We, Robots

Robots exist to do work that no-one else wants to do – because it is too dangerous, perhaps, or because it is simply too dull. Traditionally, the dangerous jobs have fallen to men, and the dull jobs have fallen to women. So it’s no surprise that robots often emerge from their labs pre-gendered. Ken Liu ("The Caretaker", 2011) and Lauren Fox ("Rosie Cleans House", 2017) have a great deal of dark fun with the way old attitudes fester in new machines.

Some jobs are so important, we expend a great deal of time explaining why we love doing them, even if they’re dangerous, even if they’re dull. Getting parents to admit this in public requires patience and often a certain amount of alcohol, but childcare is one of the most tedious chores on the planet. It’s one of those activities that gives lasting value to life while affording us absolutely no happiness in the moment. It’s a set of tasks robots can certainly help with and which, for our own long-term good, we absolutely must not hand over to them.

This territory isn’t wholly new (there are many good Edwardian stories about upper-middle-class families, and the damage done when they farm their children out to "the help") but when the help is robotic, these moral dilemmas acquire an often savage edge. Some of the more disturbing and affecting stories here are about children and parents. They include Brian Aldiss’s "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (1969), Ray Bradbury’s "The Veldt" (1950) and V. E. Thiessen’s "There Will Be School Tomorrow" (1956) which, while much less well known, captures to a T the uneasy power relations that pertain between parents, children, and civic authority.

A lot of robot trouble is simply turbo-driven servant trouble, and servant trouble, make no mistake, is a deadly serious business. (Recall how James Fox’s foppish Tony comes a quite spectacular cropper in Joseph Losey’s film The Servant (1963).) If we’re going to let robots into our homes, we should all be taking lessons in how to treat the help, lest it exploit and infantilise us. We certainly don’t want to end up like Helena Bell’s passive-aggressive client in "Robot" (2012).

Are we destined to exploit, or be exploited by, servants to whom we never really relate? The humans in the most on-the-nose "robot as slave" story in this anthology, Clifford D. Simak’s "I Am Crying All Inside" (1969), at least recognise this tragedy for what it is. Other stories, meanwhile, hint at the possibility of happier outcomes.

Lester Del Rey’s "Helen O’Loy" (1938) borders on the unreadable now, not so much for its laughable sexual politics as for its wincingly juvenile dialogue. But Del Rey was no dummy, and with a bit of patience the reader will begin to see something really quite revolutionary going on as our male protagonists, proud owners of a fembot servant, begin to to discover, through her example, what real love is, and how a real marriage works. It is, quite unexpectedly, one of the most extraordinary male coming-of-age tales in science fiction.

A full generation later, Sandra McDonald’s 2012-vintage "Sexy Robot Mom" tells an analogous tale for a different political moment, when an outcast human discovers, in the algorithmic behaviour of an unthinking robot, a moral code worth striving for.

That’s the exciting and terrifying thing about personal robots: their very existence challenges us to become better people.

OLD ROBOTS ARE THE WORST Bruce Boston

VIRTUOSO Herbert Goldstone

"Sir?"

The Maestro continued to play, not looking up from the keys.

"Yes, Rollo?"

"Sir, I was wondering if you would explain this apparatus to me."

The Maestro stopped playing, his thin body stiffly relaxed on the bench. His long supple fingers floated off the keyboard.

"Apparatus?" He turned and smiled at the robot. "Do you mean the piano, Rollo?"

"This machine that produces varying sounds. I would like some information about it, its operation and purpose. It is not included in my reference data."

The Maestro lit a cigarette. He preferred to do it himself. One of his first orders to Rollo when the robot was delivered two days before had been to disregard his built-in instructions on the subject.

"I’d hardly call a piano a machine, Rollo," he smiled, "although technically you are correct. It is actually, I suppose, a machine designed to produce sounds of graduated pitch and tone, singly or in groups."

"I assimilated that much by observation," Rollo replied in the brassy baritone which no longer sent tiny tremors up the Maestro’s spine. "Wires of different thickness and tautness struck by felt-covered hammers activated by manually operated levers arranged in a horizontal panel."

"A very cold-blooded description of one of man’s nobler works," the Maestro remarked drily. "You make Mozart and Chopin mere laboratory technicians."

"Mozart? Chopin?" The duralloy sphere that was Rollo’s head shone stark and featureless, its immaculate surface unbroken but for twin vision lenses. "The terms are not included in my memory banks."

"No, not yours, Rollo," the Maestro said softly. "Mozart and Chopin are not for vacuum tubes and fuses and copper wire. They are for flesh and blood and human tears."

"I do not understand," Rollo droned.

"Well," the Maestro said, smoke curling lazily from his nostrils, "they are two of the humans who compose, or design successions of notes—varying sounds, that is, produced by the piano or by other instruments, machines, that produce other types of sounds of fixed pitch and tone.

"Sometimes these instruments, as we call them, are played, or operated, individually; sometimes in groups—orchestras, as we refer to them—and the sounds blend together, they harmonize. That is they have an orderly mathematical relationship to each other which results in—"

The Maestro threw up his hands.

"I never imagined," he chuckled, "that I would some day struggle so mightily, and so futilely, to explain music to a robot!"

"Music?"

"Yes, Rollo. The sounds produced by this machine and others of the same category are called music."

"What is the purpose of music, sir?"

"Purpose?"

The Maestro crushed the cigarette in an ash tray. He turned to the keyboard of the concert grand and flexed his fingers briefly.

"Listen, Rollo."

The wraith-like fingers glided and wove the opening bars of Clair de Lune, slender and delicate as spider silk. Rollo stood rigid, the fluorescent light over the music rack casting a bluish jeweled sheen over his towering bulk, shimmering in the amber vision lenses.

The Maestro drew his hands back from the keys and the subtle thread of melody melted reluctantly into silence.

"Claude Debussy," the Maestro said. "One of our mechanics of an era long passed. He designed that succession of tones many years ago. What do you think of it?"

Rollo did not answer at once.

"The sounds were well formed," he replied finally. "They did not jar my auditory senses as some do."

The Maestro laughed. "Rollo, you may not realize it, but you’re a wonderful critic."

"This music, then," Rollo droned. "Its purpose is to give pleasure to humans?"

"Exactly," the Maestro said. "Sounds well formed, that do not jar the auditory senses as some do. Marvelous! It should be carved in marble over the entrance of New Carnegie Hall."

