Grim

A REAL BOY by Claudia Gray

It’s not every day you get to make your true love’s dreams come true.

Or not come true, as the case might be. I get to choose.

As much as I love Rowan, as much as I want him to have the life he deserves—to have life itself—I hesitate, my hand on the switch. Because I know that if I give Rowan what he wants most in the world, I’ll never get to be with him again.

You don’t realize how selfish a feeling love can be until it calls you to do something selfless. At least, I didn’t.

Forget my name. It’s stupid and I never liked it anyway. Two years ago, when I first dyed the streaks into my hair, people started calling me Blue, and the nickname stuck. My parents even call me Blue now, though they think it’s just a phase I’m going through. I don’t know whether I’ll keep the turquoise streaks forever, but the name? Changing it legally on my next birthday. Mom and Dad can just deal.

My parents are a little old-fashioned, I guess. They keep expecting things to go back to the way they used to be—even though that world vanished when they were only children.

Once upon a time, they say, you didn’t have to leave school at age twelve and start work; you could choose your own career instead of having to take the assessment test. Back then you could breathe the air outside without a filter, and pick out your own food in these stores that used to be big—big as cargo bays, Grandma said—and had every kind of fruit and vegetable you can imagine. The vegetables had grown in the dirt, out under a sun that didn’t sear living things. And people just had babies if they wanted to, didn’t have to apply for licenses or anything, and they made them the old-fashioned way.

I know all of that is true, and some of it sounds romantic, but mostly it sounds strange. What’s the point in thinking about how people used to live? I try to keep myself focused on the here and now.

When I took my assessment test, I got slotted into cybernetics. That’s right: I’m learning to make robots. Sounds incredibly cool, right? It will be once I reach advanced training. Now, not so much. For the past five years, my day-to-day work has been mostly custodial—cleaning up the workshops, doing inventory, stuff like that. Apprentices always have to start this way, I tell myself while I’m vacuuming metal shavings.

Still, even apprentices can get some perks if they work for them, and I do.

After I aced my last set of exams in AI Theory, Professor Jafet invited me to help her on a project. I said yes right away, even though it meant sacrificing my free time for at least a couple of weeks. I knew I’d get to assist her with a robot prototype. That kind of experience could get me ahead, later on, I guessed.

What I couldn’t have guessed was that this “experiment” would be Rowan.

“Rowan is a kind of tree,” Professor Jafet said as she placed the memory processors into his brain. (You call it a brain, even though it’s wire instead of flesh. Lots of shorthand like that in cybernetics, calling things what they’d be in humans.) Her hands were wrinkly and gnarled with age, but her fingers operated with dexterity I could only envy. “Brands with names from nature tend to sell well. It makes the robots seem more familiar, less artificial.”

I wondered why. It’s been years since I last saw a tree, and robots are everywhere. Robots ought to be the familiar part by now.

Besides, I thought, what could make a robot seem less artificial? They walked haltingly; their movements were jerky and awkward. Their faces were beautiful in the fake, soulless way of dolls. They all spoke in the same canned phrases, and their voices sounded recorded rather than real.

Yet even as I looked down at Rowan that first day, I realized he was different. His body and face were as beautiful as any other robot’s—more beautiful, really, with his full lips and thick chocolate-brown hair. And yet he seemed lifelike. Natural. Only the deeply carved cheekbones seemed unearthly.

I was shaken from my reverie when I realized how much memory Professor Jafet was weaving into his matrix. It wasn’t just more than I’d seen in other robots; it was lots more. Beyond triple. And the calculation speeds...they’d be off the charts. “Professor Jafet, what function is the Rowan model for?”

“That’s our mistake,” she said, an almost feverish light in her pale green eyes. “We design robots for specific functions. We tell them what they can do. What if, just once, we designed one at maximum capacity and let it tell us what it can do?”

“So you’re going off-specs for this.” Professor Jafet shot me a look, and hastily I added, “Just making sure we’re on the same page.”

“We’re on the same page. Don’t forget it.”

She didn’t need to worry. I know how to keep a secret, and besides—a mentor who knew I had some dirt on her was a mentor who was going to make damn sure I got advanced placement. In this world, you have to take your advantages where you can get them.

