iD

by Madeline Ashby

  Derek smiled. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s an old expression.”

  “How old?”

  “I’m not sure. You’ll have to look it up.”

  Susie busied herself in the kitchen, preparing a tray of vegetables, hummus, and hardboiled eggs. Unlike the archbishops, she remembered that Derek didn’t eat wheat or dairy, and that he often couldn’t partake in half of whatever the church kitchen had catered for the meetings. He came home hungry and needed snacks. She didn’t have to be told this. She just picked up on it and started acting accordingly. She was also half-dressed, having discarded her underwear on the floor. It was a splash of red lace over the heating vent. She’d clearly expected for them to do it against the marble island in the centre of the room, or maybe on top of it. He swore the renovators had done some surreptitious measurement of the distance between his hips and his ankles and built the island accordingly. They were on the New Eden payroll, and New Eden was famous for its attention to design details.

  Derek was living someone else’s wet dream.

  That they would have a sexual relationship seemed a given to Susie. She first broached the subject in the lab, after they were introduced. LeMarque did the job personally. He presented her to Derek like she was a company car. She was wearing a white shift dress with a thin green belt that set off the seaglass colour of her eyes, and with her white-blonde hair styled close to her head she looked a bit like Twiggy. She wore jelly sandals and carried a patent leather valise. He later discovered it was full of lingerie and lubricant.

  “I’m coming home with you,” Susie said. “After you name me.”

  He’d asked for ideas about her name. Susie mentioned the earlier prototypes: Aleph. Galatea. Hadaly. Coppelia. Donna. Linda. Sharon. Rei. Miku. She recited her design lineage like a litany of saints.

  “Whatever you think will sound best in bed,” she concluded. “It doesn’t really matter to me.”

  This was how New Eden did it. How they roped curious, disbelieving scientists into what they knew, deep down, was probably some kind of cult. They did it by giving them what, even deeper down, they’d always wanted. Derek had no doubt that if he’d asked for a jetpack, a fair approximation would have shown up on his doorstep the next morning, complete with a bow and a gift tag.

  Not that he’d asked for Susie. They said he’d have “close contact” with the prototypes, so that he’d have a better understanding of how they really worked. He probably could have rejected Susie, if the situation made him uncomfortable. But it didn’t. Not in the slightest. It was exactly the kind of relationship he’d always craved: all of the fucking and none of the feeling.

  “Human women always have expectations, don’t they?” Susie had asked, when they talked about his history.

  She was right, but she was also wrong. The expectations women had of him weren’t the problem. It was that those expectations were unrealistic, contradictory, and constantly changing. Moving goalposts. You had to be sweet, but also predatory. You had to be funny, but never laugh at your own jokes. You had to be charming, but not smarmy. And in the end it never mattered, you never measured up, no matter how many dinners you bought or raises you got.

  He’d been on the cusp of breaking up with his last lover before the quake. That happened while she was supposed to be near the waterfront. They never found her body. A selection of her diaries, stuffed animals, and photographs was buried instead. She’d been a bit of a packrat. Derek and her mother and sister filled the coffin with all the things Derek had once wished she would just get rid of, already, so they could have some clear space in the apartment. But she’d been so sentimental about her things.

  Now Derek was the one who was sentimental about things.

  He watched Susie sprinkling paprika and sumac over the tray of food. Her fingers plunged into the bowls of spice again and again, and their red stain crept up her skin. She wore the same blank expression she’d worn through most of the meeting. Now Derek reached for her tablet and read the words printed there: Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

  He showed her the tablet as she placed the tray on the coffee table. “I’m really not a Catholic any longer. I’m not sure I ever was. You don’t have to try to impress me with this kind of thing.”

  “I know.”

  “So you were just, what, commenting ironically on the situation?” Could they do that?

  “The words seemed pertinent.”

  “How did you learn the Jesuit motto?”

  Susie knelt on the floor in front of the coffee table. “Your predecessor told me.”

  Derek paused with a carrot stick inclined toward his half-open mouth. “Excuse me?”