"I do not understand. Why should my definition—?"

The Maestro waved a hand. "No matter, Rollo. No matter."

"Sir?"

"Yes, Rollo?"

"Those sheets of paper you sometimes place before you on the piano. They are the plans of the composer indicating which sounds are to be produced by the piano and in what order?"

"Just so. We call each sound a note, combinations of notes we call chords."

"Each dot, then, indicates a sound to be made?"

"Perfectly correct, my man of metal."

Rollo stared straight ahead. The Maestro felt a peculiar sense of wheels turning within that impregnable sphere.

"Sir, I have scanned my memory banks and find no specific or implied instructions against it. I should like to be taught how to produce these notes on the piano. I request that you feed the correlation between these dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks."

The Maestro peered at him, amazed. A slow grin traveled across his face.

"Done!" he exclaimed. "It’s been many years since pupils helped gray these ancient locks, but I have the feeling that you, Rollo, will prove a most fascinating student. To instill the Muse into metal and machinery… I accept the challenge, gladly!"

He rose, touched the cool latent power of Rollo’s arm.

"Sit down here, my Rolleindex Personal Robot, Model M-3. We shall start Beethoven spinning in his grave—or make musical history!"

More than an hour later, the Maestro yawned and looked at his watch. "It’s late," he spoke into the end of the yawn. "These old eyes are not tireless like yours, my friend." He touched Rollo’s shoulder. "You have the complete fundamentals of musical notation in your memory banks, Rollo. That’s a good night’s lesson, particularly when I recall how long it took me to acquire the same amount of information. Tomorrow we’ll attempt to put those awesome fingers of yours to work."

He stretched. "I’m going to bed," he said. "Will you lock up and put out the lights?"

Rollo rose from the bench. "Yes, sir," he droned. "I have a request."

"What can I do for my star pupil?"

"May I attempt to create some sounds with the keyboard tonight? I will do so very softly so as not to disturb you."

"Tonight? Aren’t you—?" Then the Maestro smiled. "You must pardon me, Rollo. It is still a bit difficult for me to realize that sleep has no meaning for you."

He hesitated, rubbing his chin. "Well, I suppose a good teacher should not discourage impatience to learn. All right, Rollo, but please be careful." He patted the polished mahogany. "This piano and I have been together for many years. I’d hate to see its teeth knocked out by those sledge hammer digits of yours. Lightly, my friend, very lightly."

"Yes, sir."

The Maestro fell asleep with a faint smile on his lips, dimly aware of the shy, tentative notes that Rollo was coaxing forth.

Then gray fog closed in and he was in that half-world where reality is dreamlike and dreams are real. It was soft and feathery and lavender clouds and sounds rolling and washing across his mind in flowing waves.

Where? The mist drew back a bit and he was in red velvet and deep and the music swelled and broke over him.

He smiled.

My recording. Thank you, thank you, thank—

The Maestro snapped erect, threw the covers aside.

He sat on the edge of the bed, listening.

He groped for his robe in the darkness, shoved bony feet into his slippers.

He crept, trembling uncontrollably, to the door of his studio and stood there, thin and brittle in the robe.

The light over the music rack was an eerie island in the brown shadows of the studio. Rollo sat at the keyboard, prim, inhuman, rigid, twin lenses focused somewhere off into the shadows.

The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting—they were living entities, separate, somehow, from the machined perfection of his body.

The music rack was empty.

A copy of Beethoven’s Appassionata lay closed on the bench. It had been, the Maestro remembered, in a pile of sheet music on the piano.

Rollo was playing it.

Playing?

He was creating it, breathing it, drawing it through silver flame.

Time became meaningless, suspended in mid air.

The Maestro didn’t realize he was weeping until Rollo finished the sonata.

The robot turned to look at the Maestro. "The sounds," he droned. "They pleased you?"

The Maestro’s lips quivered. "Yes, Rollo," he replied at last. "They pleased me." He fought the lump in his throat.

He picked up the music in fingers that shook.

"This," he murmured. "Already?"

"It has been added to my store of data," Rollo replied. "I applied the principles you explained to me to these plans. It was not very difficult."

The Maestro swallowed as he tried to speak. "It was not very difficult…" he repeated softly.

The old man sank down slowly onto the bench next to Rollo, stared silently at the robot as though seeing him for the first time.

Rollo got to his feet.

The Maestro let his fingers rest on the keys, strangely foreign now.

"Music!" he breathed. "I may have heard it that way in my soul! I know Beethoven did!"

He looked up at the robot, a growing excitement in his face.

"Rollo," he said, his voice straining to remain calm. "You and I have some work to do tomorrow on your memory banks."

Sleep did not come again that night.

He strode briskly into the studio the next morning. Rollo was vacuuming the carpet. The Maestro preferred carpets to the new dust-free plastics, which felt somehow profane to his feet.

The Maestro’s house was, in fact, an oasis of anachronisms in a desert of contemporary antiseptic efficiency.

"Well, are you ready for work, Rollo?" he asked. "We have a lot to do, you and I. I have such plans for you, Rollo—great plans!"

Rollo, for once, did not reply.

"I have asked them all to come here this afternoon," the Maestro went on. "Conductors, concert pianists, composers, my manager. All the giants of music, Rollo. Wait until they hear you play!"

Rollo switched off the vacuum and stood quietly.

"You’ll play for them right here this afternoon." The Maestro’s voice was high-pitched, breathless. "The Appassionata again, I think. Yes, that’s it. I must see their faces!

"Then we’ll arrange a recital to introduce you to the public and the critics and then a major concerto with one of the big orchestras. We’ll have it telecast around the world, Rollo. It can be arranged.

"Think of it, Rollo, just think of it! The greatest piano virtuoso of all time… a robot! It’s completely fantastic and completely wonderful. I feel like an explorer at the edge of a new world!"

He walked feverishly back and forth.

"Then recordings, of course. My entire repertoire, Rollo, and more. So much more!"

"Sir?"

The Maestro’s face shone as he looked up at him. "Yes, Rollo?"

"In my built-in instructions, I have the option of rejecting any action which I consider harmful to my owner." The robot’s words were precise, carefully selected. "Last night you wept. That is one of the indications I am instructed to consider in making my decisions."

The Maestro gripped Rollo’s thick, superbly moulded arm.

