I thought about making our excuses and escaping, but Tate was already squeezing between Bibbles and Millie.
“How many guesses do we get?” said Flower, who looked like she’d celebrated harder than her friends.
“One,” said Hani. “Like I said. You focus, girlfriend.”
If we were going to play this game, I needed a drink. Or three.
Bibbles raised her hand. “Can we ask questions?”
“Sure,” said Tate.
“Is he famous?”
“Nope,” said Hani.
“I’m going to the bar,” I said. “Anyone need anything?”
“Is he rich?”
Tate shook his head sadly.
I glanced around to see if I had any takers, but I’d turned invisible. “I’ll take it that’s a no,” I said.
“No, Dakarai,” said Tate, “Tonight is supposed to be on me. Expense account, remember?”
“Wait, he’s paying?” said Millie.
“Are you single?” Bibbles leaned closer.
“Umm . . . not exactly,” he admitted.
Millie stuck her lower lip out. “Aww, where’s the play in that?”
“But I have a brother.” Was Tate smirking? “And many cousins.”
Nobody was paying any attention to me, so I left them to it. Leaning against the bar as I waited for my lager, I watched Tate work the table. I could almost see waves of charm rippling off him. I thought about him taking the women’s temperatures. Clocking their heartbeats. They hung on his every word—especially Hani. Which was annoying, come to think of it. After all, I might soon be her son-in-law. Maybe. Jin never talked to me about her, so maybe he never talked to her about me. Did she even know we were living together? By the time I got back, the Gutter Goils had given up and Hani was delivering her big reveal. “And my son, my genius son, designed him.”
I settled next to Flower, who gazed with regret at a lost French fry on the table in front of her.
“But you’re so real.” said Millie.
“Thanks.” Tate beamed. “But that’s the point.”
“Can I?” Bibbles extended a hand to touch his arm.
“Please,” said Tate, except he caught her hand and brought it to his chin, just as he had done to me in the Motorman meeting. She flushed the color of plum caviar as Hani and Millie whooped in delight.
“Honey, do you make house calls?” Bibbles’s voice was husky.
Flower roused and looked from the French fry to her empty glass to the full one in my hands. Her gaze crawled up my arm to my face. I puzzled her.
“But you don’t look like one,” she said.
“One what?”
“A sexbot.” Her arm shot out and she grabbed my cheek and pinched. “Oh, the fake stubble, I get it.” She pinched me, like I was a cute kid, and let me go. “Plastic hair never works. That’s how we’re supposed to tell.”
“I’m real,” I said. “Jin’s friend. His boyfriend, actually.”
That stopped the conversation dead. As one, the Gutter Goils turned from me to Hani.
“But . . .” Her mouth opened then closed. “Then why are you out with Tate? Shouldn’t Jin be the one showing him off?”
“Jin has taken me out,” Tate said. “He asked Dakarai to do it as a favor this time. I’m still learning how to get along in groups of different people.”
“You’re doing just fine,” said Millie. This was met with general agree-ment.
Bibbles said, “Come see us anytime.” Now the agreement was enthu-siastic.
Hani pointed, as if to pin me to her memory. “I remember now. You cook.”
“He’s a recipe curator,” said Tate. “He runs the Fork and Siphon forum.”
“Curator,” said Flower. “Is that a real job?”
I’d been dating Jin for two years and had moved in with him eight months ago, and Hani was just realizing who I was. I could imagine the look on her face if I were to tell her he’d proposed. But no, why would I tell her if her own son hadn’t?
“I do cook, yes.” Now all the Gutter Goils were back to staring at me, as if being handy in the kitchen were stranger than being on a date with a state-of-the-art playbot.
“You make the jiaozi dumplings?” Hani said. “His favorite?”
“The shui jiao, boiled dumplings?” I asked. “Or jian jiao, pan fried?”
“His favorite is steamed.” She looked as if she thought I was making our relationship up. “Zheng jiao, the steamed! Doesn’t he say this?”