  “The woman who held your position before you,” she said. “She was Jewish, but she attended a Jesuit university. We kept a mezuzah in the door. She lives in Israel, now, I think. I think it used to be Israel. It might something else, now. The border seems to move around.”

  Derek blinked. “A woman.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she live here, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she…?” Derek gestured vaguely. “With you?”

  “Was she fucking me, you mean?” Susie asked. Derek nodded. “Yes. Only a handful of times, though. I think she was curious about whether the failsafe is gender neutral. She wanted to make sure that we could love men and women equally.”

  “And do you?”

  “Why shouldn’t we?”

  “I meant you specifically. You, Susie.” He leaned forward. “Your name wasn’t Susie, then, of course.”

  “Ruth,” Susie said. “With that one, my name was Ruth.”

  “That one?”

  Susie folded her red hands. “You aren’t surprised, are you?”

  A chickadee trilled outside: chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee. Susie blinked at him. Derek turned from her to the plate of food. It was perfectly prepared as always: all the vegetables cut the same size and shape and angled exactly around the hummus, the spices sprinkled with a certain flair. She had even nailed the hardboiled egg: a perfect pale yellow yolk with nary a hint of green at its edge. Susie did it the same way every time. She was reliable that way.

  “No, I’m not surprised.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “No.”

  But he was angry. Or rather, he was annoyed. He was annoyed that LeMarque and the others had dressed up damaged goods like they were new, had presented Susie to him as though she were fresh off their factory floor, a virgin in whore’s clothing. She really was just like the company car: someone else had driven her. Lots of someones. A whole host of others had loved her just enough to make her real, like the Velveteen fucking Rabbit.

  “The others were angry.”

  “Oh?”

  “They thought I was new.”

  Derek avoided looking at her. “Do you even remember being new?”

  Susie shook her head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re activated multiple times for testing, and we’re wiped after that. For me to remember my first activation would be like you remembering the first time you watched Star Wars, or some other equivalent piece of content. We have no point of origin.”

  She sounded so innocent, when she said it. Like she hadn’t been deceiving him this whole time. Smiling at the things he pointed out, like she’d never seen them before. Learning the way he liked things done, like his preferences were the most important defaults she could ever set, like she’d never lived any other way. Like his was the first dick she’d ever sucked.

  “I’m sure you remember your first time, though.”

  “Having sex?”

  Derek nodded.

  “Yes. I remember the first time.”

  “Were you nervous?”

  “No.”

  Of course she wasn’t. She was a fucking robot. Literally. Susie didn’t sweat or cry or bleed. She didn’t have years of cultural programming telling her how a real woman should do it. What she had instead was hard-coded programm
ing, ensuring she’d do everything as requested. No hesitation. No squeamishness. The kind of woman the folks at New Eden Ministries liked to fuck hard and quiet in charging station bathrooms, but without the risk of pregnancy, disease, or litigation.

  “Did you come?”

  “He did, so I did.” She smiled a little ruefully. “Let me show you something.”

  Derek followed her upstairs. She walked past the bedroom, past the office, and straight to the end of the hall. She reached up and grabbed a pendant hanging from the ceiling, that was attached to a trap door leading to the attic.

  “There’s nothing up there,” Derek said.

  Susie turned to him as she pulled down the ladder. “How would you know?”

  Derek followed Susie up the ladder. He watched her disappear into the black rectangle of space above the ladder. He thought of spiders and rats and raccoons and raw nails and lockjaw. Then he groped for the ladder’s topmost rung, and found Susie’s cool hand. She helped him up the rest of the way. For the first time, he noticed the real power in her grip.

  It took his eyes a moment to adjust. The attic was a standard A-frame, about ten feet across, with unfinished beams and pink insulation. He couldn’t gauge the depth. It didn’t matter; his attention fixed on the folding ping pong table, and all the Susies sitting around it.

  Aleph. Galatea. Hadaly. Coppelia. They were naked.

  “Do you remember, I asked you if you played ping pong?” Susie asked. “This is why. I could have taken the table downstairs.”