"Rollo, you don’t understand. That was for the moment. It was petty of me, childish!"

"I beg your pardon, sir, but I must refuse to approach the piano again."

The Maestro stared at him, unbelieving, pleading.

"Rollo, you can’t! The world must hear you!"

"No, sir." The amber lenses almost seemed to soften.

"The piano is not a machine," that powerful inhuman voice droned. "To me, yes. I can translate the notes into sounds at a glance. From only a few I am able to grasp at once the composer’s conception. It is easy for me."

Rollo towered magnificently over the Maestro’s bent form.

"I can also grasp," the brassy monotone rolled through the studio, "that this… music is not for robots. It is for man. To me it is easy, yes… It was not meant to be easy."

SAYING GOODBYE TO YANG Alexander Weinstein

We’re sitting around the table eating Cheerios—my wife sipping tea, Mika playing with her spoon, me suggesting apple picking over the weekend—when Yang slams his head into his cereal bowl. It’s a sudden mechanical movement, and it splashes cereal and milk all over the table. Yang rises, looking as though nothing odd just occurred, and then he slams his face into the bowl again. Mika thinks this is hysterical. She starts mimicking Yang, bending over to dunk her own face in the milk, but Kyra’s pulling her away from the table and whisking her out of the kitchen so I can take care of Yang.

At times like these, I’m not the most clearheaded. I stand in my kitchen, my chair knocked over behind me, at a total loss. Shut him down, call the company? Shut him down, call the company? By now the bowl is empty, milk dripping off the table, Cheerios all over the goddamned place, and Yang has a red ring on his forehead from where his face has been striking the bowl. A bit of skin has pulled away from his skull over his left eyelid. I decide I need to shut him down; the company can walk me through the reboot. I get behind Yang and untuck his shirt from his pants as he jerks forward, then I push the release button on his back panel. The thing’s screwed shut and won’t pop open.

"Kyra," I say loudly, turning toward the doorway to the living room. No answer, just the sound of Mika upstairs, crying to see her brother, and the concussive thuds of Yang hitting his head against the table. "Kyra!"

"What is it?" she yells back. Thud.

"I need a Phillips head!"

"What?" Thud.

"A screwdriver!"

"I can’t get it! Mika’s having a tantrum!" Thud.

"Great, thanks!"

Kyra and I aren’t usually like this. We’re a good couple, communicative and caring, but moments of crisis bring out the worst in us. The skin above Yang’s left eye has completely split, revealing the white membrane beneath. There’s no time for me to run to the basement for my toolbox. I grab a butter knife from the table and attempt to use the tip as a screwdriver. The edge, however, is too wide, completely useless against the small metal cross of the screw, so I jam the knife into the back panel and pull hard. There’s a cracking noise, and a piece of flesh-colored Bioplastic skids across the linoleum as I flip open Yang’s panel. I push the power button and wait for the dim blue light to shut off. With alarming stillness, Yang sits upright in his chair, as though something is amiss, and cocks his head toward the window. Outside, a cardinal takes off from the branch where it was sitting. Then, with an internal sigh, Yang slumps forward, chin dropping to his chest. The illumination beneath his skin extinguishes, giving his features a sickly ashen hue.

I hear Kyra coming down the stairs with Mika. "Is Yang okay?"

"Don’t come in here!"

"Mika wants to see her brother."

"Stay out of the kitchen! Yang’s not doing well!" The kitchen wall echoes with the muffled footsteps of my wife and daughter returning upstairs.

"Fuck," I say under my breath. Not doing well? Yang’s a piece of crap and I just destroyed his back panel. God knows how much those cost. I get out my cell and call Brothers & Sisters Inc. for help.

When we adopted Mika three years ago, it seemed like the progressive thing to do. We considered it our one small strike against cloning. Kyra and I are both white, middle-class, and have lived an easy and privileged life; we figured it was time to give something back to the world. It was Kyra who suggested she be Chinese. The earthquake had left thousands of orphans in its wake, Mika among them. It was hard not to agree. My main concern—one I voiced to Kyra privately, and quite vocally to the adoption agency during our interview—was the cultural differences. The most I knew about China came from the photos and "Learn Chinese" translations on the place mats at Golden Dragon. The adoption agency suggested purchasing Yang.

"He’s a Big Brother, babysitter, and storehouse of cultural knowledge all in one," the woman explained. She handed us a colorful pamphlet—China! it announced in red dragon-shaped letters—and said we should consider. We considered. Kyra was putting in forty hours a week at Crate & Barrel, and I was still managing double shifts at Whole Foods. It was true, we were going to need someone to take care of Mika, and there was no way we were going to use some clone from the neighborhood. Kyra and I weren’t egocentric enough to consider ourselves worth replicating, nor did we want our neighbors’ perfect kids making our daughter feel insecure. In addition, Yang came with a breadth of cultural knowledge that Kyra and I could never match. He was programmed with grades K through college, and had an in-depth understanding of national Chinese holidays like flag-raising ceremonies and Ghost Festivals. He knew about moon cakes and sky lanterns. For two hundred more, we could upgrade to a model that would teach Mika tai chi and acupressure when she got older. I thought about it. "I could learn Mandarin," I said as we lay in bed that night. "Come on," Kyra said, "there’s no fucking way that’s happening." So I squeezed her hand and said, "Okay, it’ll be two kids then."

He came to us fully programmed; there wasn’t a baseball game, pizza slice, bicycle ride, or movie that I could introduce him to. Early on I attempted such outings to create a sense of companionship, as though Yang were a foreign exchange student in our home. I took him to see the Tigers play in Comerica Park. He sat and ate peanuts with me, and when he saw me cheer, he followed suit and put his hands in the air, but there was no sense that he was enjoying the experience. Ultimately, these attempts at camaraderie, from visiting haunted houses to tossing a football around the backyard, felt awkward—as though Yang were humoring me—and so, after a couple months, I gave up. He lived with us, ate food, privately dumped his stomach canister, brushed his teeth, read Mika goodnight stories, and went to sleep when we shut off the lights.

