The Cybernetic Tea Shop

by Meredith Katz

  "It can happen," he said with the air of long experience.

  "I'm not that type," she said, snorting. A moment later, at Joanie's hiss, she realized how rude that had sounded, but it was hard to feel truly apologetic. "Anyway, sorry. It's just personal reasons, that's all."

  Another sigh at that, and Terry finally dredged up a smile again. "Personal reasons, huh," he repeated. "No faulting that. Well, two weeks it is, then. I don't know how I'll be able to replace you, Clara. You're a wonder."

  "You'll manage," she said, heading for the door with Joanie flitting alongside her. "See you tomorrow, Terry."

  The sound of the door shutting behind her filled her with a sense of relief. The work itself was enjoyable—finishing out her two weeks would hardly be any kind of trial—but cutting ties was practically a head rush. The wind rushed over her as she headed down the street, and Joanie dove into her jacket's collar.

  "That went well," Joanie said.

  "Not badly, anyway," Clara agreed, raising a hand to pull her collar up higher around Joanie.

  Next up would be ending the term on her apartment. That could be done online, which was always thankfully a lot easier than having to deal with someone face to face. She dealt with it pretty much as soon as she was inside, taking her jacket off and letting Joanie flit away. She kicked her shoes off, flopping into a chair as she pulled up a screen to send the landlord an email.

  Clara watched the icon—an archaic envelope, electronic mimicry of folded paper—flit across the screen and vanish with a check-mark appearing in its place before the screen quit back to her messages received menu. She let out a breath, distractedly filing away the earlier message from her Mama so she'd have a clean inbox.

  "Don't know why you sound like that," Joanie said. "Nobody's going to say 'no.' "

  "I know, I know," Clara said, knowing already it was too impulsive for Joanie to properly understand. "It's a transition, Joanie. A change of state."

  "There's nothing about it that's a change of state! That doesn't make any sense!" Joanie said and perched on the back of a chair. "It's getting colder. Warm the place up, jeez. It's already five degrees below how you like it."

  There was no point arguing with Joanie when she got that tone in her tinny voice. Clara just shook her head, dialing up the heat and heading into the kitchenette to turn the kettle on. She sorted through her teas to pick one for herself. Nothing too caffeinated, she reminded herself, not with work again in the morning; she settled on a plum cinnamon rooibos. It had a little bit of spice, a taste she could pretend would wake her up, a warmth to keep off the chill.

  Once it was ready, she curled up in a chair by the window with a blanket wrapped around her, the mug warm in her hand. Joanie curled up against the curve of her neck, the two of them looking out the window as it started to snow. She stayed up for a while just watching it, then got ready for bed. There was still a lot to do before she could move, but she could only take one day at a time.

  As it was, the following days seemed to pass both in a blur and agonizingly slowly. When she stopped paying attention to time passing she was fine, looking up from work to find another six hours had flown by. Other times, she'd watch the clock as the minutes ticked on endlessly. She'd find herself leaning back on the couch, kicking her feet, irritated by the lack of things to do. Joanie helped during those times:

  "Hey, quit sitting around! We have to decide a destination, at least!"

  "I already did, didn't I? West Coast."

  "That's a bit vague, even for you," Joanie said, disgusted. "Name a city! C'mon!"

  A shrug. "Oh, I don't know. Seattle, then." It would be easy enough to travel from there if she wasn't satisfied, and it had always had a strong tech industry. "I guess we can trade this chill for a wet, warm winter."

  "Seattle it is. I'll register you for temporary housing."

  "Joanie—"

  "It'll last the first few weeks, at least, before you find a proper place to stay."

  "Joanie, aren't you rushing?"

  "You're the one not rushing at all!"

  It went like that until the time came to go. Packing was a non-issue; she never had much. Her clothes went into a suitcase with the few belongings she didn't use up, give away, or sell off. Everything else—pretty much just toiletries and her computer box—went into a carry bag. There was nothing left to do. Joanie on her shoulder, she set off for the train station.

