Human Sister (16 page)

In the middle of last night, after receiving First Brother’s frightening transmission, I woke and found myself wet with sweat and tears. It took me several seconds to realize where I was. Then the tears resumed, as if trying to wash away a terrible wound.

Exhausted, I turned on the light. Michael wasn’t there. His sleeping bag was rolled up neatly and put in its assigned place. He doesn’t sleep much anymore, keeping busy day and night constructing the garden and the artificial wombs—do those two concepts, day and night, mean anything down here, where time is a palimpsest of nothingness?

As I sat up in my sleeping bag, I saw little sparkles of light on the reflective inner surface of the module, then the writing table and the cabinets, all rounded to fit against the walls. And permeating everything: the silence, the immense, ever-present, unluminous silence. No sleep, no shadow, no cold dark of night, nothing can compare to the silence of nonexistence—Elio’s silence. Grandpa once told me that the greatest wisdom is the ability to look at nothingness squarely and still be happy and have your happiness rub off onto others. But I no longer seem to have a grasp on that kind of wisdom. What I want is what I can’t have: that Elio did not die in a pool of blood on the way here, that he lives and waits somewhere for me.

First Brother

“H
ello! Is anyone there? Hello!” She bends down and picks up a flattened ellipsoidal rock with major axis approximately 5 cm long. She uses the rock to tap on the hull of the boat. Tap, tap, tap. “Hello!” Tap, tap. “Hello! Please speak or knock if you’re there.” She waits 8 seconds. “I have your dog here. He seems hungry. Please answer. I’ll help you if I can.” She waits 13 seconds. She taps three more times. She waits 7 seconds, then tosses the rock back onto the sand. The dog jumps over to the rock, sniffs it, licks it, and returns to her.  

She places her right forearm horizontally against the hull. She pushes her forehead against her raised forearm and begins to emit whining and sobbing sounds (highest correlation: human crying). The dog sits on its hindquarters in the sand. It watches her. It rises from its sitting position and walks to her left side. It nuzzles her dangling gloved hand. The hand responds by petting the dog’s muzzle and head while she continues to emit sobbing sounds. One minute, 20 seconds later, she pulls her forehead from her right forearm, pulls her right forearm from the hull, and wipes her eyes and cheeks with her gloved right hand.

Sara

A
t the age of eleven, I went alone to visit Mom and Dad during their second winter solstice vacation in Calgary. Grandma said the trip the year before had exhausted her and that she hadn’t liked the bitter cold, but I sensed that she knew I was eager to get out and do things on my own.

Unlike the winter before, this time when I asked to see First Brother, my parents consented. The Alberta Robotics research laboratory where he lived was housed in an underground building only four kilometers from Mom and Dad’s home. The security at the lab, along with its blank white walls and its absence of windows and carpets, made me feel at home.

Mom and Dad took me straightaway to a room designated B9. When the door to this room opened, I saw First Brother working on what appeared to be an android foot.

“First Brother!” I exclaimed, running to him. My running halted in front of his blank look and the hand he stuck out to shake.

“I’m really happy to see you,” I said, though at the moment I also felt a quiver of disappointment, realizing once again that I had failed in my early desire to help him acquire more emotional depth. This sense of failure was quickly followed by an almost painful longing for home, especially for Michael, whose enthusiastic hugs, kisses, and sometimes even tears of joy greeted me whenever I was away from him for as little as a few minutes.

“Tell me about Michael,” First Brother said, releasing my hand.

I turned around and looked questioningly at Mom and Dad.

“It’s okay,” Dad said. “We’re confident of the security here.”

I looked back at First Brother. “He speaks very well. He laughs and plays and—”

“Does the braincord work?” First Brother interrupted.

“Yes. He says he’s conscious of my thoughts and feelings when—”

“Has Professor Jensen given Michael access to his mathematics module yet?”

“No. Grandpa thinks it’s better—”

“Then I presume that Michael hasn’t been given access to his science module.”

“No. As I was saying—”

“You may leave now.” First Brother turned back to his work.

Confused and disheartened, I felt Mom take hold of my arm. “Everyone here is awfully busy right now, as you can see,” she said.

Before entering an adjacent room, Mom leaned toward me and said, “We have a little surprise for you.”

The surprise was that I was finally introduced to Second Brother and, even more surprising, to four additional brothers, all of whom looked like First Brother and appeared to be engaged in some thing or things more interesting than I, even while they were being introduced. Mom told me that two of my new brothers were being trained by First Brother and two by Second Brother.

“When did I get four new brothers?”

“Each of them came to consciousness about five months ago,” Dad answered.

“There is a lot for us to do,” Mom said, “and all of your brothers are very helpful.”

I interpreted, perhaps wrongly, the look on her face to express that I, unlike my brothers, was very unhelpful.

“What do they do?” I asked.

“Whatever needs to be done,” Mom answered.

“Oh.”

“Come, we’ll show you our office,” Dad said.

