Human Sister (9 page)

“Yes,” I answered, for they were comfortable; I’d picked them out myself at Carlos’s house, and Grandma had perfected them with appropriate alterations. After running the matter quickly through my mind again, I added, “Elio can’t know how nice my clothes are. He’s never had a chance to try them on.”

“That’s right, honey,” she replied, and we went on with our work, undoubtedly appearing, had a stranger seen us, to be a contented grandmother cultivating her garden beside her barefoot grandchild, who had boyish hair (cut by then like Elio’s, the way I wanted it) and who wore a long-sleeved plaid shirt and a pair of patched and faded jeans.

After landing at Schiphol near Amsterdam and passing through Customs, I spotted Aunt Lynh and Elio standing in a crowd of people. I pulled my hand away from Grandpa’s and ran ahead of the luggage cart straight toward Elio. Seeing him at last in person, I was nearly bursting with excitement and wanted to hug him. But instead of opening his arms to me, he stiffly extended his hand. I’d seen Grandpa shake hands with people before, but Elio’s outstretched hand and unexpectedly solemn face quelled my excitement. Didn’t he want to see me?

I turned to look back at Grandpa, who was approaching with the cart. His smile and nod gave me courage. I ignored Elio’s extended hand and hugged him. He hugged me back. I liked the feel of him, and I liked his smell, which reminded me of dew on young winter grass.

When he released his hold on me, he looked up at his mother. “I told you she wouldn’t want to shake hands. It’s so off-putting.”

Elio and I sat in the backseat of Aunt Lynh’s car, Grandpa in the front, as Aunt Lynh drove. Her car wasn’t as quiet inside as Grandpa and Grandma’s. When she began telling Grandpa about her new research job at a teaching hospital, Elio motioned for me to be quiet, then bent over and reached under Grandpa’s seat. He pulled out a little model of the ASST-77 Grandpa and I had arrived on, handed it to me, and whispered, “Ma says I can’t give you any gifts, but this is for you anyway. Don’t let her see it.”

I was delighted with the toy plane and played with it out of sight of the rearview mirror until Aunt Lynh said, “You two are awfully quiet back there.”

Elio grabbed the plane from me and shoved it under his leg. “Just playing, Ma.”

Northern Europe’s long-lingering midsummer sun, whorling gold and red, hung low in the sky as we exited the automated motorway near Aunt Lynh’s apartment. As soon as we parked, Elio opened the car door and shouted, “Follow me!”

 We ran out into a well-kept park that was surrounded by the six buildings of the apartment complex. We had just come to a large tree with serrated heart-shaped leaves and a pleasant fruity scent (I later learned that it was a linden tree) when I heard Aunt Lynh call: “Elio! Come here!”

His shoulders and head drooped.

“Come here—right now!”

“Aw, Ma!”

“Now!”

We walked back—Elio appearing dejected, like a balloon that had lost its air—to where she and Grandpa stood beside the luggage.

“Elio, haven’t I told you not to take Sara near that tree?”

He merely shrugged.

“Now, you listen real good, mister. If you get Sara hurt horsing around, you’ll be grounded for the rest of the summer. That means in your room, no internet, no movies, no going out with your friends—all summer. Got it? She’s younger and she’s not used to playing with the kind of roughnecks you play with, so you’ve got to use your head and be careful. And don’t you dare climb in that tree with her. Are you listening to me?”

“Jeez, Ma.”

“Don’t you ‘Jeez, Ma’ me. Now answer properly. Are you going to be careful with Sara all during her stay?”

“Ja, I’ll be real careful.”

“You’d better be. And don’t forget to hold on to her hand whenever you’re near cars or buses. You should think of her as your little sister. Now, it’s almost your bedtime. Come up with Professor Jensen and me and show Sara your room.”

The door to their apartment opened to a living room. To the left was the kitchen. Beyond the living room and kitchen were two bedrooms: Aunt Lynh’s to the left and Elio’s to the right, with a bathroom between. All the rooms seemed small to me. There were pictures in frames on most of the walls, and light brown carpet covered the living room and bedroom floors. In our house there were no carpets or rugs, which would have been even better hiding places for surveillance microbots than pictures on the walls. Furthermore, we had no need for such floor coverings because our soft ceramic floors were heated from below. But Elio appeared proud while showing me his room, small and cramped and carpeted though it was. He took particular care while demonstrating exactly where and how he sat when he talked with me on Vidtel.

He and I played with a few of his toys while Grandpa and Aunt Lynh talked in the kitchen. I’d never before played with another human child and was fascinated watching Elio’s hands and hearing his voice, which made growling, screeching, and exploding noises, as if he were adding a soundtrack to our activities.

After about a half-hour, Aunt Lynh peeked inside the bedroom door. “Elio, it’s your bedtime. Sara has to leave with her grandfather. They’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

As soon as Aunt Lynh’s face disappeared from the crack in the door, Elio whispered, “Tell them you want to stay here with me.”

“Where’s Grandpa going?”

“We don’t have a guest room, so he’s going to a hotel. But you tell them you want to stay here with me.”

I ran out to Grandpa and hugged him tightly around his neck.