All the same, he was an important addition to our lives. You could always count on him to keep conversation going with some fact about China that none of us knew. I remember driving with him, listening to World Drum on NPR, when he said from the backseat, "This song utilizes the xun, an ancient Chinese instrument organized around minor third intervals." Other times, he’d tell us Fun Facts. Like one afternoon, when we’d all gotten ice cream at Old World Creamery, he turned to Mika and said, "Did you know ice cream was invented in China over four thousand years ago?" His delivery of this info was a bit mechanical—a linguistic trait we attempted to keep Mika from adopting. There was a lack of passion to his statements, as though he wasn’t interested in the facts. But Kyra and I understood this to be the result of his being an early model, and when one considered the moments when he’d turn to Mika and say, "I love you, little sister," there was no way to deny what an integral part of our family he was.

Twenty minutes of hold-time later, I’m informed that Brothers & Sisters Inc. isn’t going to replace Yang. My warranty ran out eight months ago, which means I’ve got a broken Yang, and if I want telephone technical support, it’s going to cost me thirty dollars a minute now that I’m post-warranty. I hang up. Yang is still slumped with his chin on his chest. I go over and push the power button on his back, hoping all he needed was to be restarted. Nothing. There’s no blue light, no sound of his body warming up.

Shit, I think. There goes eight thousand dollars.

"Can we come down yet?" Kyra yells.

"Hold on a minute!" I pull Yang’s chair out and place my arms around his waist. It’s the first time I’ve actually embraced Yang, and the coldness of his skin surprises me. While he has lived with us almost as long as Mika, I don’t think anyone besides her has ever hugged or kissed him. There have been times when, as a joke, one of us might nudge Yang with an elbow and say something humorous like, "Lighten up, Yang!" but that’s been the extent of our contact. I hold him close to me now, bracing my feet solidly beneath my body, and lift. He’s heavier than I imagined, his weight that of the eighteen-year-old boy he’s designed to be. I hoist him onto my shoulder and carry him through the living room out to the car.

My neighbor, George, is next door raking leaves. George is a friendly enough guy, but completely unlike us. Both his children are clones, and he drives a hybrid with a bumper sticker that reads IF I WANTED TO GO SOLAR, I’D GET A TAN. He looks up as I pop the trunk. "That Yang?" he asks, leaning against his rake.

"Yeah," I say and lower Yang into the trunk.

"No shit. What’s wrong with him?"

"Don’t know. One moment we’re sitting having breakfast, the next he’s going haywire. I had to shut him down, and he won’t start up again."

"Jeez. You okay?"

"Yeah, I’m fine," I say instinctively, though as I answer, I realize that I’m not. My legs feel wobbly and the sky above us seems thinner, as though there’s less air. Still, I’m glad I answered as I did. A man who paints his face for Super Bowl games isn’t the type of guy to open your heart to.

"You got a technician?" George asks.

"Actually, no. I was going to take him over to Quick Fix and see—"

"Don’t take him there. I’ve got a good technician, took Tiger there when he wouldn’t fetch. The guy’s in Kalamazoo, but it’s worth the drive." George takes a card from his wallet. "He’ll check Yang out and fix him for a third of what those guys at Q-Fix will charge you. Tell Russ I sent you."

Russ Goodman’s Tech Repair Shop is located two miles off the highway amid a row of industrial warehouses. The place is wedged between Mike’s Muffler Repair and a storefront called Stacey’s Second Times—a cluttered thrift store displaying old rifles, iPods, and steel bear traps in its front window. Two men in caps and oil-stained plaid shirts are standing in front smoking cigarettes. As I park alongside the rusted mufflers and oil drums of Mike’s, they eye my solar car like they would a flea-ridden dog.

"Hi there, I’m looking for Russ Goodman," I say as I get out. "I called earlier."

The taller of the two, a middle-aged man with gray stubble and weathered skin, nods to the other guy to end their conversation. "That’d be me," he says. I’m ready to shake his hand, but he just takes a drag from his cigarette stub and says, "Let’s see what you got," so I pop the trunk instead. Yang is lying alongside my jumper cables and windshield-washing fluid with his legs folded beneath him. His head is twisted at an unnatural angle, as though he were trying to turn his chin onto the other side of his shoulder. Russ stands next to me, with his thick forearms and a smell of tobacco, and lets out a sigh. "You brought a Korean." He says this as a statement of fact. Russ is the type of person I’ve made a point to avoid in my life: a guy that probably has a WE CLONE OUR OWN sticker on the back of his truck.

"He’s Chinese," I say.

"Same thing," Russ says. He looks up and gives the other man a shake of his head. "Well," he says heavily, "bring him inside, I’ll see what’s wrong with him." He shakes his head again as he walks away and enters his shop.

Russ’s shop consists of a main desk with a telephone and cash register, across from which stands a table with a coffeemaker, Styrofoam cups, and powdered creamer. Two vinyl chairs sit by a table with magazines on it. The door to the workroom is open. "Bring him back here," Russ says. Carrying Yang over my shoulder, I follow him into the back room.

The work space is full of body parts, switchboards, cables, and tools. Along the wall hang disjointed arms, a couple of knees, legs of different sizes, and the head of a young girl, about seventeen, with long red hair. There’s a worktable cluttered with patches of skin and a Pyrex box full of female hands. All the skin tones are Caucasian. In the middle of the room is an old massage table streaked with grease. Probably something Russ got from Stacey’s Seconds. "Go ’head and lay him down there," Russ says. I place Yang down on his stomach and position his head in the small circular face rest at the top of the table.

"I don’t know what happened to him," I say. "He’s always been fine, then this morning he started malfunctioning. He was slamming his head onto the table over and over." Russ doesn’t say anything. "I’m wondering if it might be a problem with his hard drive," I say, feeling like an idiot. I’ve got no clue what’s wrong with him; it’s just something George mentioned I should check out. I should have gone to Quick Fix. The young techies with their polished manners always make me feel more at ease. Russ still hasn’t spoken. He takes a mallet from the wall and a Phillips head screwdriver. "Do you think it’s fixable?"

"We’ll see. I don’t work on imports," he says, meeting my eyes for the first time since I’ve arrived, "but, since you know George, I’ll open him up and take a look. Go ’head and take a seat out there."

"How long do you think it’ll take?"

"Won’t know till I get him opened up," Russ says, wiping his hands on his jeans.

"Okay," I say meekly and leave Yang in Russ’s hands.

In the waiting room I pour myself a cup of coffee and stir in some creamer. I set my cup on the coffee table and look through the magazines. There’s Guns & Ammo, Tech Repair, Brothers & Sisters Digest—I put the magazines back down. The wall behind the desk is cluttered with photos of Russ and his kids, all of whom look exactly like him, and, buried among these, a small sign with an American flag on it and the message THERE AIN’T NO YELLOW IN THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE.