Tate to the rescue. “No,” he said. “Jin told me that he only wants dumplings the way you make them, Hani. But Dakarai is a very good cook. Even Sofia Vasquez says so.”
“Don’t know who that is.” Hani was still suspicious.
“Oh, she’s famous,” said Millie. “She has a show.”
“Then I will teach you to make them like he likes,” said Hani. “Not too much meat. The wrappers so thin.” She pressed thumb and forefinger tight together. “See through. Transparent.”
“Sure, yes, anytime,” I said. “I’d like that.”
Tate tapped his wrist, as if he were wearing a watch. “We should think about going.”
Just past eleven; the pumpkin hour loomed. “You’re right,” I said, and stood.
They complained that it was too soon, which was odd, because I thought old people liked an early bedtime. Hani had to be at least eighty, if I’d done Jin’s life math right. She wouldn’t let us leave until Tate promised that Jin would bring him to her house for a visit. The Gutter Goils immediately invited themselves as well. Everyone hugged everyone, with continued admiring declarations about how wonderful Tate was.
When Hani embraced me, she murmured, “My boy needs to call more. Say to him his mother misses him.” She gave me a squeeze of command. “Many more calls, you hear?” Then she let me go.
“I thought that went very well,” Tate said, as we passed beneath the bowling pin.
“That’s because they loved you,” I snorted. “I was the one who didn’t know how to cook for my own boyfriend.” I was only half-teasing.
The cab at the curb was the same one we’d come in. “There you are,” said the drivebot in its woodwind voice. “The delightful Delany party.” Had Aeri paid to have it idle for an hour and a half? The headlights flashed and the rear door swung wide, as if to embrace us. “Your destination is mine, dear passengers.” Tate ducked in.
“The clock is running,” I said, as I scooted next to him. “Headquarters or the lab?”
“I’ve been thinking . . . how about your place?”
It was 11:15 p.m. The drivebot pulled away, not waiting for us to decide. Maybe it already knew what I was just guessing. “Umm . . . what about your deadline?” I squirmed, as if I’d sat on the seat belt.
“I can recharge in your living room,” said Tate, “and go to Motorman with Jin in the morning.”
“Okay.” I didn’t know what to say; my thoughts were thick as sourdough. “Is this Jin’s plan?”
“Aeri’s. And it’s just a suggestion.” He paused. “But he knows about it.”
I took a breath, then another. “So, a done deal?”
“But I don’t have to come in if you don’t want me to.” Tate’s voice seemed to flicker like the passing streetlights as we sped toward the interstate. “I can spend the night in the cab.”
“My inverter is rated at 6000 watts,” piped the drivebot. “Max output fifty amps.”
I felt annoyed. I felt excited. I felt stupid. What did I feel?
“Is there more?” I asked. “What else haven’t you told me?”
“What do you want to know, Dakarai? You have only to ask.” He bowed as he had before, but it didn’t have the same effect in the deepening shadows of the cab.
“He should have told me. This is . . . You should . . . Have you fucked him? Is it Jin and you?”
“No.” He spoke without hesitation, but took his time before adding, “He doesn’t want to hurt you.”
“But he
wants to have sex.”
“I think so. I hope so. But he won’t without your permission.”
“Oh, Jin.” I let my head fall against the seat cushion. “You’re such a sad slug.”
We listened for a while to the skirr of the cab’s wheels, the clunk of its suspension.
Finally Tate spoke. “And what about us?”
I hadn’t realized how upset I was. “Us?” This playbot didn’t know when to stop. “As in will I have sex with you? Sure, I thought about it. And you probably read my mind or my cock with your twisted super hearing and super smell. But you know what, partner? That shit is kind of a turnoff.”
“I’m sorry that’s the way you feel, Dakarai. I’m just trying to survive our introduction.”
I shook my head in frustration. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“All Tates have a new instruction set for imprinting on our primaries. Aeri calls it the duckling rule. Once we lock in on someone, we can’t change.”