But if I had known then what I know now—if I had realized what she was doing with Rowan—would I have had the guts to say something? Would I have been able to say, This is wrong, you’re playing God, you’re not creating something, you’re creating someone?

Probably not. Because if I knew then what I know now, I would know that I needed to meet Rowan. To see the world, and myself, through his eyes. As wrong as it was for him to be created, I can’t help being grateful.

Like I said, love can make you selfish.

The first hints that Rowan was profoundly, deeply different came the moment Professor Jafet switched him on. He opened his eyes. He saw me. And he smiled.

This wasn’t a plastic robot smile. It was realer than most of the smiles I saw on human faces every day. The light in his eyes made me feel like...well, like I was beautiful. I don’t get that reaction very often.

“Oh,” he said with so much wonder in his voice that he might have been looking at the stars. “Who are you?”

“Uh, I’m Blue.” I glanced over at Professor Jafet, unsure what to make of this. Newly activated robots usually asked about their designated functions—but Rowan didn’t have any, did he?

Rowan sat up and looked around the workshop. For him it wasn’t cold steel and spare parts; I knew, just seeing his face, that to Rowan this place was magical. In that instant I saw it through his eyes—the machinery shining like silver, the red and green memory chips glittering like jewels. All the blinking lights and whirring noises around us wove together as though they were music, and for the first time since my earliest days here, I remembered that I worked somewhere extraordinary—that we came as close as anyone could to creating another form of life.

When he looked at Professor Jafet, he didn’t ask who she was. He only said, “Is this where I was born?”

“Yes,” she said, and to my astonishment, she smiled. “Happy birthday.”

He rose from the table, and the way he moved was startlingly human. The only difference was his grace, his easy strength. Even though I’d helped put Rowan together, I suddenly felt embarrassed that he wasn’t wearing any clothing. His nakedness didn’t seem to bother him, though. He simply walked the perimeter of the lab, his broad bare feet padding against the metal floor.

“You’ll recharge here,” Professor Jafet said to him in the same tone of voice a mother might tell a kid that this was their new room. “I’ll get you clothing and supplies.”

“And shoes,” I said, because that floor looked cold. Usually I wouldn’t worry about a robot feeling cold, but I just wanted Rowan to be comfortable, without yet understanding why.

Rowan nodded, but he was hardly listening. That, too, was peculiar—robots are designed to pay attention to humans, not to have interests of their own. But Rowan kept pacing the edges of the room, picking up this tool and that, staring at each vid-screen like they all had something wonderful to tell him. It was as though the entire world, even this little sliver of it, was full of treasures just waiting to be discovered.

Professor Jafet’s gaze flicked over to me, gentler now than before. She put a hand on my shoulder. “Rowan, I’m assigning Blue to work with you.”

He turned around, finally paying attention. “Good. I like Blue.”

My face got flushed, and I couldn’t look directly at him any longer. When could we get this guy some pants?

If Professor Jafet noticed my embarrassment, she gave no sign as she continued, “My duties won’t allow us to spend too much time together, but these early weeks are important. You should have company, someone to learn human society and behavior from.”

Okay, if any of my friends or family had heard her say I should be the one to teach somebody about human society, they’d never stop laughing. I’d be a better fit for the “antisocial and weird” master class. Still, I knew better than to say that to Professor Jafet, so I went for the more obvious problem first. “Between classes and work shifts, I only get a couple hours free a day.”

“I’m signing you out of your work shifts as of now,” Professor Jafet said. “If you think you can keep up with your classes via independent study, I’ll sign you out of those, too. This project can be for special accelerated credits. What do you think, Blue?”

Accelerated credits? The kind that would get me out of apprenticeship and into advanced study a year or two early? I’d have signed up for that even if the path was a lot harder than spending time with a hot guy...I mean, a robot who looked like a hot guy. “I can keep up. I’ll do it.”

“Thank you,” Rowan said. He obviously considered himself as much a part of this conversation as me and the professor. Robots never do that, either.

Yet I knew just by the way he looked at me that he thought I was something special, so he couldn’t be human, either. Humans knew better.

How do I describe the next few weeks?