  Walking into the building triggered an immediate sense of anticipation. It would be a nearly three-day trip, but she was used enough to sleeping in train seats, to the hustle and bustle of other people. The train itself, fully electric, was pretty much silent, but the interior wouldn't be. It would be full with the sounds of everyone trying to sleep around her, walking around, coughing, all the rest. The general noises of human life. If she were lucky, she would have a seat companion who had an interesting Raise that she could take a look at. If not, she had her computer and Joanie to fulfill the rest of her needs. There was entertainment outside too, plenty to watch. Moving that far meant seeing the environment change around them as hours passed, watch them speed past and through cities and fields, forests and country and plains and mountains.

  She double-checked the ticket on her screens, then settled on a bench to wait for her train.

  *~*~*

  The first thing Sal did when she activated for the day was check the online reservation list. It was empty again. She felt a vague sense of what she had come to classify as unease, a hard-to-label emotion which fell somewhere in the range between anxiety and sadness. There would be walk-ins, of course. There were usually walk-ins. But she still anticipated a lower-than-necessary income for the day.

  It seemed like it was going to be a long day as a result. She didn't always mind the long days, the ones where it was busy and she didn't have a moment to stop. But the other kind were a problem—the drawn-out, slow meaninglessness of a day where there was too little to do. Perhaps there were some reservations that had been made through means other than the online system? She had forgotten some before, after all. She checked the spreadsheet she had started to keep recently, but that too showed nothing.

  There was no point in letting it get to her. Instead, she went about her daily tasks mechanically, preparing the soup and getting it on the stove for a slow simmer, defrosting some of the previously-prepared treats, marking the specials on a chalkboard in neat, regular strokes of chalk. It left a residue on her fingertips that she looked down at for a few moments, at how it showed her finger pads smooth and unmarked. There was a sense that if she allowed herself to linger on it too long, she would develop some kind of unpleasant feeling about it. Businesslike, she brushed it off on her apron. She had baking to do and other chores left before the day began, however busy or slow it was to be.

  And so she did them, rolling up her sleeves and burying her fingers in dough that she knew better in texture and pressure than anything else in the world by now except tea leaves. As she worked, she listened for the door. At the end of the day she would, as always, donate the uneaten food to the homeless. If nobody came, it was their fortune for the day, not hers. Still, she baked as if she would have customers; the lack of them these days didn't make the work easier for her. Rather, it made it harder. She had always been able to manage all her tasks, and it was simply slower and less absorbing now that fewer customers came.

  Rolls were put in the oven. The soup was ready; the defrosted items too. She managed to force fifteen minutes to pass quickly by cleaning up after herself, rinsing bowls and putting them in the sanitizer, running a wet cloth over her work area. And then there was nothing to do for a short time.

  While she waited, she leaned against a wall and recharged, eyes half-closed. Her system opened to the network, drawing power in a small and steady trickle, made larger by not having to divert energy to any other tasks. She slowly took other things offline: breathing, movement, dialing thought down to the background processes only.

  When the bell
over the door signaled customer entry, the sound started her back up at once. She drew a sharp breath and did a quick check of her surroundings. The baked goods were just about ready to come out from the oven; it was coincidentally ideal timing. It was the sort of thing she usually considered fortuitous, a stroke of significance. She thought: I couldn't have planned it any better.

  "Told you that we didn't need to make reservations. Just look at the place—"

  "Well, it's nice, though..."

  Sal headed out from the back to the tea shop proper. It was a delicate affair with white lace-edged linen on the tables, plates on the walls showing royalty from various cultures and times, along with paintings of ships and gardens. It had been a quaint, deeply old-fashioned place even when it had first opened. Originally, the tea cups on each table matched each other and their plates; over many years of service, broken cups and plates had meant that by now almost none of them matched.

