Blue Hearts of Mars (10 page)

“Um, OK,” I said. He pulled his hand away. And I let his fingers slip away reluctantly. I wanted to lean in and kiss him, but his mannerisms had become so distant. I was afraid he’d reject me.

He left quickly. I stood there, my hand on the outside of the doorway, leaning slightly into it, feeling cold and bereft.

“He’s an android, Retta,” Dad said from behind me, emphasizing android. He’d come into the entry foyer and was standing behind me.

I closed my eyes slowly, opened them, and relaxed my jaw. “Dad, really? Is that all you see in him?”

“Well, yes, frankly. And you’d be wise to see that too.”

“Didn’t meeting Sonja do anything for you?”

“After you left, we talked. She’s crazy. She thinks he’s real.” Dad waved his hand flippantly and went into the kitchen. I followed him. “I mean, the woman actually quit her position at the research and development company because they began encouraging euthanasia for some deviant androids.”

“Euthan-what?”

“Euthanasia. When they humanely kill something. Like putting it to sleep. A suffering animal, a mentally unstable android.”

“What are you saying?” I asked, raising my voice. A wave of sickness washed over me.

“Some androids have gotten off-track. You know, all this graffiti is probably being done by the androids that would benefit from being put down. Rebooted. Or something.”

“You make absolutely no sense, Dad. Hemingway
is
real. You don’t bring something to life and then kill it when it does something you don’t like. Or reboot it. They’re not computers. They’re alive! Would you like to put me down too? Am I getting off your preferred track?” I was seriously livid.

“Retta, you and Marta are human,” he said. The look in his eye was fierce like he resented the comparison or he was disgusted with the idea of hurting me for doing something he didn't like. Well. Good. I wanted him to think about the horrible nature of what he was suggesting. “I would never, never want you to be hurt. I would protect you with my own life, if necessary.” He leaned across the counter toward me and took my hand in his, a little bit rougher than I would have liked. “Do you hear me? Look at me in the eyes, Retta. I would
die
for you if I had to. Your life and Marta’s life are completely different from Hemingway’s life.”

I tried to pull my hand away, but he wouldn’t let me. So I looked him straight in the eye and tried to push all of my feelings into my face, into my stare. “That’s not how his mother, Sonja feels. And it’s not how I feel. Sonja would die for Hemingway. That speaks as much for his human-ness as anything else, Dad. Having someone who loves you
that
much. That makes you as human as anything.” With one last jerk, I pulled my hand away and hurried to my room.

I threw myself onto my bed and buried my face in my pillow. I cried. Yes. I know. Tough, old Retta doesn’t cry. Well, that’s completely not true. I cry a lot. I cried the most when my mom died. Since then, not as much. But there are times when a girl just needs to cry. Like when Stig was a major jerk and said to me, “I just think we’ve taken
us
as far as we can go. We’re going in different directions. I need someone who’s going in my direction.” Translation: you won’t have sex with me, so I’m going to find someone who will.

Yeah. A good cry. Times like that.

The conversation with my dad really bothered me. How could he not see it the way I did?

Is it me? Am I a complete fool? Are the androids one hundred percent different from humans? Are their souls lies?

Sometimes it was really inconvenient having to use my Gate as a phone, since I was always, you know,
seen
. In the old days, if you wanted to communicate with someone, it was almost instantaneous. Just press a button by your ear and boom, on the phone. Then there was a rash of brain cancers from the implants and the wireless signals, so everyone reverted to not having phones near their brains.

Makes sense. A brain is way more important than a phone. I guess humans weren’t meant to be part cyborg after all. And anyway, when it became evident that robots were getting really humanlike, people didn’t want to be cyborgs. Well, some of them did. But the sane people were afraid to lose what made them human. It’s a big mess, really, the blue hearts and the humans and all the confusion over being a machine or being a soft, fleshy human with a red heart.

So I wanted to call Hemingway on my Gate, but I looked like a bad mug shot from crying. My blue eyes were all puffy and my pale cheeks were red and blotchy. Did that matter? I was completely worried about him. My dad can be such a total jerk that it surprises me sometimes. I don’t know why, though. I’ve lived with him my whole life, I should just expect that by now. I guess I’m always holding out hope that he’ll warm up, drop the scientist vibe just a bit, and be friendly. It got worse after mom died, if that can be believed. One would think something so transforming would cause him to soften up. Nope. Not my dad.

I went to the mirror against the wall and pressed the puffy parts of my eyes down. That didn’t work. So I put my hair up into a bun and adjusted the strands that wouldn’t stay in. I went to my small bathroom and splashed cold water over my face then hurried back into my room. I could hear my dad in the kitchen making toast or something. I seethed for a moment. How can he have an appetite at a time like this? He ruins my life and then makes a snack.

I set the lights to a more flattering level and made the call, which I was doing solely out of concern for Hemingway.

“Hey,” he said almost immediately, his face appearing before me.

“Hey.” I leaned back and began playing with a strand of hair.

He smiled a bit, but there was a look of sorrow in his eyes.

Neither of us said anything. “You alright?” I asked at last.

He shrugged. “Well enough.”

“My dad is a jerk, OK, don’t let him get to you. What he thinks doesn’t even matter.”

“Thanks, but the truth is, he represents most of the population. Not enough people think like you, Retta.”

“They’ll come around,” I said encouragingly.

“They will? It’s been over two hundred years. If they can’t change in that time, when will they?”

“Soon. There’s obviously something happening, you know, out in the world. The graffiti and whatnot. It will help,” I said, twisting the strand of hair really tight around my finger.

“It will be stifled. Just wait. There’s too much fear.”

