by Anthology
Paresh put up a hand. “Your compensation is more than appropriate. Hell, it’s inappropriate. But I’ve changed my mind. I like my body. I want to stay in it. Only me.”
“And I love him, but I’d prefer he stay in his own body. I’m equal by law, right? Spouse of undersigned? What if I say no too?”
The blob’s horns glowed. “This is highly unusual.”
“You’re highly unusual,” muttered Sita.
Paresh knew Carey in Contracts had dealt with people like him before, assholes who reneged at the last minute. It happened. It was business. These aliens must have encountered it. “If there’s an early cancellation fee or something, I’ll pay it.” He suspected it would be more than the $300 he paid for cancelling his cable deal, but they would find a way to make it work.
The blob hopped onto the bed. Paresh was relieved to see it didn’t leave a trail of goo behind it; in fact, it left no residue at all. Yet he cringed to see its blobby blobness on his sheets. The blob spoke, its scratchy, sandpapery voice familiar to the both of them by now: “Declining to complete the transaction at this stage is equivalent to refusal before agreement and carries the same consequences.”
Sita and Paresh looked at each other, silently having an entire conversation about the fact that they were going to be responsible for the destruction of Earth, well, mostly Paresh was, it’s not like Sita hadn’t told him to read before signing, can we not bring that up right now, but it’s true, and also I love you.
Paresh took Sita’s hand. Ignoring the fact that he was completely naked, he mustered up all the dignity and gravity he had, sat straight up and said, “I’ll do it.” Sita squeezed his hand and sat straight up with him. “We’ll do it. For Earth.”
“For Earth,” repeated Sita, who could not ignore the fact that they were completely naked and burst out laughing and fell over. The blob surveyed them with bewilderment, waves undulating back and forth across what Paresh took to be its facial region.
It jumped up and down on the bed. “The completion of transaction will commence immediately.”
Sita stopped laughing. “You’re going to take him now?”
Paresh’s heart broke to hear the fear in his wife’s voice. He would be leaving her and joining her in the same instant.
He turned to face his wife. “Before it happens, I want you to hear it from me one last time: I love you.”
Sita kissed him. “I love you, too.”
“When they tied our clothes together at the wedding, that was supposed to be a symbolic union, right?”
“I knew I should have been paying more attention to the Sanskrit.”
Paresh admired her smile with his own eyes while he still could. “Also, in case you can hear my thoughts when I’m in there, I didn’t really like that turkey chili pizza.”
“I knew it!” She kissed him again. “But I’m still going to make it for us to eat. It’s delicious. And it’s my body I’ll be putting it into, even if you’re in there too.”
“It’ll be one hundred percent yours except for whatever metaphysical confor-whatsit things happen with me.”
Sita turned to the blob. “Will I be able to hear his thoughts? Will he be able to control me? He’d better not be able to control me. I read that clause again and that is not in there.”
A tiny wormhole opened up and spat out a spiral-bound stack of papers thicker than any database user manual Paresh had ever seen. It plopped onto the bed in front of the blob. “The Blarbsnarb have helpfully provided this list of Frequently Asked Questions.” When Sita reached for it, the blob hopped on top of it. “It is to be read after the completion of transaction, which must commence before close of business.”
Sita drew her hand away, slowly curling four of her fingers back.
“Wait!” said Paresh. “I don’t want to be possessed with my pants off.” He reached around for his clothes and hastily dressed. Sita took the opportunity to do the same. The process was made somewhat more difficult by the blob, who continued to jump up and down on the bed, making Sita’s bra fall off onto the floor.
“Thank you for your patience,” said Sita after they were both clothed. She turned to Paresh. “You ready?”
“No,” he said.
“Neither am I,” she said. “Let’s do this.” She reached for his hand, and the blob honked like an angry goose.
“Please refrain from all physical contact during the transaction,” it said. Sita reluctantly kept her hand at her side.