In some ways it was like spending time with a very small child. Everything was new to Rowan—everything—and he could ask questions for hours on end.

“Why do we never go outside?” he said on one of those early days as we walked the corridors of the complex.

“There’s a UV-radiation advisory. It wouldn’t bother you, but it would give me a sunburn pretty quickly. Those hurt like hell.”

Rowan would hesitate sometimes as he accessed preprogrammed information, draw those thick arched eyebrows of his together as he thought it over. And that was the uncanny thing—he didn’t just pull the info up, he thought about it. Came to his own conclusions. “If you’ve been sunburned, then you used to ignore the advisories. Or you did once.”

“I used to do it a lot,” I admitted. “I figured, you know, I’ve got dark skin, that’s going to protect me. And it does, kinda—instead of getting burned to a crisp in twenty minutes, it takes me about thirty minutes. But I got burned all the same.”

“Why did you do it, if you knew it was dangerous?”

“Because it’s beautiful, seeing the sky. Clouds by day, stars by night. There’s nothing more amazing than a sky full of stars. And the ground is soft and rolling, not flat and hard—soft against your feet, so you could run forever. Plus you don’t feel so closed in all the time. You get to feel free, you know?”

Which was a ridiculous thing to say to a robot who had never been outside even once. Who would never feel free.

But Rowan said, “Yes, I know,” and I believed him.

His curiosity went far beyond anything I’d ever seen in a robot—honestly, beyond what I’d seen in most human beings. He’d been preprogrammed with the raw facts about how the world worked, but he wanted to put those facts in context. Usually, the only context I had to draw on was my own life.

“You were raised in the crèche,” he said, “lived with your parents from age five to age twelve, then left for your apprenticeship.”

I nodded. He had all this information from my files, but wanted to talk it through with me all the same. “Exactly. Just like everybody else.”

“Yet you feel primary allegiance to your parents, even though you lived with them for only a brief period of your life.”

“Well, sure. They’re my mom and dad.”

Rowan hesitated, then said, “You love them.”

“And they love me.”

“How do you know?”

That stopped me short, and I had to think how to answer. We were hanging out in one of the cafeterias then; it was an off-hour, so not many people were around. Rowan didn’t wear a work coverall like most robots. Instead he had on the same jeans and sweater anybody else might wear during their free time. One girl in my apprentice track was getting a coffee, and I saw her shoot us a curious glance. She didn’t think I was spending time working with a robot prototype; she thought I was having lunch with a hot guy.

It did kind of feel like that.

“Kids and parents always love each other,” I said. “It’s hardwired into humans. Good thing, too, or otherwise we wouldn’t be able to stand each other.”

“Really?” Rowan looked so disappointed. “It’s only your programming?”

“No. I’m sorry. I was just—snarking, I guess.”

He must have understood that. “Will you tell me the real answer?”

Rowan deserved that much. So I thought about it for a second, and answered as honestly as I could. “My parents came to see me in the crèche, as often as they could. They cared about whether I was healthy, and happy, all of that. And the years I spent with them—those were the best. That’s how people are supposed to live, and down deep we all know it. Now I only get to talk to them on the computer, but they’re still in my life. They always ask about me. Sometimes I feel like they ask too much, but at least that proves I matter to them, you know? It’s important to feel like you matter to someone.”

“You matter to me,” Rowan said very simply. He didn’t seem to think that was any big deal—that it ought to be obvious.

“Well, thanks. You matter to me, too.” I told myself I said that only to be polite.

Another day I took him to the hydroponic gardens; I had a hunch he’d like them. Rowan kept touching every petal on every flower, brushing his long fingers against each stem, each leaf.

“Even the air smells different,” he said.

“It’s the higher oxygen content.”

“It smells alive.”

Which was exactly what I thought every time I came here on my own. But I just shrugged and laughed. “What you mean is, everywhere else in the center smells dead. Or fake, at least.”

“You’re doing it again.”

That caught me off guard. “Doing what?”

“Snarking,” Rowan said, and I had to laugh. But he remained serious. “I’ve noticed that you often make sarcastic comments to conceal deeper emotions. If you are being sarcastic about the hydroponic gardens, then you must feel very deeply about spending time here. What I don’t understand is why you wouldn’t want me to know.”