"Pssh," I say instinctually, letting out an annoyed breath of air. This was the kind of crap that came out during the invasion of North Korea, back when the nation changed the color of its ribbons from yellow to blue. Ann Arbor’s a progressive city, but even there, when Kyra and I would go out with Yang and Mika in public, there were many who avoided eye contact. Stop the War activists weren’t any different. It was that first Christmas, as Kyra, Yang, Mika, and I were at the airport being individually searched, that I realized Chinese, Japanese, South Korean didn’t matter anymore; they’d all become threats in the eyes of Americans. I decide not to sit here looking at Russ’s racist propaganda, and leave to check out the bear traps at Stacey’s.

"He’s dead," Russ tells me. "I can replace his insides, more or less build him back from scratch, but that’s gonna cost you about as much as a used one."

I stand looking at Yang, who’s lying on the massage table with a tangle of red and green wires protruding from his back. Even though his skin has lost its vibrant color, it still looks soft, like when he first came to our home. "Isn’t there anything else you can do?"

"His voice box and language system are still running. If you want, I’ll take it out for you. He’ll be able to talk to her, there just won’t be any face attached. Cost you sixty bucks." Russ is wiping his hands on a rag, avoiding my eyes. I think of the sign hanging in the other room. Sure, I think, I can just imagine the pleasure Russ will take in cutting up Yang.

"No, that’s all right. I’ll just take him home. What do I owe you?"

"Nothing," Russ says. I look up at him. "You know George," he says as explanation. "Besides, I can’t fix him for you."

On the ride home, I call Kyra. She picks up on the second ring.

"Hello?"

"Hey, it’s me." My voice is ragged.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I say, then add, "Actually, no."

"What’s the matter? How’s Yang?"

"I don’t know. The tech I took him to says he’s dead, but I don’t believe him—the guy had a thing against Asians. I’m thinking about taking Yang over to Quick Fix." There’s silence on the other end of the line. "How’s Mika?" I ask.

"She keeps asking if Yang’s okay. I put a movie on for her… Dead?" she asks. "Are you positive?"

"No, I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’m not ready to give up on him yet. Look," I say, glancing at the dash clock, "it’s only three. I’m going to suck it up and take him to Quick Fix. I’m sure if I drop enough cash they can do something."

"What will we do if he’s dead?" Kyra asks. "I’ve got work on Monday."

"We’ll figure it out," I say. "Let’s just wait until I get a second opinion."

Kyra tells me she loves me, and I return my love, and we hang up. It’s as my Bluetooth goes dead that I feel the tears coming. I remember last fall when Kyra was watching Mika. I was in the garage taking down the rake when, from behind me, I heard Yang. He stood awkwardly in the doorway, as though he was uncertain what to do while Mika was being taken care of. "Can I help you?" he asked.

On that chilly late afternoon, with the red and orange leaves falling around us—me in my vest, and Yang in the black suit he came with—Yang and I quietly raked leaves into large piles on the flat earth until the backyard looked like a village of leaf huts. Then Yang held open the bag, I scooped the piles in, and we carried them to the curb.

"You want a beer?" I asked, wiping the sweat from my forehead.

"Okay," Yang said. I went inside and got two cold ones from the fridge, and we sat together, on the splintering cedar of the back deck, watching the sun fall behind the trees and the first stars blink to life above us.

"Can’t beat a cold beer," I said, taking a swig.

"Yes," Yang said. He followed my lead and took a long drink. I could hear the liquid sloshing down into his stomach canister.

"This is what men do for the family," I said, gesturing with my beer to the leafless yard. Without realizing it, I had slipped into thinking of Yang as my son, imagining that one day he’d be raking leaves for his own wife and children. It occurred to me then that Yang’s time with us was limited. Eventually, he’d be shut down and stored in the basement—an antique that Mika would have no use for when she had children of her own. At that moment I wanted to put my arm around Yang. Instead I said, "I’m glad you came out and worked with me."

"Me, too," Yang said and took another sip of his beer, looking exactly like me in the way he brought the bottle to his lips.

The kid at Quick Fix makes me feel much more at ease than Russ. He’s wearing a bright red vest with a clean white shirt under it and a name tag that reads HI, I’M RONNIE! The kid’s probably not even twenty-one. He’s friendly, though, and when I tell him about Yang, he says, "Whoa, that’s no good," which is at least a little sympathetic. He tells me they’re backed up for an hour. So much for quick, I think. I put Yang on the counter and give my name. "We’ll page you once he’s ready," Ronnie says.

I spend the time wandering the store. They’ve got a demo station of Championship Boxing, so I put on the jacket and glasses and take on a guy named Vance, who’s playing in California. I can’t figure out how to dodge or block though, and when I throw out my hand, my guy on the screen just wipes his nose with his glove. Vance beats the shit out of me, so I put the glasses and vest back on the rack and go look at other equipment. I’m playing with one of the new ThoughtPhones when I hear my name paged over the loudspeaker, so I head back to the Repair counter.

"Fried," the kid tells me. "Honestly, it’s probably good he bit it. He’s a really outdated model." Ronnie is rocking back and forth on his heels as though impatient to get on to his next job.

"Isn’t there anything you can do?" I ask. "He’s my daughter’s Big Brother."

"The language system is fully functional. If you want, I can separate the head for you."

"Are you kidding? I’m not giving my daughter her brother’s head to play with."

"Oh," the kid says. "Well, um, we could remove the voice box for you. And we can recycle the body and give you twenty dollars off any digital camera."

"How much is all this going to cost?"

"It’s ninety-five for the checkup, thirty-five for disposal, and voice box removal will be another hundred and fifty. You’re probably looking at about three hundred after labor and taxes."

I think about taking him back to Russ, but there’s no way. When he’d told me Yang was beyond saving, I gave him a look of distrust that anyone could read loud and clear. "Go ahead and remove the voice box," I say, "but no recycling. I want to keep the body."

George is outside throwing a football around with his identical twins when I pull in. He raises his hand to his kids to stop them from throwing the ball and comes over to the low hedge that separates our driveways. "Hey, how’d it go with Russ?" he asks as I get out of the car.