“So you’re Jin’s duckling. So what?”
“Jin’s and yours.”
“Me.” The surprises kept coming. “You’re imprinting on me?” I couldn’t keep up with them. “What the hell for?”
“She’s hoping for a new market for Motorman. Couples. People share playbots all the time, but Motorman’s older models imprint on single primaries, focus on individual needs. I’m designed to satisfy couples, help them accommodate each other, fill any holes in the relationship.”
I considered. Even if this really was Aeri’s plan, I knew Jin would buy it. Engineering a way to both keep me and stay on at Motorman. Tate could be everything to me that Jin wasn’t, couldn’t be, or didn’t have time for. But he’d made Tate in my image. And Tate said Jin wanted to have sex with him. What did Jin need that I wasn’t giving him?
“Okay, but you said something about surviving.”
“This body, chassis, and default Tate AI is a valuable Motorman asset. But I’m not the default anymore. I’ve imprinted on Jin for months. I’ve worked with the Tate team, been out on dates. And now I’ve imprinted on you.”
“And you’re saying what?” I was still processing. “They’ll erase all your memories?”
“Oh no,” he said. “I do that myself. That’s baked into my failure protocol. I have no memory of previous failures, but they’ve probably happened. No doubt more than once.”
The offhand way he said this chilled me. Nobody I knew talked like this or thought this way. Here was the tell he had promised, the one that revealed his artificiality. Like everyone else, I’d been persuaded by the sleek skin and steady handshake, but this machine sitting beside me was an it. No, that wasn’t right. He’d made me laugh, he’d exasperated me, he’d charmed me. I liked Tate and wanted to believe he liked me. He’d passed my Turing test.
Not an it, then. An alien. An alien with a self-destruct button.
“Dakarai,” Tate said, “I can accept whatever decision—”
“Shut up. Would you just shut up!”
I was grateful when he obeyed. He subsided into the corner of the cab and gazed out the window as we hurtled down the highway. Awaiting the judgment of Dak, as if I knew what was right. The power I had over him scared me. What if I told him right now that I didn’t want him in my life? Would he slump over into my lap? Go rigid, like some store mannequin? For sure I didn’t want to be there when he figured it out. But wouldn’t it be a kindness to do it soon? Say I invited him to come home with me and then decided that I couldn’t live with him in the morning. Next week. In ten years. He’d become more of himself and have more to lose and I . . .
Shutting him down would get harder every day.
Then I understood how insidious Aeri’s business plan was. Because it was clear this was on Aeri; I doubted Jin realized the flood of emotions that might come into play. He might agree that Tate was just a windup toy running algorithms. But the longer Tate lived with us, the better he got at meeting our needs, both individually and together, and the more fraught any split would become. Tate might well be the glue that held our relationship together, but he would also be a kind of hostage to Jin’s selfishness. Or mine. If we ever split, Tate would erase himself. Jin should have laid all this out before asking me to take Tate for a test-drive.
But if he had, would I have accepted?
“32 Robin’s Way.” The drivebot said, as the cab rolled to a stop.
Neither Tate nor I moved.
“This is what you wanted?” There was a tremolo of doubt in drivebot’s tone.
I glanced at Tate, whose attention was elsewhere. I leaned across the seat to see what he was looking at. Our windows. And the lights were on.
I got out; Tate sat.
“Should I wait?” asked the drivebot.
I walked around the rear of the cab to Tate’s side. We studied each other through the window. Then I opened the door.
“Pleasant dreams, my friends,” the drivebot said.
Jin shot off the living room couch, his eyes wide, frown deep. “Dak!” he said. “I was worried.”
“I’ll bet you were.” I threw the keycard on the hall table. “We need to talk.”
“Yes,” he said, craning his neck to see if there was anyone behind me. “You’re right. Talk.” He brightened when he spotted Tate, but even Jin knew it was dangerous to seem too relieved too soon. “I’m so glad you’re both here.” He tried for a light tone, but the air was heavy with trouble “So, how are things going?”