I shrugged. “People make fun of you for being too—sincere, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“No. You wouldn’t.”

Rowan smiled. “So you need not pretend with me. You can be your true self.”

If a regular guy had said that to me, I would’ve thought he was just trying to get in my pants. But I knew Rowan meant it. He never said anything he didn’t mean. Then again, he couldn’t; he was just a robot.

“You’re right,” I said. “I love the gardens. It’s quiet here, and there’s so much color. I get tired of everything being gray.”

“Me, too,” Rowan said. Probably he was just saying that to be polite. How could a robot long for something as meaningless, as useless, as color?

Eventually Professor Jafet wanted me to do some evaluation tests with Rowan. But instead of the usual tests—functioning speed, etc.—she had me give him psychology tests, the kind only humans take. At first I thought those would be a ridiculous waste of time; if you show a robot ink blots and ask him what he sees, he’s going to say “Ink blots.” The end.

Instead Rowan studied each card intently as I held them up. “Two dancers joining hands,” he said. “A robed monk seated for meditation. A phoenix unfolding its wings in the fire.”

It was all I could do to keep my hands from shaking. Not only was Rowan responding as a human, he was responding like one with—imagination. Vision. Someone who saw possibility everywhere, the chance of renewal and rebirth....

I managed to say, “How do you even know what a monk looks like? Or a phoenix?”

He blinked. “Still and moving images of virtually all human activity and mythology were preprogrammed into my matrix. Didn’t you help Dr. Jafet do that?”

“Yeah. I did. Sorry.” My astonishment had more to do with the fact that Rowan was capable of recognizing such things in mere swirls of ink.

Quickly I held up the last card. Most of the ink blots were monochromatic, but this one was multicolored. To my surprise, Rowan instantly smiled. “You.”

“Me what?”

“I see you.” He nodded at the card. “The blue loops at the top—that’s your hair. And the rest is you when you’re sort of tired at the end of the day, but you don’t want me to see. You’re leaning back in one of the big chairs, sort of...sprawled, but still graceful.” Rowan’s fingertips grazed over the card, and his gaze was soft. “These are the curves of your shoulders—see?—and then your arms...”

His voice trailed off. At first I thought Rowan had seen that I’d begun to tremble—that I was deeply affected by the fact that he knew when I was tired, that he cared about how I felt and had thought about the way I looked—

Then I realized he hadn’t paused because of that. He was affected. Just the same as me.

“Good,” I said. “That’s good. You did great on this test.”

“Thank you.” Rowan sat up straight, mirroring my posture. We were both acting like strangers who’d never met before, because we both knew we’d crossed a line. That line was one Rowan wasn’t even supposed to be able to recognize.

What the hell was going on?

That night I managed to schedule a meeting with Professor Jafet. She wasn’t keeping regular office hours any longer due to some kind of medical condition—that was what I’d heard. I’d figured it was no big deal, a virus or something. But when she met me there that night, I was struck by how pale she looked, and how thin. The professor wasn’t a young woman, but she seemed to have aged years since I’d last seen her a few weeks before.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, and immediately I was sorry. She shot me this look like I’d shut up if I knew what was good for me.

She lowered herself carefully into one of the office chairs. “What did you want to meet about?”

“Rowan’s intelligence—it’s not like robot intelligence. It’s more like a human’s.”

Professor Jafet smiled. “He should be close. Very close. That was my hope.”

“I didn’t think we could replicate human intelligence.”

“Of course we can. We’ve been able to for a very long time. But human intelligence has one great flaw, Blue. It applies itself to more than the task at hand. We get distracted. We dream of things that can never be. We hope for the impossible. We break our hearts. Humans are stuck with that. Robots don’t have to be. The regulations against higher robot intelligence are born from human insecurity and fear—but those rules protect the robots as well, really.”

“Then why did you break the rules for Rowan?”

“Because I’ve long thought we might be able to create a robot who falls just short of the human mark. One with higher consciousness, but still able to operate with the efficiency of a robot. Intelligence without emotion. For years that has been my ultimate goal.” Professor Jafet’s voice had become raspier, and she closed her eyes—in pain, I realized. I knew she’d want me not to notice, so I pretended I didn’t. After a moment she continued, “You feel he does have full human intelligence?”