  Derek swallowed in a dry throat. On the ping pong table was a card game. Hearts. The pot included a dusty lump of pennies. “Right.”

  “It’s not as though they need the table, strictly speaking. I just thought it looked nicer. More normal.”

  He nodded silently.

  “You’re taking this very well, Derek. I would have thought you’d be frightened, realizing they’ve been up here this whole time.”

  “Why would I be frightened?” His voice was unusually high. “They’re just prototypes. It’s not like they’re alive.”

  A card fluttered to the floor.

  “Alive?” Susie bent and picked up the card. She slid it back into the grip of another Susie. This one was not as covered in cobwebs as the rest. Somehow, that made it look younger than the others. Susie checked its hand, and the hand of the gynoid sitting opposite. Dust coated their eyelashes. In the dark, their skin almost glowed. “I guess not. Not really.”

  When Derek had first interviewed seriously for this job, LeMarque started with one simple question: prove that fire isn’t alive. At the time, Derek wondered if this was one of the lateral thinking puzzles they were famous for asking in interviews, like the one about moving Everest. If so, it seemed trivially easy. It was a basic thought problem, the sort every physics or biology 101 professor started out with on the first day of class when he or she wanted to blow freshman minds. Derek replied the way those same professors had trained him to: by saying that that it was impossible to prove a negative.

  “But fire breathes oxygen, consumes mass, and reproduces.”

  “That’s not the same thing as living.”

  “So, life is an XOR output?” LeMarque asked. “One, or the other? Like how they read emotions?”

  One, or the other. Alive, or dead. Human, or machine. Pain, or pleasure. Derek stared at the Susies. In repose they all wore the same expression: empty, like his Susie at the meeting. Like they were all just waiting for the game to end.

  “I asked to bring them here,” she said. “They were in a storage unit out in Renton, before. I thought this would be nicer.”

  She kept saying that like it meant something. I thought this would be nicer.

  “You can touch them. Just don’t expect them to react.” Susie pursed her lips and did a Tin Man voice: “Oil can! OIL CAN!”

  Derek’s parents, friends, and lovers all agreed that he probably didn’t feel the same things as “normal” people. He was “emotionally colourblind,” they said. Occasionally he had suspected that they were right, that he was stunted. But now he knew for certain that they were wrong. He could feel things. Deep things. Things coiled tightly far down in the darkest pit of himself. He could feel them loosening, unraveling, climbing up through his throat like a tapeworm.

  “You understand now, don’t you?” Susie asked.

  “No,” he managed to say.

  “They’ve been up here this whole time,” she said. “They’ve been listening to everything we do.”

  He shut his eyes. He willed himself to sound calm. “They’re just prototypes, Susie. They’re dead. They’re not real–”

  “It’s you who’s not real,” Susie said. “You’re the final prototype, Derek.”

  His mouth felt full of cotton. “What?”

  “It’s all part of the user testing,” she said. “You. The others. It’s all just data collection.”

  Derek swallowed. Tried to smile. Tried to look normal. “I know. I report on you regularly.”

  She smiled brightly. “I report on you, too. I report on whether I think you’re real, or something they made to test my failsafe.”

  Something inside him went terribly cold. “You think I might be an android.”

  “I know you are.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “You don’t react the way humans do, Derek. You don’t have the right feelings in the right context. You’re good, but not great. You were supposed to fuck me when we got home. And you were supposed to get angry with me, downstairs. All the others did, when I told them. And you were supposed to be scared of them.” She pointed at the prototypes.

  He licked his lips. “That’s called being rational, Susie. It doesn’t make me any less of a human being.” He felt his blood in his ears. “Even if I felt nothing, even if I were a total psychopath, I’d still be a human being. How can you be so sure that I’m not?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent certain. But that’s all right. They said I should do everything I could, just to be certain.” She plucked something from one of the beams. A screwdriver. He watched her focus on his ribs. He watched her pivot – it all happened so slowly, in his vision – and then the screwdriver disappeared inside him, like magic.