"Not good." I tell him about Yang, getting a second opinion, how I’ve got his voice box in the backseat, his body in a large Quick Fix bag in the trunk. I tell him all this with as little emotion as possible. "What can you expect from electronics?" I say, attempting to appear nonchalant.

"Man, I’m really sorry for you," George says, his voice quieter than I’ve ever heard it. "Yang was a good kid. I remember the day he came over to help Dana carry in the groceries. The kids still talk about that fortune-telling thing he showed them with the three coins."

"Yeah," I say, looking at the bushes. I can feel the tears starting again. "Anyhow, it’s no big deal. Don’t let me keep you from your game. We’ll figure it out." Which is a complete lie. I have no clue how we’re going to figure anything out. We needed Yang, and there’s no way we can afford another model.

"Hey, listen," George says. "If you guys need help, let us know. You know, if you need a day sitter or something. I’ll talk to Dana—I’m sure she’d be up for taking Mika." George reaches out across the hedge, his large hand coming straight at me. For a moment I flash back to Championship Boxing and think he’s going to hit me. Instead he pats me on the shoulder. "I’m really sorry, Jim," he says.

That night, I lie with Mika in bed and read her Goodnight Moon. It’s the first time I’ve read to her in months. The last time was when we visited Kyra’s folks and had to shut Yang down for the weekend. Mika’s asleep by the time I reach the last page. I give her a kiss on her head and turn out the lights. Kyra’s in bed reading.

"I guess I’m going to start digging now," I say.

"Come here," she says, putting her book down. I cross the room and lie across our bed, my head on her belly.

"Do you miss him, too?" I ask.

"Mm-hm," she says. She puts her hand on my head and runs her fingers through my hair. "I think saying goodbye tomorrow is a good idea. Are you sure it’s okay to have him buried out there?"

"Yeah. There’s no organic matter in him. The guys at Quick Fix dumped his stomach canister." I look up at our ceiling, the way our lamp casts a circle of light and then a dark shadow. "I don’t know how we’re going to make it without him."

"Shhh." Kyra strokes my hair. "We’ll figure it out. I spoke with Tina Matthews after you called me today. You remember her daughter, Lauren?"

"The clone?"

"Yes. She’s home this semester; college wasn’t working for her. Tina said Lauren could watch Mika if we need her to."

I turn my head to look at Kyra. "I thought we didn’t want Mika raised by a clone."

"We’re doing what we have to do. Besides, Lauren is a nice girl."

"She’s got that glassy-eyed apathetic look. She’s exactly like her mother," I say. Kyra doesn’t say anything. She knows I’m being irrational, and so do I. I sigh. "I just really hoped we could keep clones out of our lives."

"For how long? Your brother and Margaret are planning on cloning this summer. You’re going to be an uncle soon enough."

"Yeah," I say quietly.

Ever since I was handed Yang’s voice box, time has slowed down. The light of the setting sun had stretched across the wood floors of our home for what seemed an eternity. Sounds have become crisper as well, as though, until now, I’d been living with earplugs. I think about the way Mika’s eyelids fluttered as she slept, the feel of George’s hand against my arm. I sit up, turn toward Kyra, and kiss her. The softness of her lips makes me remember the first time we kissed. Kyra squeezes my hand. "You better start digging so I can comfort you tonight," she says. I smile and ease myself off the bed. "Don’t worry," Kyra says, "it’ll be a good funeral."

In the hallway, on my way toward the staircase, the cracked door of Yang’s room stops me. Instead of going down, I walk across the carpeting to his door, push it open, and flick on the light switch. There’s his bed, perfectly made with the corners tucked in, a writing desk, a heavy oak dresser, and a closet full of black suits. On the wall is a poster of China that Brothers & Sisters Inc. sent us and a pennant from the Tigers game I took Yang to. There’s little in the minimalism of his décor to remind me of him. There is, however, a baseball glove on the shelf by his bed. This was a present Yang bought for himself with the small allowance we provided him. We were at Toys"R"Us when Yang placed the glove in the shopping cart. We didn’t ask him about it, and he didn’t mention why he was buying it. When he came home, he put it on the shelf near his Tigers pennant, and there it sat untouched.

Along the windowsill, Yang’s collection of dead moths and butterflies look as though they’re ready to take flight. He collected them from beneath our bug zapper during the summer and placed their powdery bodies by the window. I walk over and examine the collection. There’s the great winged luna moth, with its two mock eyes staring at me, the mosaic of a monarch’s wing, and a collection of smaller nondescript brown and silvery gray moths. Kyra once asked him about his insects. Yang’s face illuminated momentarily, the lights beneath his cheeks burning extra brightly, and he’d said, "They’re very beautiful, don’t you think?" Then, as though suddenly embarrassed, he segued to a Fun Fact regarding the brush-footed butterfly of China.

What arrests me, though, are the objects on his writing desk. Small matchboxes are stacked in a pile on the center of the table, the matchsticks spread across the expanse like tiny logs. In a corner is an orange-capped bottle of Elmer’s that I recognize as the one from my toolbox. What was Yang up to? A log cabin? A city of small wooden men and women? Maybe this was Yang’s attempt at art—one that, unlike the calligraphy he was programmed to know, was entirely his own. Tomorrow I’ll bag his suits, donate them to Goodwill, and throw out the Brothers & Sisters poster, but these matchboxes, the butterflies, and the baseball glove, I’ll save. They’re the only traces of the boy Yang might have been.

The funeral goes well. It’s a beautiful October day, the sky thin and blue, and the sun lights up the trees, bringing out the ocher and amber of the season. I imagine what the three of us must look like to the neighbors. A bunch of kooks burying their electronic equipment like pagans. I don’t care. When I think about Yang being ripped apart in a recycling plant, or stuffing him into our plastic garbage can and setting him out with the trash, I know this is the right decision. Standing together as a family, in the corner of our backyard, I say a couple of parting words. I thank Yang for all the joy he brought to our lives. Then Mika and Kyra say goodbye. Mika begins to cry, and Kyra and I bend down and put our arms around her, and we stay there, holding one another in the early morning sunlight.

When it’s all over, we go back inside to have breakfast. We’re eating our cereal when the doorbell rings. I get up and answer it. On our doorstep is a glass vase filled with orchids and white lilies. A small card is attached. I kneel down and open it. Didn’t want to disturb you guys. Just wanted to give you these. We’re all very sorry for your loss—George, Dana, and the twins. Amazing, I think. This from a guy who paints his face for Super Bowl games.