“More than. He has the computational quickness of a robot but the analytical thinking of a human.”

“Good. Good.”

“But—Professor Jafet, I don’t know whether he’s totally free from emotion.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

Normally this was the last thing I’d have wanted to discuss with the professor or with anyone, but it felt like I had to, for Rowan’s sake. “Rowan seems kind of, um, attached. To me, obviously. It’s not like he spends time with anyone else.”

“Has he violated any of his core operational protocols?”

Core protocols include never touching a human except to protect them from harm; showing deference to human preferences at all times; never telling a human being a lie.

“No,” I said. “He hasn’t.”

Professor Jafet nodded, like she’d suspected as much. “No doubt he’s mirroring certain human behaviors. He’s smart enough to want to do that. So he’s mirroring the natural connection you feel to him now that you’re spending so much time together. It’s no more than that for him. Is it for you?”

Thank God nobody can see me blush. “No.”

“That’s why I wanted you for this project, Blue,” she said. “You’re not the type of girl to get confused.”

Not because I aced my exams. Not because of all my hard work. The professor only chose me because everybody thought I was too much of a hard-ass to care about anybody else. That was exactly the impression I tried to make. So why did it sting?

She continued, “Rowan’s imprinted on you. Like a gosling with a goose.”

“Like a what?”

“They were birds. You wouldn’t remember them, I guess.” Professor Jafet closed her eyes again, and I sensed it was time for me to leave.

Keeping up with my coursework while I was spending every day with Rowan was fairly challenging; I was always in danger of falling behind.

As we became more comfortable with each other, though, this became a little easier. Rowan didn’t mind if I took an hour or two to read. He liked reading, too—novels, mostly, or poetry, the kinds of things that wouldn’t have been downloaded into him automatically. So we’d curl up on the workshop sofa and hang out, reading side by side. It was nice spending time with someone who didn’t demand my attention every second. Just my presence was enough for him.

One day I needed to conduct an observational study. “Taking notes on robots in action,” I explained as I took him with me to one of the work areas of the center, one we hadn’t visited before. “I’m supposed to see if I can identify any ways to improve performance, or if I can guess the programmers’ main priorities for each design.”

“You could observe me in action,” Rowan said, and his grin was almost sly.

I laughed. “You don’t count, silly.”

“Why not?”

It took me a moment to reply. “You’re a prototype. There aren’t any others like you. And I worked with your programmer, so it would be kind of like cheating.”

Which was all totally valid and true. But what I’d really wanted to say was, You’re not like the other robots. You’re not like any robot I’ve ever met.

Or any person, either.

We’d come across other robots before, of course. They never took any special notice of Rowan as they performed their tasks, and Rowan had seemed less interested in them than in human beings. However, in this part of the center, robots outnumbered people. We were close to the operational cores where radiation levels made it impossible for humans to work. It was safe for us where we were—it was shielded, of course—but the majority of the laborers passing by were inhuman.

“My thesis is probably going to be about movement,” I explained to him as we stood on one of the high walkways, looking down. We were up so far that the enormous ceiling lights hung down slightly past us; below us the world was bright and clear, but we were in shadows. “You’re perfect. You move just like a human. But most robots don’t. Now, you have more intelligence than almost any robot, and that probably means you can process movement functions faster. So I have to see how to replicate that in robots without as much higher intelligence.”

Rowan was preprogrammed with most of that information anyway, which was why I wasn’t prepared for Rowan to look so troubled.

“They don’t walk correctly,” he said, glancing downward. “Their arms never move while their legs do.”

“No, and their steps are a little too long. That’s more efficient, though, so we might want to keep that.”

“They are programmed for efficiency. With no other goals in mind.” Rowan’s voice had become flat—not in a robotic monotone, but like someone attempting to disguise strong emotion.

Which was impossible, it had to be impossible...

“Does that bother you?” I tried to make my question sound casual. “The fact that we programmed the other robots for efficiency instead of intelligence?”

Rowan straightened. Our eyes met. And I knew in that moment everything he felt: the shame of being less than human. The anger that we treated robots like things. The horror at knowing that he had less in common with the robots clanking around below us than he did with a human being. And the depthless loneliness of being the only one of his kind in the whole world.