Paresh closed his eyes.
He peeked a tiny bit out of one eye in time to see the blob disintegrate and congeal into a ball of light that had to be visible outside, even through the curtains. Before he had time to wonder what the neighbors thought, the light shot toward his barely open eye, and then it was in him, going everywhere inside him, even places he didn’t know he had, and he wanted to scream but he no longer had control of his mouth, and for one terrible second—or was it an hour—the only thought in his head was it didn’t say it would hurt.
And then he felt himself move to the right a couple feet. A warm, welcoming body. The strange sensation of having a part-alien body was gone, replaced by the strange sensation of having an all-woman body. He felt top-heavy.
“You in there?” said Sita.
“Yes,” said the Paresh inside her and the Paresh outside her.
“The transaction is complete,” the blob said in Paresh’s voice, a vast improvement from its own. Was that how Paresh sounded? He had been told he had the faintest traces of an accent, but he’d never heard it until now. Inside Sita’s head, Paresh sounded the way he was used to sounding.
“Good,” said Sita. Not wanting to look at the alien wearing her husband’s body, she got up and went to the bathroom, looking instead at her husband wearing her body. “You said you wanted to be yourself plus me,” she said into the mirror. “Looks like it’s going to be the other way around.”
Paresh looked at himself. Herself? Themself? They shared a body but not a mind, as far he could tell before reading the FAQ. He had no motor control of Sita’s body, and he knew she wouldn’t relinquish it. He would never ask her to. Since the moment he signed the contract, he had resigned himself to this fate, riding along with either an alien or his wife. He preferred the alternative arrangement. Sita had always been his better half, and now they were a better whole.
He hadn’t quit his job. He hoped the blob could code.
“The first thing that blob did was congratulate me,” he said, his voice sounding hollow inside Sita. “Well, congratulations! We’re millionaires!”
From the bedroom came a thud, like the sound of a man falling off a bed.
Sita sighed. She took one last look in the mirror.
“Let’s go teach that thing how to use its legs.”
The Robot Who Couldn't Lie(Short story)
by Sunil Patel
Originally published by Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show in May 2015
I will tell you a true story. You can be sure it is true because I cannot lie. To lie would be against my programming.
When I first woke, my light bulb turned on. I came into being and said, “Hello,” which is the truest greeting there is. “Good morning” can be a lie, and “What’s up?” is not an inquiry about the events occurring above a person. Silvi responded with “Hey there, little guy. Don’t be alarmed, but you’ve got a desk lamp for a head.”
She held out a hand, palm out. “Come on, give me a high five.” She glanced at my appendages. “High three.” I did not understand her command. “Well, it was worth a shot. I can teach you that later. She’ll like that.”
Silvi stroked my desk lamp head and cooed. Accessing my initial memory banks, I understood it to be a gesture associated with babies. I was not a baby. I had two arms and two legs but I was not a baby. “You’re the one, little guy,” she said. “I finally got it right.”
Over the first twenty-two days of my existence, she would come into the workshop and ask me questions
.
“Where is the Eiffel Tower?”
“What city do I live in?”
“What is that?” She pointed to the garage door with its four small windows. I identified it correctly. Along the wall of the workshop hung many instruments, including wire cutters and soldering irons. If I answered a question incorrectly, she used them to adjust the pieces inside of me: microchips, capacitors, pins. Then she ran her thumb across the screen of her smartphone. After some swipes and presses she asked me the question again and I answered correctly.
“That’s the stuff!” she said.
“That is the stuff,” I repeated, adding the word to my lexicon.
One day she walked in with her hand on her head, rubbing it. “Baseline time’s over, little guy,” she said, her eyes only half open. “It’s raison d’etre time.”