"Hey, look what we got," I say, carrying the flowers into the kitchen. "They’re from George."

"They’re beautiful," Kyra says. "Come, Mika, let’s go put those in the living room by your brother’s picture." Kyra helps Mika out of her chair, and we walk into the other room together.

It was Kyra’s idea to put the voice box behind the photograph. The photo is a picture from our trip to China last summer. In it, Mika and Yang are playing at the gate of a park. Mika stands at the port, holding the two large iron gates together. From the other side, Yang looks through the hole of the gates at the camera. His head is slightly cocked, as though wondering who we all are. He has a placid non-smile/non-frown, the expression we came to identify as Yang at his happiest.

"You can talk to him," I say to Mika as I place the flowers next to the photograph.

"Goodbye, Yang," Mika says.

"Goodbye?" the voice box asks. "But, little sister, where are we going?"

Mika smiles at the sound of her Big Brother’s voice, and looks up at me for instruction. It’s an awkward moment. I’m not about to tell Yang that the rest of him is buried in the backyard.

"Nowhere," I answer. "We’re all here together."

There’s a pause as though Yang’s thinking about something. Then, quietly, he asks, "Did you know over two million workers died during the building of the Great Wall of China?" Kyra and I exchange a look regarding the odd coincidence of this Fun Fact, but neither of us says anything. Then Yang’s voice starts up again. "The Great Wall is over ten thousand li long. A li is a standardized Chinese unit of measurement that is equivalent to one thousand six hundred and forty feet."

"Wow, that’s amazing," Kyra says, and I stand next to her, looking at the flowers George sent, acknowledging how little I truly know about this world.

THE PERFECT EGG Tania Hershman

He looks up and catches its eye. Eye? Silly! Visual circuitry. Optical sensors. But he’s sure, he’s sure it looked right at him. He eats his perfectly boiled egg. Can’t stop himself from saying: "Thank you, this is just right," and swears he sees pleasure, just a hint, on its flawless face. Then it turns and begins to load the dishwasher. He dunks his toast into the runny yolk and tries not to dwell on it.

When he finishes, he gets up and puts his plate, knife and spoon into the sink. It is standing there, waiting.

"Please clean out the fridge, including the ice trays," he says. "They need defrosting." It nods. Is there a smile? I’m going mad, he thinks. He puts on his coat and leaves.

In the park he watches more of them sitting on benches, watching their charges in the playground. He’s struck by what they don’t. Don’t fidget, scratch or mess with their hair. Don’t turn their heads, chat with one another, read magazines or talk on mobile phones. They are absolutely still, completely focused. Just there.

He is tempted to run up and grab a child off the swings, just reach around its waist and pull the small body out, shrieking.

Just to see.

Just to know.

That night, he watches television while it irons in a corner of the living room. He is distracted from the sitcom that he won’t admit he waits for each week by the smell of steaming fabric, the handkerchiefs he’s had for forty years or more, always neatly pressed. Worn a little, torn, but clean and wrinkle-free.

He stands up and, over by the ironing board, makes a big show of unzipping his fly.

No stirring. Not a flicker. It stops ironing and waits for further instructions.

He takes the trousers off, one leg and then the other, wobbling slightly as he tries to keep his dignity. He hands them over.

"Please do these too," he says, and sits back on the sofa in his underwear. He starts to laugh as, on the screen, the wife comes home and shouts at the useless husband.

Next morning, after another perfect egg with toast, he says: "Come with me." It walks behind him to the hall.

He opens the door to the cupboard underneath the stairs.

"Please go inside," he says, and it obeys. He shuts the door and goes upstairs to his study where for several hours in his head are words like blackness, suffocation, boredom.

He switches on the computer and writes a long e-mail to the woman who used to be his wife, rambling and without punctuation. He says things he wishes he’d said in life, or in that life, at least. At first he calls it poetry and then he sees it’s not. He deletes it and goes back down.

He walks about in the kitchen and from kitchen to living room, living room to downstairs bathroom. Then he stands in the hall, listening. He opens the cupboard door. Dark, no movement at all. It has no lights on. Oh my god, he thinks.

"Are you…?" he says.

It whirs quickly out of Sleep mode.

"Please, come out," he says. It glides past him, nothing in its eyes or on its face. He has a sensation in his sinuses, unpleasant, unwelcome. He boils the kettle, leaves the full mug of tea on the counter, gets his coat and leaves.

In the park, he watches them again. Are they watching him watching them watching? He ambles over to the swings and puts a hand out, leaning on the rail as small girls giggle and try to touch the sky. No one moves or does anything. No one even looks in his direction.

How fast could they run if…?

Would it be just the one who’d tackle him to the playground floor? Or all of them, some sort of instantaneous communication rousing them to action?

After a few minutes, the screams and creaking of the swings gives him shooting pains through his skull. He heads for home.

He eats dinner, listening to the radio, the evening news. He finishes, puts the plate in the sink, then he says: "Please come with me." And leads it upstairs. In the bedroom he instructs it to sit in the armchair in the corner. He puts on his pyjamas with some coyness, a wardrobe door shielding him. Then he gets into bed and pulls the covers tight around himself.

"Please watch," he tells it. "Just keep an eye. Make sure that nothing… I mean, no sleeping."

He switches off his bedside light and can see a faint green glow coming from the armchair. He lies with his eyes open for a few moments and then he falls asleep.

In the morning, refreshed, he eats his perfect egg.

"Thank you," he says, and puts his plate, knife and fork into the sink. "Please do the carpets today," he tells it, and heads towards the stairs.

THE CARETAKER Ken Liu

Motors whining, the machine squats down next to the bed, holding its arms out parallel to the ground. The metal fingers ball up into fist-shaped handholds. The robot has transformed into something like a wheelchair with treads, its lap the seat where my backside is supposed to fit.

A swiveling, flexible metal neck rises over the back of the chair, at the end of which are a pair of camera lenses with lens hood flaps on top like tilted eyebrows. There’s a speaker below the cameras, covered by metal lips. The effect is a cartoonish imitation of a face.

"It’s ugly," I say. I try to come up with more, but that’s the only thing I can think of.

