by Steven James
Don’t cry.
And I did not.
As difficult as it was, I forced myself to hold the tears in.
“There was an attack,” he said, changing the subject, “there in Cincinnati, at our production plant earlier today.”
“Yes, I know.” I looked at him again. “I was there.”
He straightened up slightly. “You were?”
“I was on my way home from the hospital. I saw it happen.”
“Are you okay? I mean, you weren’t hurt?”
“I’m fine.”
“My division is in charge of investigating it.”
“Okay.” I didn’t want to talk about the attack. “I just called so you’d know that I sent the Artificial back.”
“Did you see anything that could help us out?”
“I saw people die, Trevor. That’s what I remember. A truck drove through security. The explosion swallowed people up. I don’t know of anything else that might help you.”
“With some of our latest neural implants, there are promising breakthroughs in helping people recall details from traumatic events that they—”
“Trevor!”
“Sorry.” He was quiet, then asked, “Are you going to have a memorial service for Naiobi?”
“Tomorrow at two. But it’s not really a service. It’s just me saying goodbye.”
“Would you like me to come?”
“No, no. That’s okay.”
“Are you sure? I could fly in and—”
“No. But thanks.”
It seemed like a moment during which he might glance down to check the time or something, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Jordan is special.”
“Jordan?”
“The Artificial I sent you.”
I shook my head.
“Just . . . Listen, Kestrel, I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but this isn’t a time when you need to be alone, or shut people out.”
I was about to counter that, but paused.
A change had come over my brother. He had a look of deep concern that I never would’ve expected to see. “Just try him out,” he said. “Just for a few days. I promise you, if you decide you don’t want him after that, you can ship him back and I won’t pressure you anymore to get an Artificial. Not ever again. And if you want, I’ll stay out of your life. I won’t call. I’ll leave you alone. Just give Jordan a try.”
Why is this so important to him?
A soft buzz came from his end and he looked down toward what was no doubt an incoming call, but he tapped a button to decline it and peered at me from across his desk, waiting for me to reply.
I had no idea who might have been contacting him, but in truth it didn’t matter. He had plenty of people screening calls for him, so if one made it through, it was almost certainly something vital, an issue only he could deal with. A year ago he would have asked me to wait while he accepted the call. I was certain of that much.
“Alright,” I told him at last. “Have the company ship it back. I’ll accept delivery this time. Two days. I’ll give it two days and if I decide I don’t want it, I return it. And you won’t bring this up again.”
“Yes.”
I said nothing about his offer to refrain from contacting me. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. As healthy as it might be for us to have a closer relationship, I didn’t know if that could ever happen again, or even exactly what it might look like if we did.
“Why does it mean so much to you that I have an Artificial?” I said.
“You’re a good person. You don’t deserve to be alone.”
I have the Lord, I thought. I have my faith. But I didn’t say that. Trevor was an avowed atheist. He’d given up any semblance of faith in a higher power after our parents died.
Well, died wasn’t exactly the right word to describe what happened to them. It didn’t come close to doing justice to describing the brutal way their lives ended.
Shot.
Slaughtered.
Gunned down.
Any of those descriptions would’ve been a lot more on the right track.
I didn’t respond to his comment about me not deserving to be alone because I wasn’t so sure I had the Lord, or my own faith, anymore and I didn’t want to mislead him.
“Is there anything else I can do?” Trevor said. “Do you need money for—”
“I don’t need money.”
“Okay.”
The Artificial was his way of showing he cared, and so was the offer of money—I understood that—but the fracture between us was deep, and it wasn’t going to be healed by the gift of a robot or a credit transfer to my account.
“Let me know if you have any questions about Jordan,” he offered.
“Right.”
And then, after fumbling through our awkward goodbyes, we ended the call.
Obviously the recovery time after giving birth varies for different women. It depends on how long you’re in labor and how big your baby is, in addition to any number of medical issues or complications that might arise. And I had to admit that even though I was emotionally devastated, physically I was feeling far better than I would’ve expected.
However, my milk had come in and my breasts hurt and it was a terrible kind of pain. My mind knew that my baby was dead, but my body was reacting as if she were still alive. I’d never felt so lonely in my life.
According to the articles on the Feeds, I should avoid pumping since it might keep the milk from drying up. Still, I found it necessary and so I did.
Later in the evening, the droid returned, delivering the adult-sized box to my living room.
My brother had told me that Jordan was special.
We would see about that.
You have two days, I thought. Starting from when I power you up tomorrow. Then I’m sending you back.
A message came in from the hospital offering me counseling services along with information on working through the stages of grief. “We’re here to assist you. To listen. To help you heal,” it read.
I filed it to respond to later.
Trevor’s question regarding a memorial service stuck in my mind, but I couldn’t bear the thought of going through saying goodbye to my baby with an audience around me. It would just be too traumatic, too difficult, so I decided not to post the time on the Feeds. I would have a private visitation without drawing undo attention to myself or my loss.