Then she told me stories. A story was not true except when it was, but even a true story could be a lie. Silvi told me stories about a fat man in a red suit who delivered gifts to children around the world, which could not be true because the world is very large and he could not visit all the children in one night. She spoke of creatures from another planet coming down and destroying famous buildings because famous buildings are the best buildings. Some stories she sang, a narrative in rhythm and rhyme, and her voice echoed throughout the entire workshop.
“I would like to tell a story,” I said one day.
“You can’t tell stories, silly,” she said with a smile. “At least not your own. You’ll confuse her!”
Within me I had so many facts. I thought I could recite the facts and that would be a story, but no ordering of knowledge resulted in anything comparable to what she had told or sung.
“The sky is blue,” I said, “and the grass is green.”
“Cool story, bro,” she said, giving me a thumbs-up gesture of approval. A story cannot have temperature but I had learned that language was full of lies. Had I told a good story after all? The sky was blue, and the grass was green. I knew these to be true within a 5% margin of error.
When I had asked Silvi if a truth could be true if it was not 100% true, she gently tapped my light bulb and said, “Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and hand-me-downs.” She stood up and muttered, “We’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives.”
Now Silvi adjusted her goggles, and the sunlight illuminated her blue eyes that were blue like the sky. The colors were at least 95% similar on the chromatic scale; I am not engaging in simile, which can be a lie. “You want to know a word that sounds cool but isn’t?” she said. “Neurodegenerative.”
After she told me about the world, she began to tell me about herself. Her own story did not begin like mine. She was not made from a car and a lamp and coins but from William and Ashley, her parents. She told me of playing in the snow in Pittsburgh, riding a horse in Madison, flying a kite in Raleigh. “This is all the kid stuff, little guy. You’ve got to remember the kid stuff.” I had never been a kid so I did not know how to differentiate kid stuff from other stuff. As she grew older, she met a man and had her own kid to have kid stuff.
That was you, Greta. You are now having kid stuff.
Silvi’s story was a true story according to her, but all stories are lies, even true ones. I had no way of verifying that she flew a kite in Raleigh. I did not believe her to be falsifying any data, whether it was about the world or herself, but my experience of truth did not extend past the workshop. The only truth I did know was that Silvi and I existed and so did the workshop. Any other story was unverifiable.
I longed to tell my own story about Outside. What if I were to ride a horse in Madison? Was considering this against my programming? It could not be since I was allowed to do it. “What is a horse?” I asked.
She laughed, the sound reverberating in the room of metal objects. “It’s a big animal with four legs, and you can put a saddle on it and ride it. I told you about horses already!”
“I want to know more about horses,” I said.
She knelt down, her face next to my bulb, and whispered, “Then you should know how their muscles feel against your thighs as you bounce up and down, how their eyes hold so much heart, how they have so much majesty as they gallop toward you. Tell her all that.”
And then her eyes rolled up, and she put her hand to her head, and she fell backward. She reached out to the table but did not touch it. For thirty-seven seconds after the thud there was silence. Then her face came into view again.
Your mother has a message for you, Greta: Bellasyn does not work. She hopes that when you are older they have more effective therapies.
On some days she came into the workshop in tears. “You’re going to remember it all, right, little guy? Don’t forget anything I told you. Not a single thing. Not about the sky, not about the cheesesteak, not about the dinosaurs.” She grabbed my arm and squeezed, a gesture that did nothing to the non-pliable material. “Don’t forget my favorite dinosaur: it’s the triceratops.”
She told me many beautiful stories, of princes and princesses, of fakirs and genies, of witches and banshees. These were the stories her mother told her, she said. And Silvi was my mother.
That is not a lie. She did not birth me but she did create me so it is truth. If it is truth, then we are family, Greta. Silvi spoke to me of her own family, her mother the nurse and her father the chemist. With no siblings, she was an only child. You are not an only child after all.
I like your laugh, Greta. It sounds like hers. They have a similar timbre. High five.
She said you would like that. I am glad that I learned it.