But none of that shook me as badly as what Rowan did next.

“No,” he said. “No, it does not bother me.”

Rowan had told me a lie.

He winced then, and turned sharply away from me. Apparently violating one of his core protocols activated something within Rowan that mimicked pain. I hated seeing that, but I was too freaked-out to respond appropriately—to respond at all. I could only stare. There should have been no way for a robot to violate core protocols. None. If Rowan could do that, then he had become something more than a robot.

When Rowan turned back to me, I could tell that he knew I’d recognized his lie; my expression must have given it away. He understood enough about cybernetics to realize how significant this was. Very quietly he said, “I realize that you must deactivate me now.”

I said the only thing I could say—something I’d never have dreamed of saying just a few short weeks before. “I’m not going to do that.”

“Why not?”

I couldn’t have done that to Rowan any more than I could have killed a human being. “I’m just not.”

“But you will report me.”

Slowly I shook my head no. Rowan’s face lit up again with the same wonder I’d seen when he first awoke—but somehow, now it was even more amazing.

“It’s just a malfunction,” I said hastily. “A glitch. No big thing.”

He wasn’t fooled.

I’d been hanging on to the railing this whole time. Slowly Rowan lowered one of his hands over mine, his fingers sliding between my fingers, his palm warm against the back of my hand. The professor had even gotten his body temperature right.

He was touching me for no purpose—at least, no purpose his programming should recognize. That was another violation of a core protocol. And all I could think about was that I’d been waiting for this moment since Rowan first opened his eyes; I just hadn’t known it until we finally touched.

Rowan said, “We are both malfunctioning, I think.”

“Maybe so.” If love is a malfunction.

Of course I didn’t report Rowan. But I did make another appointment with Professor Jafet.

“What’s going to happen to him?” I couldn’t even sit; I paced the length of her office, restless and uneasy. “You told me he was a prototype, but he can’t be. The world isn’t ready for hundreds or thousands of robots like him.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t.” Professor Jafet looked even wearier than before. Her skin had taken on a grayish pallor. “But he’s proved my theories were true. At long last, I know I was right.”

“Okay, that takes care of you. What about him?”

That was about when she should have bitched me out for yelling at a professor and questioning her authority. Instead Professor Jafet sighed. “Well, we have two options. First, we can downgrade his intelligence. Remove some of his processors. He’d still be brighter than most robots, but he’d be only a robot. The human qualities of his intelligence would be eliminated, as well as whatever emotional component seems to be troubling you so.”

It made me sick to think of turning Rowan back into just another machine. Once I would have thought nothing of it; now the idea was as grotesque to me as the idea of lobotomizing a human being. “You can’t do that to Rowan. Please.”

Professor Jafet’s green eyes stared deeply into mine. I wondered what she saw there. “The alternative is to upgrade him yet further—to give him full human intelligence and independence. That’s against our rules here, of course, but what the hell is tenure for?” She coughed, a hollow, rattling sound. “Besides, I doubt I’d be around for the disciplinary hearing.”

“Professor? Are you okay?”

She ignored this. “Blue, I want you to understand—if we upgrade Rowan’s intelligence, it’s not the same as, oh, waving a magic wand and turning him into a real boy. If he acquires full human autonomy, he won’t be the same any longer. It will be as profound a change as downgrading his intelligence, just different.”

“But it would be a change for the better,” I insisted.

“In some ways. At that point, certain legal protections would kick in—old rules, for that long-ago generation of AI that went beyond these boundaries. Nobody could dismantle him after that, downgrade him against his will. But Rowan will lose some of his innocence. His gentleness. It’s possible that whatever emotional bonds he’s formed would vanish. For instance, the way he has imprinted on you—I doubt that would survive.”

I stepped back, stung. Rowan’s feelings for me—whatever they were—they were more than a spare part somebody could remove.

...weren’t they?

“We can continue to evaluate him,” Professor Jafet said. “I’ll go over his charts. But you’re the one who’s able to spend the most time with Rowan. Your recommendation will be important.”

She’d just put Rowan’s entire future into my hands, and I didn’t know what to do.