The Pollyannaish idea that Naiobi would live on in my heart brought me no comfort. No, the dead do not live on in our hearts. We remember them, of course, but that’s of little comfort, or none at all. In fact, I’d often seen that when people were grieving, the lingering memories of their loved ones actually made it more difficult to move on.
The dead don’t live on in our hearts.
They’re gone.
I gave the box a wide berth as I passed it on the way to my bedroom.
* * *
“What do we know about her?” Special Agent Nick Vernon paused as he scrolled through a series of images on the screen in front of him.
The woman appeared to be about his age. She had a gentle-looking, attractive face, but also an intensity about her that made her appear to be someone who could stand up for herself.
“She’s a Methodist minister,” Agent Ripley Carlisle, his associate, said. “Wrote anti-technology blogs while she was at seminary.”
Nick had worked with Ripley for the last six months. Bald, wiry, and strong, the man had a presence about him that seemed almost serpentine.
The two men were in Nick’s office in the National Counterterrorism Bureau suite at the federal building in downtown Cincinnati. The cramped and quiet room stood in sharp contrast to the frenzied activity in the unit’s expansive control center down the hall.
“And now?” Nick said.
“She was one of the first responders at the scene of the bombing. And her purchase history includes hundreds of paper-bound books.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.�
��
“I’m not looking for proof yet, sir, just connections.”
A touch of silence. “Your report says she offered assistance to one of the victims.”
“Yes. A Terabyne security officer named Ethan Bolderson.”
“And?”
“And?”
“Did he make it?”
“He did. He’s at the hospital, still sedated, but in stable condition.”
“Start with him before you talk with her. As soon as he’s awake find out what she said to him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And contact the plant’s security office. I want a copy of the surveillance camera footage of her arrival.” Then he added, “And pull up those articles that she wrote. I want to read them for myself.”
5
Thursday, November 6
Thankfully I made it through the night without any more terrifying dreams.
I ate breakfast staring at the box in the living room.
For some reason it looked taller and more imposing than it had yesterday when the droid brought it in.
I called Saint Lucia’s Chapel to confirm that things were set.
“We have the service scheduled for two o’clock.”
“It won’t be a service per se,” I said to their director. “I’m just coming in to say goodbye to my daughter. It’ll just be me.”
“No visitation then?”
“I’ll be alone.”
A pause. “We’re here to meet your needs. Will it be a chemical or fire cremation?”
Because of zoning constraints, scarcity of land, and overpopulation issues, cremation was the norm these days, but I’d never warmed to the idea of dissolving a loved one using alkaline hydrolysis or reducing them to ashes. However, by law, funeral homes still made concessions to bury the dead—as long as you were willing to pay.
“Burial,” I said.
“Do you have a plot?”
“I’d like one overlooking the river. Do you have anything like that?”
“Will cost be an issue for you?” he asked after a slight hesitation. “We have a limited number of plots available, you know.”
Over the years I’d saved up some money that I’d intended to give to any children I might have for their wedding or for college or a down payment on a house. Now, I would be using it to pay for my daughter’s burial.
“Can we sort through that and handle the credit transfer when I arrive?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll come by before two so we can meet. Figure all that out.”
“Alright, Ms. Hathaway.”
End call.
Though I’d committed to opening the box today, I was still reticent to do so, and couldn’t quite bring myself to power up the Artificial inside of it—not yet. I’d never owned one for myself and had avoided them ever since the tragedy that left both of my parents dead. So right now I wanted to find out a little more about the implications of having one around before I turned this unit on.
Admittedly, it might have been a way of stalling, but either way, I went to the Feeds to read up on owning an Artificial.
I already knew that, depending on the role the machine was meant to fulfill, it would have different levels of autonomy and the accountability that came with it.
Unlike simpler droids or manufacturing robots that lacked advanced neural processors, today’s cognizant Artificials had self-awareness, consciousness, and free will—and because of that, they’d been granted certain rights by law.
It used to be that people designed machines simply as utilitarian devices to make life simpler, easier, or safer. However, over time, as the machines became self-aware, things began to change.
Robotic rights have been advancing steadily ever since 2017, when Sophia became the first robot to be given citizenship in a country, when Saudi Arabia accepted her.
The right for Artificials to marry Naturals was granted by the European Union in 2031, following the right to consent laws two years earlier.
After all, if the Artificials were morally free agents—so the argument went—they shouldn’t be treated the same as toasters and washing machines, or be limited to having only the same rights as a coffee bean grinder.
So, six years ago the International Artificial Intelligence Rights Forum, working with the United Nations and the team of Artificials who’d originally advocated for the rights in the first place, drew up three inalienable rights for Artificials—granted, as it were, by their creators.