“But I’d like to see what my brothers do. I’d like to be with them awhile.”

“Enough for one day,” Mom said, turning me by my shoulders back toward the door.

“Good-bye,” I said. “I’m so happy to have met all of you.”

None of them looked up or said good-bye.

Once we were in Mom and Dad’s office—bare white walls, two desks, two computer monitors, and four chairs—they told me about the new Four Seasons Hotel they’d stay at while attending the Space Medical Sciences Conference (they went to this conference on the moon nearly every year), and they talked in general terms about the medical robots they and my brothers were working on. While they talked, a question began forming in my mind, then made itself heard: “Why are you creating more androids? What can they do that people can’t do with the help of machines?”

“You mean, how dare we take a bite out of the apple?” Mom had that look that meant I’d just been naughty.

“No,” Dad said, turning toward her and placing his hand on her arm. “Sara just wants to know”—he paused, then glanced at me—“what we’ve been doing all these years that’s so important it has largely kept us out of her life.”

Suddenly, coming as a complete surprise to me, I began crying. They both came and hugged me, holding me quietly, as Grandpa always did, until I’d cried out my feelings.

Mom produced a tissue. I dried my eyes and blew my nose.

They both smiled. “To know ourselves, honey,” Dad said, “has long been humans’ deepest intellectual desire. We have learned an immense amount about ourselves—one day you’ll understand this—in the process of trying to duplicate with alternative materials how we think and feel and act.”

“And how to improve ourselves,” Mom said. “There’s no other way to test what might result from certain proposed improvements, such as having larger working memories, different algorithms for memory prioritization and decay, heightened sensory perception, and so on. Such things we can’t try out on each other. Who knows what might go wrong? It is in the nature of complex systems to be unpredictable, and as we’ve seen in other fields during the past few decades, not all the surprises can be expected to be pleasant ones.”

“Your brothers have already given us so much,” Dad said. “Compared with your grandma and grandpa, and even to Michael, they probably appear to you to be a bit cold. But if you ever get to know them as we have, you’ll find them to be immensely interesting and caring and even loving, in their own way.”

“And like us,” Mom added, “they want to create—to reproduce, if you will—and care for what they’ve created. Your four new brothers are the product of your older brothers’ designs and devoted nurturing.”

“What we’re getting at, honey,” Dad said, “is that we love you dearly. You’re our daughter, our only human child. You came to us as a happy accident, but we were so busy with other important things that we felt we couldn’t do justice to you or to our love for you if we selfishly kept you to ourselves. We felt, and hope we were right in this, that your grandma and grandpa could give you much more of what you need than we, with our busy lives, ever could.”

It’s hopeless, I thought. They’ll never understand what it feels like to be abandoned. To be abandoned in favor of brothers.

After having a snack in the lab’s lunchroom, Dad asked whether I’d like to go for a drive to see the city and the wintry countryside. I said I’d like to spend more time with my brothers, but Mom said my introduction had been distracting enough to them for one day.  

It was mid-afternoon when Dad stopped the car near a snowy field abutting a river lined with trees. The three of us got out and started building a snowman; but before long, clouds blanketed the sky, and soon, swirling down through the bracing air, some flakes of paralyzed water landed on my face, were warmed, and once again flowed, crawling like insects down my cheeks into the scarf around my neck. Then the ground was white, the trees were white, even the sky was white; and at the edge of this world of one color, the invisible sun set earlier than I expected, sending darkness, like an owl on a hunt, swooping swiftly and silently down upon us.

We had just settled into the car and begun to warm up when Mom’s teleband beeped. She answered, and by the few words I heard and by the tone of her voice, I knew, or was led to believe, that a crisis had occurred. She snapped the teleband off and turned to Dad. “That was Louise at the AAN. Aita isn’t responding. She was working at the greenhouse. They want us to get over there right away.”

 Dad started the engine and headed back toward the city.

“What’s the AAN?” I asked.

“The Android Assistance Network,” Mom answered.

“What do they do?”

“We’re an underground network that helps androids escape from the United States.”

“Who is Aita?”

“An android who works at a greenhouse nearby. She came out of the Robotic Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and is a second-generation android, developed and trained exclusively by other androids, as have been your four new brothers.”

“Is something wrong with her?”

Mom glanced at Dad, then looked back at me. “Recently some androids have been disappearing. Most of them are equipped with alarms and tracking devices, but at the time of each disappearance, the frequencies on which those devices broadcast are jammed for a few minutes, and when the jamming ends, there’s nothing, not a trace of the android anywhere.”

“Have Aita’s frequencies been jammed?” I asked.

“That’s what Louise just told me. Most of the people with the AAN think the androids are being kidnapped by U.S. agents, thrown into insulated chambers, and, well, after that we can only speculate.” Mom looked worried and shifted her gaze out the front window.

I wonder now whether she actually did look worried. Was she so accomplished at deceiving her daughter? Or did my mind simply paint in something—in this case, worry—that it expected to be there under the circumstances?