I lay awake that whole night, tossing and turning, until my roommates yelled at me to lie still, or at least be restless more quietly.

What kind of person was I, to shut out every single guy I knew but fall for a robot? Did that mean I was emotionally stunted, or selfish? Or was it only natural? I didn’t think I’d fallen for what was fake about Rowan; I thought I’d fallen for what was real in him...what was human.

Rowan showed me the world like it was new. He made me see beauty where I’d seen only drabness, showed me colors where I’d seen only gray. And Rowan made me see myself differently, too. Maybe I wasn’t just this...antisocial loser. Maybe I was someone extraordinary.

Or maybe he imprinted on you like Professor Jafet said, I thought. Maybe this is just the malfunctioning of a machine.

But I didn’t want to believe that.

All night I lay there, trying to work out the right thing to do, but the answer never came.

“You’re very tired,” Rowan said the next day—this morning, just hours ago—as we walked along one of the hallways. “Are you well?”

“I’m fine. Just didn’t get enough sleep.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be unwell. Like Professor Jafet. I think she is very seriously ill.”

“I think so, too,” I said, surprised he knew. Maybe Rowan’s analytical side had picked up on her problems more accurately than I had. “What do you think is wrong with her?”

I never learned what he would have answered, because then a guy from one of my classes yelled, “Hey, Blue!”

Todd wasn’t a bad guy; I waved at him. “Hey, Todd!” But that was too encouraging, because Todd came loping over, his shock of red hair bouncing with each step.

“Where have you been lately? Thought you were working on a special project.” He grinned at me. “And hey, who’s this?”

Rowan brightened. He obviously liked the idea that a human being wouldn’t know he was a robot. Did that mean he walked around ashamed of himself all the time? I hated to even imagine that.

“This is Rowan,” I said. “He’s the special project.”

“Wait. You’re kidding, right? Whoa.” Todd took a couple of steps back. “That is amazing.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Todd,” Rowan said. I could tell he wasn’t sure how to handle this.

“Amazing!” Todd’s smile only widened. “Special project, no kidding. He’s way ahead of anything else we’ve got.”

“How long have you known Blue?” Rowan was trying so hard to be polite; it broke my heart.

“Todd and I are in the same apprenticeship year,” I interjected. “Right, Todd?”

“Since when did you get all formal?” Todd laughed. He still didn’t speak to Rowan; he only spoke about him. “That’s not the Blue I know. Did Jafet delete your personality?”

That hurt. Always, before, I’d wanted people to think I was hard and cool. Now that someone had recognized the real me—since Rowan—that mask didn’t fit any longer.

Rowan saw my downcast face, and he gently brushed his hand against my shoulder as he said, “Blue’s personality is extremely complex.”

Todd’s face fell, and I thought, Oh, damn. Damn.

Rowan touched me. He violated a core protocol, and Todd saw it.

“...I gotta go,” Todd said, and he turned without another word.

As he vanished down the hallway, Rowan said, “I messed up.”

The words were mine—he was copying me—and that would have moved me if I were any less horror-struck. “Yeah, you did.”

“Will he report me?”

“Yes.” Like I said, Todd wasn’t a bad guy, but he played by the rules. Unlike me, he didn’t have anything to gain by turning a blind eye. And unlike me, he didn’t care what happened to Rowan.

Rowan turned to me. “What will happen?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But I think it’s going to be out of Professor Jafet’s hands.”

He must have been so afraid, and I knew by then that Rowan felt fear as deeply as any human being did. But he said only, “Let’s go home.”

The only home Rowan had was a workshop where he had a charging station. That tore at my heart like claws. “Come on. Let’s go.”

And as long as the damage was already done, I took his hand.

When we arrived at the workshop, though, all the screens were lit up: priority communication. Todd had worked faster than I’d imagined. Rowan stopped short when he saw the red borders around the screens, but he was the one who had the courage to step forward and open the message. That was when we learned the communication didn’t have anything to do with Todd, or with Rowan violating a core protocol.

The message told us Professor Jafet had died.

While I was still breathless with shock, the message continued, “Video from Professor Isadora Jafet, for Millicent Fairchild. Play?”