  The first time a cup had broken, she had frozen up, unsure how to react. There were none to replace it. Karinne had laughed and told her not to worry about it, and later went out and bought a replacement from an antique store. Already worn, it had stuck out like a sore thumb. But everyone wanted to get it, like it was lucky. More broke as time passed, and the fewer matched, the less each individual cup kept anyone's interest, the same as when they all matched. Now, they matched only in that they didn't match. Nobody paid any of them any more attention than the others because of it.

  She smiled at the couple as they looked up at her. "Good morning," she said. It was 11:21 a.m.; it was still on that side of things. "Table for two?"

  "Yeah, thanks."

  The couple was a man and a woman—the man with red hair and a flushed face, tall and round, the woman with short, tightly-curled black hair and brown skin. The man was the one who had spoken, giving Sal a once-over and a somewhat condescending smile. The woman behind him was looking at her dubiously, assessing her. It was something Sal was used to, that uncertain look. She was being measured up against 'human being' and 'womanhood' while being recognized as something totally unfamiliar.

  "I've been here before, you remember?" The man grinned and made a gesture around the room.

  Even her failing memory recalled it to the day, to the minute. He'd come with a different woman. It would not have been polite to mention as much. "Yes, sir. Three years ago, wasn't it?"

  "Hah," he said, and then, as an aside to the woman, "told you they don't forget."

  She sat the two of them at a table by the window. When this had been a trendy place, both for quality and curiosity, it had been the most popular seat, the tea house's best view of the hill leading down toward Pike Place. The market itself had been heavily changed after the earthquake, but a new one had been remade at the bottom of the long slope down Pike. "Welcome back, sir. Mr. Wharton, as I recall it. What can I get for you and your lady friend today?"

  "We'll get an afternoon tea for two," the man said. "Get me a black tea, and your best fruity herbal for Nadie." The woman nodded; it seemed it was acceptable that he speak for both of them. Sal nodded in return, resettling in her arms the menus which she hadn't yet put down.

  "The baking is fresh out of the oven," she told them instead. "Nice and warm."

  "Wow," Nadie said. "You sure sound human."

  A faint twinge stirred inside Sal; she didn't bother to identify or express it. She simply nodded again. "Yes," she said.

  "Is it true you've been running this restaurant for hundreds of years?" Nadie was wide-eyed and breathily fascinated. There was a performative femininity to it, so Sal could only assume she was showing off for the man—he had obviously brought her here to try to impress her. Sal thought, To them, I am like the single out-of-place cup. Something new and different. Wharton's experience with the tea house, his ability to find a place not run by humans but by some exotic other, was proof of his own erudition.

  People hardly changed.

  She smiled regardless. It was business, after all. "Two hundred and seventy-eight," she said. "I'm hoping to see three hundred before it closes." It was true that she hoped that, though some days it didn't seem likely to happen. It didn't get much income, and her savings were running thin. Besides that, her memory... she wasn't sure she would last until then. It was strange, she thought. Back then, Artiface Industries had a guarantee that the human-seeming robots they made would last 'indefinitely'. The only part of the word's meaning which seemed to be true was that it was unspecified, not that it was unlimited.

  She had outlived Artiface by one hundred and forty-seven years.

  "Amazing," Nadie said, turning back to the man. "Taking me to a place that lasts forever—you're romantic, Wallace."

  Sal went into the back and let them talk as she arranged baked goods on a tiered silver tray. The smell of the soup must be filling the air, judging by the way steam was rolling off it, but soup didn't come with the afternoon tea. It would continue to simmer quietly until someone came in and ordered it. She lifted the tray and carried it back out. The couple was holding hands across the table, so she had to be careful to find room without jostling them as she put the tray down next to their knotted fists.

  After describing each of the items on the trays, she straightened, smoothing out her uniform skirt—a habitual gesture she'd developed, making sure there was no flour or crumbs on herself, buying time. There was a ring on Nadie's finger with no scratch lines at all on the gold surface. "Is it a special occasion?" she asked. People preferred if it was asked that way, generally, even though it was clear that it was, and what the occasion was.

