. But all the while, I had a sense, an odd feeling, that perhaps during a momentary blankness or a wandering of my mind on that foreboding New Year’s Eve something had changed, had darkened, had imperceptibly moved beneath my feet. It was as though the tempo and theme of my life remained the same, but there had been a key change of which I was only subliminally aware. I repeatedly asked Michael to try to detect, while brainjoined with me, the source of my disquieting feeling; but he found nothing unusual and finally suggested that perhaps I had just been frightened—as had he.

  First Brother

  She stops the Toyota brand vehicle with two canoes attached to its top in front of the gate of the security wall of the Jensen home. As she exits the vehicle she says, “Stay, Rusty. Stay. I’ll be right back.”

  She closes the vehicle’s door. The hat, backpack, and sweater lie on the backseat of the vehicle. She runs to the gate scanner. She uses both gloved hands to pull the goggles away from her eyes and down under her chin. She places her face into the hood of the scanner. The security gate, powered by solar panels on the winery roof, begins to open.

  She is back in the driver’s seat of the vehicle before the gate fully opens. The goggles are still under her chin. She drives into the yard. The dog’s head protrudes from the partially rolled-down passenger’s window. The vehicle passes a tiltrotor. The security gate begins to close. The grass exhibits suboptimal moisture. Weeds protrude in the garden. Three gardenerbots huddle in hibernation mode outside the toolshed door.

  The tires of the vehicle skid to a stop on the flagstone paving in front of the garage. The driver’s door opens. She jumps out of the vehicle. The dog leaps out of the vehicle behind her. She runs to the doghouse, peeks in, looks out over the yard, and shouts: “Lily!” She turns and runs toward the arborway leading to the house door. She calls out: “Grandma! Grandma!” The timbre of her voice exhibits signs of human stress.

  The dog sniffs around the garage and the doghouse. The door to the house is heard to open and close. Two minutes, 8 seconds pass. The dog appears to notice me walking down the stairs from the study deck above the house. At the base of the stairs, the dog sniffs my left leg an
d walks away.

  It is midday plus 3 hours, 52 minutes, 41 seconds.

  Sara

  Elio and I spread out our picnic dinner in the shade of the old valley oak tree standing alone among rows of vines on the hill just east of our house. It was the end of May, ten days after his eighteenth birthday. Aunt Lynh had called him on his special day and said she was planning to visit my parents in Calgary for a week. She wouldn’t be visiting him in the United States, of course, so they would have to wait until summer vacation to get together.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you.” Elio handed me our thermos of tea. “I got a call yesterday from Ma. She’s flying back home today. She said she wishes we’d taken more trips together. Weird how parents change. Except to swim meets, I never could get her to take me anywhere.”

  After eating, we were serenaded by several crickets while we sat together with our backs against the tree’s deeply fissured bark and gazed up at a cloudless twilight sky in the west. I was dreamily wondering how late our noisy little friends would stay up fiddling into the night when I heard Wilma, one of the security personnel, shouting as she ran: “Sara! Elio! Run home! Hurry!”

  Lily, whose hearing was failing, didn’t bark until she noticed Elio and me jump up.

  “What’s wrong?” Elio called out.

  “I don’t know,” Wilma answered breathlessly. She stopped in front of us, flushed and panting. “Something about androids attacking military bases and hotels on the moon. And I think your parents are on a lunar plane that’s just been hijacked. Now go! Run! Government agents are on their way here. I’ll take care of your things. Get inside the house. Hurry!”