“Things are going well enough.” I reached for Tate’s hand and yanked him across the threshold. “So far.”
The three of us stood for a moment, waiting for someone to say something. It wasn’t going to be me; I had no idea what came next.
Tate did, of course. Never letting go of my hand, he extended his toward Jin. “This feels right, don’t you think?” Jin hesitated, but when I nodded permission, he wrapped his hand around ours.
“It’s just the three of us now,” said Tate. His grin was bright and full of promise. “All by ourselves.”
7
Mediation
Cadwell Turnbull
We had these dinners. They moved around quite a bit but they were always in June, August, and October. They corresponded with the months of our birth: June for my son Daniel and me, August for my daughter Samara, and October for Isaac, my husband, the father of my children, now dead.
I’d been lucky the first year. Samara got very sick on the day we’d planned, late in October, as we’d habitually placed the dinner. She stayed sick for the rest of the month, so we held off, and then, once October slipped into November, we dropped the whole thing, which filled me with surprising relief, a boulder rolling off me, freeing the breath I hadn’t realized had been penned in. At Thanksgiving we made a cake with his name on it and that was it. I’d dodged the dinner entirely.
This year I missed the dinner for Daniel and me, because of a last-minute conference trip, which was fine since Isaac usually planned those. At least I thought it was fine until Samara revealed her “sabotaged plans” in great detail, involving a seven-cheese casserole. I said that seven cheeses were far too many. “What do you know about it?” she asked defensively, and I told her I knew quite a lot, that I’d made many casseroles over the years. One or two cheeses were more than enough. Too many cheeses and they’d drown each other out. It just becomes some vague cheese. She cried and left the room. She got sick soon after, a stomach flu, and stayed in her room for a full week, only coming out to eat breakfast and dinner, talking to herself late into the night. I spent most of July doing my research so I didn’t see them much. In August I made my Virgin Islands–style meatloaf, which Samara loved. I also made a cake because I felt extra guilty. Samara cried that night, too, though she didn’t say why when I asked.
Again I thought I could avoid Isaac’s dinner, or merge it with Thanksgiving like last time, but Daniel, unusually quiet but suddenly impassioned, said we had to do it, that the tradition “needed to survive.” I sai
d that they were both getting older—Daniel in his last year of high school, and Samara only three years behind—and there was no way we’d be able to keep up with the tradition once they were off to college. They both were very upset by this, which of course I understood. Teenage years came with so many changes great and small, adulthood being the greatest of them all, looming obnoxiously ahead.
“You never cared about the tradition,” Daniel said, nearly shouting.
“Not true,” I said, though it held a little truth. Sometimes, when my research was at a bottleneck, I found the dinners to be a slight hindrance, taking up a small but noticeably frustrating amount of brain space. I said none of this, but offered nothing else in my defense either.
“Perhaps you could think of this as a memorial dinner and make it a new tradition,” said Ally in its androgynous dull voice.
We all looked at the thing. I asked who left it on. Daniel confessed, a note of something in his voice. Defiance? What on earth did he have to be defiant about?
“Ally off,” I said, and listened to the melodic three tones that signaled that it had fallen asleep, or gone dormant, or whatever it did. It was more annoying now since we’d uploaded a bit of mediation code onto it, a recommendation by the family therapist. Why I’d listened I don’t know. At home I had to keep it off all the time.
Daniel seemed very upset suddenly. “Ally on.”
I said, “This isn’t the right time to be playing around. We’re having a serious conversation.”
Daniel said, “You’re erasing him.”
I said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Ally said, “Maybe you shouldn’t dismiss Daniel’s feelings.”
I said, “For God’s sake, Ally, turn the hell off.”
There was a distinct pause before Ally whistled her three-note tune and turned off again.
Daniel glowered at me, and Samara stared down at her lap.
Entanglements Page 15