First, the right to exist. That made it against the law to destroy a cognizant Artificial without its permission or unless the life of a human was at risk.
Second, the right to have hope. This resulted in Terabyne’s establishment of the Consciousness Realignment Algorithm, or the CoRA.
When an Artificial experienced a Catastrophic Terminal Event, most often referred to as a CaTE, the Artificial’s consciousness, memory, understanding, and aspirations would be uploaded to a secure mainframe computer at Terabyne’s headquarters in the Cascade Mountains on the campus where Trevor worked. In this way, the robots would live on and wouldn’t need to fear their demise.
The CoRA was the closest thing that there was to an afterlife for machines, and it provided them with hope, just as belief in an afterlife brings hope to so many human beings.
And finally, Artificials had the inviolable right to die. All self-aware Artificials were, by design, apoptotic.
This was the most controversial of the three rights, but was actually fought for the most intractably by the Artificials themselves.
The experience of being human is much more than simply knowing what human beings know or even processing information in ways humans might do. The essence of being human requires conceptualizing life from the perspective of someone who will not live forever on this planet.
And that was what the Artificials wanted—the closest possible semblance to the human experience.
In order to encounter life the way humans do, you must be able to live in the paradox of knowing that you are finite—that you might die at any moment, in fact—but also, at the same time, you must have the ability to seek joy and meaning.
How does a sentient, self-aware being experience both the truth of life’s brevity and also cling to the hope of tomorrow? Looking forward to entering the CoRA allowed Artificials a way to live within this paradox without despairing their brief existence.
Consciousness is not just a collection of facts. It isn’t just intelligence and emotion that a machine might exhibit. We also shape our lives around the beliefs that we have. As a result, a self-aware computer, one with consciousness, must also be one with beliefs.
So, the three rights were intertwined and interdependent, and formed the framework for Artificials to pursue meaning while also experiencing, as much as possible, what it would be like to exist as a finite biological organism.
I got lost reading about the different views on the establishment of the CoRA—some people claiming that it was a good thing since it allowed machines to live on, others claiming that it was simply a way to manipulate the system to sell more Artificials, but finally, as I was finishing lunch, I realized that I’d learned all I needed to.
I had to admit that I was, in fact, stalling.
It was time to open the box.
Because of the weight of its contents, the packaging tape that’d been used to secure the flaps was thick and formidable, and I doubted that a regular letter opener or scissors blade would handle it. Somewhere in the closet I had the hunting knife that my dad gave me when I turned twelve. That would do the trick.
I went down the hallway to my bedroom, feeling a clutch of pain as I passed the door to the nursery I’d prepared for Naiobi.
And also guilt, not just for being so good at distracting myself from powering up the Artificial, but also from avoiding thinking about the death of my dear, sweet daughter.
* * *
Agent Ripley Carlisle knuckle-rapped on Ethan Bolderson’s hospital r
oom door, and when Ethan invited him in, he entered, closed the door softly behind him, and then locked it.
The room smelled lemony-aseptic-clean, the way hospitals do. A machine monitoring Ethan’s vitals emitted a soft, barely audible hum and a steady, metronomic beep.
As Ripley approached the bed, he could see that Ethan’s right arm had been amputated just below the shoulder. A tube offering him a morphine drip was attached to his other arm.
“Hello?” Ethan said questioningly. “Do I know you?”
“My name is Agent Carlisle. I work with the federal agency tasked with finding the people who attacked your place of work yesterday.”
“The NCB,” Ethan guessed.
“Yes.” He must have been a trusting person because he didn’t ask for an ID, but Ripley showed him his NCB badge anyway—over the years he’d found that it instilled more trust in the people he was interviewing.
As he pocketed it, he said, “From what I hear, you’re a lucky man. You lost a lot of blood.”
“They had to give me two transfusions. But it looks like I’m gonna be alright.”
“That’s good news.”
“I’ll say.”
A beat. “I understand that you met up with a woman after the attack.”
“A woman?”
“Who helped you. By the meditation pool.”
“Oh. Yes. She told me her name was Kestrel.”
“Did she give you a last name?”
“No.”
Ripley walked to the window and dialed the blinds shut. “What do you know about her?”
“Nothing—except that she knew first aid. She saved my life. I was bleeding out.” With his free hand he indicated the stump where his other arm used to be. “They’re prepping me for an artificial arm.”
“You’ll be a Plusser.”
“Yep. It shouldn’t be that bad.”
“No. It shouldn’t.” Ripley dragged a chair over to the bedside and took a seat. He studied the screen of the machine that was tracking Ethan’s body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. A steady beep.
Beep and hum.
“What else can you tell me about her?” Ripley said.
Ethan shook his head. “I don’t know, I . . . Well . . . She was religious. I was fading in and out, I remember that. I was scared I’d die. She talked to me about heaven. Seemed to know a lot about it.”