“You can’t give up hope. Change is inevitable and if enough people like me care about androids, we can show the world that we’re the same—humans and androids.”

He shook his head and put his face into his hands, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm. “You’re amazing. And beautiful. And I’m really into you.” He said finally, looking at me and reaching his hand toward the Gate like he was touching my face on his end of the call. My heart responded to the words and I began to smile. “But I can’t drag you through this, Retta. You deserve something normal. A man that’s accepted by the rest of society as a man. Not an android. Not someone who’s very nature will create a maelstrom of vitriol around you.”

“What—what—no—” I stuttered, feeling a black well of panic open up in my chest. “What? Don’t say those things, Hemingway. You can’t!”

He nodded sadly, his steel blue eyes suddenly seemed to burn with a thousand sparks. “It’s for the best, Retta. I love you too much to let anything happen to you.”

“No! Hemingway, no! This is wrong. You can’t do this to me!” I fell toward the Gate as though I could reach through and grab hold of him. New tears were bursting into my eyes. I couldn’t see.

His face was turned down, his eyes averted, like he couldn’t watch me floundering. Then he vanished.

I crumpled into a heap on my bed, my Gate fading into a clear piece of glass, devoid of warmth and the light of Hemingway’s face. Sobbing into my pillow, I barely heard a soft knocking on my bedroom door. It creaked open.

“Retta?” Came my dad’s voice. “Is everything alright? I heard shout—” he broke off.

He was by my side in a heartbeat. I felt his arms scooping me close as he sat down on my bed. I almost pushed him away, but felt too weak and drained to even protest him holding me.

“What happened?” Dad asked.

“Hemingway,” I managed.

“What? What did he do? Did he hurt you? If he hurt you—” he didn’t finish, but I knew what he’d say.

“My heart,” I said, the words coming out between sobs.

“What? He broke up with you?” He patted my back. “He’s an idiot. An idiot. He doesn’t deserve you if he could just cast you aside like that.”

“Aren’t you glad?” I asked, barely able to form the question.

I felt him shake his head. “Not at all. Not glad that he hurt you. I knew he would, I knew he would.”

I thought about pushing him away and screaming that it was partly because of how he treated Hemingway that made him break up with me. But I was too drained. My body seemed shriveled in total exhaustion. I just wanted to cry and fall asleep, to forget, to sink into my dreams where maybe Hemingway and I were still together without the pressure of my disapproving father and a society that wouldn't accept us.

Despite the fact I’d been upset over the argument with my dad, I was thankful he was comforting me. Sometimes I really wished my mom was alive. She isn’t. But at least I have my dad. As obtuse as he could be, he was still my dad and his embrace always felt a lot like home.

What do you do when the man you love breaks up with you? You stalk him, of course.

That’s a joke, obviously. This isn’t the holo-film “Fatal Attraction” or something. I’m not
that
unstable. I may be seventeen and slightly rash, but I’m no psycho in love.

I wasn’t stalking Hemingway per se. Just looking for answers, really.

The classic reason we’d been given that the androids were created was to help settle Mars. They were the precursors to humans on the red planet. They say when the first androids came to Mars, they were more robotic, machine-like, and less human. They looked like metallic skeletons. Their eyes were glass domes. Their muscles were hydraulic and pneumatic and other fancy terms. Those more robotic androids could survive in the small amounts of pressure on Mars without enormous, pressurized suits. They could deal with several months of quarantine to make sure there weren’t disease vectors in the dust of Mars clinging to them if they returned to Earth.

Early androids established the first settlements on Mars. They erected the domes and put together the shelters that housed the initial human settlers. As soon as the settlements got going and mining operations could begin, the influx of rare metals and the necessity for people who could do more than just build domes pushed the advancement of the early androids and they became the extremely human-like androids we know now. Ridiculously, perfectly gorgeous androids like Hemingway.

Or so we’d been told.

I don’t know if I bought it.

The problem was that I had nothing else to offer as an alternative to this story.

So what was I doing? Looking for more.

But so far, the best I could do was search the many databases connected to my Gate. New Helsinki was fairly limited in its capacity for storing information, like we didn’t have some kind of Library of Congress like they had back on Earth in America, or that big one, in the eternal city of London that combined the hundred largest libraries from all the countries. The library here was more a museum and less a repository for the volumes and volumes of human literature and knowledge. Maybe there was stuff in our library that I hadn’t tapped into and maybe there was stuff in the Vantaa—the capitol building of New Helsinki—and maybe there was something at the Synlife dome-scraper where Hemingway’s mother used to work.

For the moment, I’d been plugging search terms into the many search engines on the Webs.

Sunday afternoon. I didn’t feel like going out or doing anything. So I stayed in my room, studying and browsing my search results. I got several old articles from news-feeds that detailed some of the big breakthroughs. Like when the androids began to have a form of blood, for example, that ran nutrients and waste back and forth between various tissues and cells and their hearts. I read one about the first engineered heart. How it was blue. How it beat at a constant one-hundred and twenty beats per minute and that it would last the lifetime of the android, providing they were never exposed to large magnetic sources.

All of these engineering strides took place several years after Mars had already been settled.

I learned things I never knew about androids. Their skin imitates human skin perfectly. At first it took ten months to knit together an entire layer of skin—of which there are two. Nowadays it takes a month and a half per layer, so three months. I found out that at first there were big debates about whether or not to give androids reproductive organs. One faction claimed it would be inhumane to create an android with body parts like that. It would defile the godliness of humans. God would find it offensive and strike down humans who would do such a wicked thing. The other side claimed that it would be inhumane to not give them the capacity to procreate, as though they knew that the androids would grow souls. It was like one side saw androids as sinful and the other side saw them as a blessing—just a new way to house souls.