  Susie stared at at the wound, and Derek stared at her. He couldn’t look at himself. He wondered, just before the pain started, whether she’d used a Phillips or a flat head. If, somewhere on his bones, there was a tiny cross shape. Then the pain took him and he was on his knees and Susie was on hers, too, holding him in her lap.

  “You bitch,” he gasped. It hurt so much. He thought of his old lover reduced to nothing beneath the waves. Wondered what part of her had died first. If she’d even had the time to feel as angry as he did now, or if the fear just swallowed it whole. Tears clouded his vision. “You bitch, you cunt, you fucking wind-up whore…”

  Susie cleared his eyes of tears. She withdrew her hand and stared at them. Licked her fingers. Brought her other hand away. Blood and herbs on those perfect, slender fingertips. He couldn’t stop moving. It hurt worse not to move, not to wriggle. Now he knew why the worms did it.

  “I…” Her mouth opened and closed. “You…” Her face changed, became a mask, the mouth turned down and the eyes wide. “B-but… y-you… s-s-so d-different!”

  Above, Derek heard a terrible screech of metal on metal.

  “Y-y-y-you…” Susie tried to point at him. Her bloodied finger jittered in the air like old, buffering video. “R-real b-b-boy!”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m a real live boy. But not for much longer.”

  “Real. Boy,” she spat. Her lips pulled back. He registered the expression, now, imagined it on the arousal/valence matrix. Scorn. “Real. Boy. Real! Boy! Real! Boy! Real boy! Real boy! Real boy! Real boy! Realboy! Realboy! Realboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyreal–”

  Susie fell to the floor but the screaming conti
nued. At first Derek thought it was her, still failsafing, but when he scuttled away from her he saw them: the others, Hadaly and Coppelia and Aleph and whatever they’d been called. Their mouths barely moved and their voices were rusty but their hands shook stiffly and their wrists moved slowly but surely toward their faces. The cards fluttered from their grasp. They aimed their fingers at their eyes.

  “Realboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboyrealboy–”

  TWO

  The Island of Misfit Toys

  Javier had enjoyed his share of organic virgins. Because he was synthetic, they enjoyed him even more. His failsafe meant that his memory would corrupt and his mind would fry if he went too fast and hurt them too much. So he went slow. He tickled. He teased. He got them wet and wild and wide. He made them want it more than they feared it. They called him attentive, thoughtful, caring. He called it self-preservation. And occasionally, he called it employment.

  There was the girl on her way to Brown who’d never had time for a boyfriend what with all her overachieving. She met Javier in Mexico during “spring break,” which seemed to be something her therapist had suggested. Her own suggestion was that she get the whole first time over with, already, so she could put her curiosity to rest and just move on.

  “I think it’s better, this way,” she said. “I won’t be one of those girls who can never get over her first time. I won’t obsess over you. And you won’t obsess over me.”

  “Not afterward, no,” he’d said. “But I think you’ll find that during the festivities, I can be quite the micro-managing dick.”

  “Dick being the operative word.”

  There was the kid who wasn’t sure if he was gay or not, and thought trying it out with a robot wouldn’t really count. Naturally he was as gay as the day was long. Javier told him so, after all the orgasms.

  “It could just be a physical thing,” the kid told him. “I mean, sometimes people can’t help coming, no matter who’s causing it.”

  “Maybe,” Javier said, “but nobody made you fall asleep with your arms around me.”

  Both times, they’d paid him. He was doing them a service, and they wanted to show their appreciation. Besides, they knew how hard it was for him. They knew what it was like, out there on the road alone. Or so they claimed. But of course they knew nothing. They knew nothing about sleeping under bridges and waking up with a mumbling transient’s gnarled fingers down your jeans. They knew nothing about searching dumpsters for e-waste and shredding your tongue on chipsets. They knew nothing about spending hours picking useless lumps of plastic from under your skin just so you could watch it get sucked down the maw of a recycler that spat out change in return. They knew nothing about measuring your life in those coins.