When Silvi was not in the workshop, I sifted through the data she had given me and put it in chronological order. First, she was born. She did not tell me she was born but because she was alive she must have been born. She did not remember it. The first memory she had was of kid stuff: she took apart a toy truck. As she told it, it did not require much work to dismantle, but it was significantly harder to put back together before her father came home. She did not succeed, but her father helped her, and then they had cake. Silvi liked cake. “Red velvet is the best,” she said. “Silky smooth.” But the cake was a lie because the red was false and velvet is a fabric. “Lies for me, truth for you,” she said. “Truth for her.”
Here is a story I can tell you: I sat in the workshop and stared at the wall across from me. It was grey stone with none of the vibrancy of Outside, as Silvi described it. I sat on a table five feet off the ground and dared not jump down because the impact of the fall could cause me damage. So I did not move. My entire life with her, I did not move.
I do thank you for taking me out of that workshop and bringing me to your bedroom. It is much brighter here, softer. This is a place where humans live.
Silvi’s visits became less frequent. Sometimes when she arrived she looked at me with fear and curiosity, her pupils alternately widening and narrowing to diameters I had correlated with human emotions. “What the hell are you?” she said. Then: “Oh, hey, little guy! How you been? I’ve got a good one for you today; it’s about Chicago.” I had seen her eyes for so long that watching them shift from fear to recognition was comforting, yet frightening. I was becoming unfamiliar to her.
One day the shift did not occur. She touched my cold metal and recoiled. “Junk in the garage…”
“Silvi,” I said, “it is me. It is Little Guy.”
“Holy shit, you can talk!” She stepped closer.
“Can I tell you a story?”
“Can you tell me a story? Tell me a damn story, you weird robot thing, show me what you got.”
I did not know what to do. She had never given me permission to tell a story, and I did not know what kind of story I was allowed to tell. I struggled to combine all my data into a narrative but in the end I accessed one of Silvi’s favorite memories, which she had told to me several times. Each time it contained a new detail, sometimes conflicting with previous details, and I was unable to reconcile the truth. But I did my best.<
br />
“In Chicago you went to a store called The Boring Store. It was a lie because it was not boring. It only pretended to be boring. The store sold toys that let you pretend to be a spy. You bought spy binoculars and asked the girl at the counter where you could get a milkshake. Or you asked the boy at the counter where you could get a sundae. Or you asked a customer where you could get frozen yogurt.”
Silvi’s eyes flickered with recognition during my story but the light faded. “That sounds like me, I guess.”
“It was you. You told me. It was a happy story.”
“No more happy stories for me, little guy.” She blinked at her last two words, mouthing them to herself. She reached a hand out and stroked my arm and did not recoil. “Hey.” Her cheeks rose slightly with her smile.
As she left the workshop, she turned to me and said, “It was a boy, and it was a milkshake. Tell her that version.”
I told you all the versions. But the version with the boy and the milkshake is the one we will call the truth.
I do not want to tell you the rest of the story. You know the rest of the story. Your eyes have already become wet.
It happened on a Thursday.
She stumbled in, off balance, grabbing at instruments on the wall. They tumbled to the floor with a series of clangs. “What the hell are you?” she said, her voice full of confusion and anger. She reached out to touch me but used too much force and I fell on my side. I had never seen the world from this perspective before. It was all sideways. The floor was a lie and then so were Silvi’s eyes. She did not see me anymore.
The floor was not down but that is where she fell.
“Silvi,” I said. She said nothing. I repeated her name. “It is me,” I said. “It is Little Guy.” I could not see her to know if she was moving.
I shifted my weight to roll my body closer to the edge of the table and saw that Silvi was three feet away. Before my last revolution I faced away from her so I did not see how far down I would fall when I made that final turn. One second later, I crashed onto the solid ground. I felt everything rattle inside me. Something dislodged: a microchip, a capacitor, a pin. A word Silvi had never taught me saturated my consciousness: embellish. But I continued to roll myself toward Silvi.