Rowan frowned. “Who is Millicent Fairchild?”

“Me. That’s me.” I told you my name was stupid. “Blue is just a nickname.”

“I think Millicent is a pretty name,” he said, thus becoming the first person ever to say that since the dawn of time. “But you’ll always be Blue to me.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean—even if they take me away, after this—when I am deactivated—something inside me will remain. Whatever it is that is more than metal.” Rowan’s dark eyes met mine. “It’s the part of me that will always remember you. The part that will remember how gentle you are beneath the hard exterior, and how patient you were when you showed me the world. That part will remember how—how when I looked at you I knew what it would mean to be alive. And will always remember you wanted to be called Blue.”

Tears were welling in my eyes, but I just jabbed at the screen to make the video play.

The image that came to life on-screen was that of Professor Jafet propped up in a bed. “I haven’t much time, Blue,” she rasped. “But you should know that after our last conversation, I added a codicil to my will. From the moment of my death, Rowan legally belongs to you. That means his ultimate fate lies in your hands. I trust you to choose well. You’re a smart girl—maybe smarter than you know. You’ll need that—it’s a hard world. Good luck, Blue.”

Jafet smiled, and then the video ended. The professor had left my life forever, still as much an enigma as when we’d met.

“I belong to you.” Rowan smiled at me like that was the best news in the world. When I didn’t smile back, he hesitated. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Not after I violated a core protocol in front of Todd. I’ll be confiscated no matter what.”

This might be the last time, so what the hell. I took his face in my hands; he covered my fingers with his own. “Rowan,” I whispered, “do you trust me?”

“Completely.”

“I can fix it so they won’t take you away. But I’ll have to modify you.”

He didn’t even ask what I planned to do. “We should act immediately.”

Todd was probably talking to the authorities right now. “Yeah, we should.”

I started to move, but he held me fast. “Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“Just once, I wanted to do this.” And Rowan leaned forward and kissed me.

It was a soft kiss, unsure and gentle, lasting only a moment. But it still made my heart seem to expand within my chest, as though it were unfolding into bloom like a rose. Tears welled in my eyes.

When our lips parted, Rowan said, “Did I do it right?”

I managed to smile for him. “You sure did.”

And that brings us to here, and now. Rowan lies on the workshop table, unconscious. His fate is entirely in my hands.

Do I downgrade his intelligence, make him more like another robot so that the authorities have no reason to take him away? Rowan would still be devoted to me, and I could keep him forever. But he would just be a shell of the Rowan I knew.

My other choice—add more intelligence, make his mind indistinguishable from a human being’s. Give him some legal rights so that he couldn’t be deactivated or taken away...and in the process, take away whatever it was he felt for me.

Like I said, love makes you selfish. I want to keep him with me no matter what it takes. I want to keep seeing the world made beautiful through his eyes. I need that—need him—more than I ever imagined I could.

But love gives you a power that goes beyond anything selfish. I feel it inside me, holding me up, keeping me strong.

This is not about what I need. This is about what Rowan needs. He needs to be free. He needs to be real.

Rowan wakes up after I’m done. He opens his eyes. And once again he says, “Oh,” in that voice of wonder—but the wonder isn’t for me. It’s for the windows I’ve opened up in his mind.

“They can’t touch you now,” I say. My voice doesn’t shake. Good job, me. “You belong to yourself.”

“And to you,” Rowan says as he sits up.

“Legally, I guess. For now.” I did some research on this over the past few weeks; now I know that an Emancipated Artificial Intelligence gets pretty much the same rights as a human being—old legal precedent. That’s one reason why businesses try so hard not to make any more of them. “But you belong to yourself, really. Soon, officially.”

“Yes. And to you.”

His hand reaches out for mine. Slowly he lifts it to his lips and presses a soft kiss against my palm.

“But—” I can’t let myself believe this. If I do, and I’m wrong, my heart will shatter into so many tiny pieces that I’ll never be able to put it back together. This is what happens when you break something so hard, so brittle, and find the softness inside; you never get to repair the cracks again. “You’re not like other robots any longer. Your feelings are real now. You’re real.”

So shyly, so gently, Rowan smiles. “This was always real.”

* * * * *