“Oh, my, my,” he said. “Whatever is the matter?”

I glanced back at Elio, who was standing near his bedroom door, his enticing dark eyes focused on me.

“May I stay here with Elio?” I asked.

Later that night, right after Aunt Lynh had tucked Elio and me in bed and kissed us goodnight, Elio whispered, “Let’s take off our pajamas.”

I turned to him. “Why?” There was just enough light coming in from his bathroom night-light to allow me to see him smile.

“Because it’s more comfortable that way—and free.”

“Would that be okay with your mom?”

“The rule is, if she wants to come in, she has to knock and then I go and open the door. So, if she knocks, we’ll put our pajamas back on and then I’ll go and open the door. She’ll never know.”

“Okay,” I said.

That was the first night, the first of many in summers to come, that he wrapped himself around me and called me the cuddliest teddy bear in the whole world.

In the morning, I woke before Elio, slipped out of bed, put my pajamas back on, and began playing with his toys—quietly, with none of his action-imitative noises. All the while I played, I felt as though I was getting away with something I shouldn’t have been doing. Then, as was usual for my mornings at home, I began meditating. I was still sitting cross-legged on the floor when Elio woke.

“What’re you doing?” he asked sleepily, his head raised slightly from his pillow, his hair tousled and matted as if it were wind-churned black grass.

“Meditating.”

“Meditating? Why do you do that?”

“To quiet the hustle and bustle of the world, to help me become more aware.”

“What do you become more aware of?”

My mind went blank for a moment, aware only of his enchanting eyes and hair and sleepy puzzled look. I should have told him that while meditating I found a heart beating, the quiet rise and fallback of breath, sensations of my body touching the floor—but nothing more, except a sense of a dark hollowness abuzz with unformed thoughts, which I could watch fill my consciousness, not so unlike how I sometimes sat quietly on the deck above the vineyard house and watched fog drift over the hills and down into the valley, finding its place in the emptiness of the world.

But all I was able to think of then in answer to his question was, “Things.”

“Things?” He squinched his eyelids to such narrow slits that I wondered whether he could actually see through them.

First Brother

I
n her gloved hands, she holds a paddle in which the shaft is partially retracted into one of its blades. In sync with the rocking of the raft in the water, the shadow of the brim of her hat moves about on the paddle. She appears to visually scan the coastline. She pauses once for approximately five seconds and again for approximately eight seconds to focus on a sailboat listing onto its port side in the sand of Goat Rock Beach.

She begins to extend the shaft of the paddle, looks up, smiles, and exclaims: “Pigeonoid! I’m so happy to see you!” She brings her hands together, pulls the glove from her right hand, and reaches out with the naked hand. Her hand moves back and forth in a motion correlated with increasing and decreasing stroking pressure (as predicted, within acceptable parameters) on the dorsal structure. The irregular tessellated pattern of the skin on her wrist is penetrated by sweat-gland shafts, which occasionally well up with moisture that glistens in the sun before evaporating.

A close visual inspection of her lips and nostrils confirms that she is free from the infection.

Sara

B
efore escaping to this place under the sea, I copied everything I was able to gain access to on Grandpa’s computer. I’ve been reviewing notes for a book he began but apparently never finished on android psychology. The following entry was made just over three years before I was born and twelve years before Michael first opened his eyes:

Creativity requires more than the generation of representational diversity and the ability to recognize novel patterns; it also requires the recognition of significant new problems. In humans, problems arise naturally out of their continual dialogue with the world in which they are embedded. The lack of motivation to dialogue with the external world that typifies androids at their present stage of development undoubtedly contributes to their low level of creative output even in the sciences and mathematics, belying the pedestrian notion that the abstract is not emotionalized.

The problem of emotion in androids begins with the problem of empathy, for we do not know how to engender a rich repertoire of emotion without a foundation of empathy. But repeated failures over the past few decades to achieve even a moderate degree of empathy in androids from our most sophisticated mirror neuron systems lends credence to the theory that empathy presupposes an experience of the other as being like oneself. To that end, we make androids look like us and give them servo-mechanical systems capable of mimicking the actions of our bodies. But how is it possible for a creature to experience itself as being like me if it has never experienced hunger, pain, the discomforts of heat and cold, the total dependency on parents during infancy, the relative intellectual and physical inadequacies of youth, sexual desire, and so on? On these and on most other aspects of my life as lived, any adult furry little mammal in the wild is more like me than is any android yet created.

We need to develop and study intelligent systems that feel hunger and pain, go through long periods of dependency, struggle to learn, desire…

Grandpa eventually got what he wanted: two such intelligent systems, ones that would feel pain and desire and all the rest—Michael and me—to develop and study. And love and protect and deceive.

Nearly three months after my eighth birthday I lay, dreamy and blissful, on an operating table not long after receiving a sedative. Colorful cartoon images seemed to appear and disappear on the top of the white interior of a sterile operation tent, which had been designed by the military for occasions when evacuation to a hospital was impracticable. A scent, as of a tub scrubbed very clean, permeated everything, and the air felt drowsy amid the soft buzz of air filter motors keeping positive pressure inside the tent.