  It seemed to go over well. Wallace's smile broadened into something more genuine, and Nadie's face lit up. She began to speak of her engagement energetically, enjoying the chance to shine, but truthfully, it didn't matter to Sal.

  The look on Nadie's face had brought up an old memory, strange and visceral, of Karinne's smile. It had always been like that, though—she'd never needed an engagement to shine so brightly and had never married. Karinne had smiled like that over every positive change, every new opportunity. Karinne had smiled like that when she'd purchased Sal. She'd been bought because Karinne couldn't manage the restaurant all on her own, but Karinne had purchased her, brought her here, and told her, "Welcome home." Karinne, with her sparkling blue eyes and long brown hair, with her hands strong from kneading dough. Those hands had grown weak eventually. Sal had held them to the end.

  "—ever so happy," Nadie was saying. "It's the start of the rest of our lives, you know? We'll spend forever together."

  It was easy enough to keep the smile on her face. Her expressions, though minute, were involuntary; she learned naturally through exposure, and expression of emotion was part of that. But she'd learned when to completely hide her emotions as well, and it was only right she kept it light and happy for them. Polite. "Congratulations," she said. "I'll let you two celebrate."

  Sal went into the back again. The monitors would tell her if they needed more hot water for their tea, if they were looking around for her, anything. Her battery was bothering her again. It really didn't hold much of a charge these days—she needed to get it replaced soon, but there was no guarantee that any she could purchase would be any good. It had been so long since other human-types were made that everything on the market was out of date and poor quality. She could use the batteries meant for larger Raises, but not very efficiently. Still, it wasn't much of a choice. Short charges were what they were; she couldn't spend all her time charging.

  She would put in an order for a new one after work.

  She waited, watching the monitors, diverting her energy to her eyes and deliberately shutting down her access to her distant memory. It was only for a little while. Having been reminded, she would start to think more about Karinne if she let herself, and there was nothing to be gained from doing so. So she waited, and when the customers finished their food and tea, she reactivated all the parts she had shut down, removed herself from her strong connection to th
e network, and went back out with a smile and the check.

  They transferred funds and left. The tea house was silent again in their absence. It seemed emptied out, and that felt strange even though it was the normal state of things. She stood a few moments, absorbing the lack of sound, then gathered up their dishes and took them to the back, slid them into the sanitizer. Charged herself some more.

  Two hours later, the bell rang again. It startled her—she'd started to sink into something like depression. As she rose, she shook her head as if to clear it. No good would come of that.

  The man who had entered was shaking his head too, spraying water droplets from his hair. "Afternoon, Sal," he said. It had begun to rain while she was in the back, she noted, quite a downpour. Unusual for Seattle, which favored a more constant light rain. It smeared water over her windows, made the view of the city blurry and indistinct, unreal.

  "Good evening, Detective Hyeon," she said, smiling. "Take a seat. Something to warm you up?"

  "Darjeeling," he said firmly, shaking out his jacket from where water had caught on folds, sending an arc of water droplets across the floor. She'd mop those up, but it would be rude while he was right there. Even knowing that, her eyes tracked the movement, their several concentric lenses dilating. He didn't seem to have noticed. "Some of that nice soup of yours, too."

  "Of course," she said, snapping her gaze back to his face. Good. Someone would enjoy it after all.

  She headed to the back and filled his tray, almost distracted as she put a teal one-person teapot on it, spooned tea into the bag, filled it with hot water, and went to ladle out the soup. She'd known him a long time, but he didn't really have a regular order for her to surprise him with. He hated the cold, though, and did tend to get hot items on days like this one. The detective had been coming around now and again for seventeen years. At first, it was just part of his work, but since then, he had seemed to become fond of the place.

  When she came out again, he'd taken off his heavy hydrophobic uniform jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. His hair had dripped slightly on the table, leaving a few droplets on its smooth surface. This, at least, she rubbed down with a cloth before shifting the tray to both hands and unloading the soup and tea. "For you," she said. "The tea has only just started to steep, so please give it a few moments. Please let me know if you'd like anything else, Detective."