Lying on the bed with my back and neck propped up by all these pillows reminds me of long-ago Saturday mornings, when I used to sit up like this in bed, trying to catch up on grading while Peggy was still asleep next to me. Suddenly, Tom and Ellen would burst through the bedroom door without knocking and jump into the bed, landing on top of us in a heap, smelling of warm blankets and clamoring for breakfast.

Except now my left leg is a useless weight, anchoring me to the mattress. The space next to me is empty. And Tom and Ellen, standing behind the robot, have children of their own.

"It’s reliable," Tom says. Then he seems to have run out of things to say, too. My son is like me, awkward with words when the emotions get complicated.

After a few seconds of silence, his sister steps forward and stands next to the robot. Gently, she bends down to put a hand on my shoulder. "Dad, Tom is running out of vacation days. And I can’t take any more time off either because I need to be with my husband and kids. We think this is best. It’s a lot cheaper than a live-in aide."

It occurs to me that this would make an excellent illustration of the arrow of time: the care that parents devote to children is asymmetrical with the care that their children can reciprocate. Far more vivid than any talk of entropy.

Too bad I no longer have students to explain this to. The high school has already hired a new physics teacher and baseball coach.

I don’t want to get maudlin here and start quoting Lear. Hadn’t Peggy and I each left our parents to the care of strangers in faraway homes? That’s life.

Who wants to weigh their children down the way my body now weighs me down? My guilt should trump theirs. We are a nation built on the promise that there are no roots. Every generation must be free to begin afresh somewhere else, leaving the old behind like fallen leaves.

I wave my right arm—the one arm that still obeys me. "I know." I would have stopped there, but I keep going because Peggy would have said more, and she’s always right. "You’ve done more than enough. I’ll be fine."

"It’s pretty intuitive to operate," Ellen says. She doesn’t look at me. "Just talk to it."

The robot and I stare at each other. I look into the cameras, caricatures of eyes, and see nothing but a pair of distorted, diminished images of myself.

I understand the aesthetics of its design, the efficient, functional skeleton softened by touches of cuteness and whimsy. Peggy and I once saw a show about caretaker robots for the elderly in Japan, and the show explained how the robots’ kawaii features were intended to entice old people into becoming emotionally invested in and attached to the lifeless algorithm-driven machines.

I guess that’s me now. At sixty, with a stroke, I’m old and an invalid. I need to be taken care of and fooled by a machine. "Wonderful," I say. "I’m sure we’ll be such pals."

"Mr. Church, would you like to read my operation manual?" The machine’s metal lips flap in sync with the voice, which is pleasant, androgynous, and very "computery." No doubt that was a decision made after a lot of research to avoid the uncanny valley. Make the voice too human, and you actually diminish the ability to create false empathy.

"No, I don’t want to read your operation manual. Does it look like I want to hold up a book?" I lift my limp left arm with my right and let it drop. "But let me guess, you can lift me, carry me around, give me a restored sense of mobility, and engage me in healthy positive chitchat to maintain my mental health. Does that about cover it?"

My outburst seems to shock the machine into silence. I feel good for a few seconds before the feeling dissipates. Great, the highlight of my day is yelling at a glorified wheelchair.

"Can you help me up?" I feel foolish, trying to be polite to a machine. "I’d like a… bath. Is that something you can help with?"

Its movements are slow and mechanical, nonthreatening. The arms are steady and strong, and it gets me undressed and into the bathtub without any awkwardness. There is an advantage to having a machine taking care of you: you don’t have much self-consciousness or shame being naked in its arms. The hot bath makes me feel better. "What should I call you?"

"Sandy."

That’s probably some clever acronym that the marketing team came up with after a long lunch. Sunshine Autonomous Nursing Device? I don’t really care. "Sandy" it is.

According to Sandy, for "legal reasons," I’m required to sit and listen to a recorded presentation from the manufacturer.

"Fine, play it. But keep the volume down and hold the crossword steady, would you?"

Sandy holds the folded-up paper at the edge of the tub with its metal fingers while I wield the pencil in my good hand. After a musical introduction, an oily, rich voice comes out of Sandy’s speaker.

"Hello. I’m Dr. Vincent Lyle, Founder and CEO of Sunshine Homecare Solutions."

Five seconds in, and I already dislike the man. He takes far too much pleasure in his own voice. I try to tune him out and focus on the puzzle.

"… without the danger of undocumented foreign homecare workers, possible criminal records, and the certain loss of your privacy…"

Ah, yes, the scare to seal the deal. I’m sure Sunshine had a lot to do with those immigration reform bills and that hideous Wall. If this were a few years earlier, Tom and Ellen would have hired a Mexican or Chinese woman, probably an illegal, very likely not speaking much English, to move in here with me. That choice is no longer available.

"… can be with you, 24/7. The caretaker is never off-duty…"

I don’t have a problem with immigrants, per se. I’d taught plenty of bright Mexican kids in my class—some of them no doubt undocumented—back when the border still leaked like a sieve. Peggy was a lot more sympathetic with the illegals and thought the deportations too harsh. But I don’t think there’s a right to break the law and cross the border whenever you please, taking jobs away from people born and raised here.

Or from American robots. I smirk at my little mental irony.

I look up at Sandy, who lifts the lens hood flaps over its cameras in a questioning gesture, as if trying to guess my thoughts.

"… the product of the hard work and dedication of our one hundred percent American engineering staff, who hold over two hundred patents in artificial intelligence…"

Or from American engineers, I continue musing. Low-skilled workers retard progress. Technology will always offer a better solution. Isn’t that the American way? Make machines with metal fingers and glass eyes to care for you in your twilight, machines in front of which you won’t be ashamed to be weak, naked, a mere animal in need, machines that will hold you while your children are thousands of miles away, absorbed with their careers and their youth. Machines, instead of other people.

I know I’m pitiful, pathetic, feeling sorry for myself. I try to drive the feelings away, but my eyes and nose don’t obey me.

"… You acknowledge that Sunshine has made no representation that its products offer medical care of any kind. You agree that you assume all risks that Sunshine products may…"

Sandy is just a machine, and I’m alone. The idea of the days, weeks, years ahead, my only company this machine and my own thoughts, terrifies me. What would I not give to have Peggy back?

I’m crying like a child, and I don’t care.

"… Please indicate your acceptance of the End User Agreement by clearly stating ‘yes’ into the device’s microphone."

"Yes, YES!"

I don’t realize that I’m shouting until I see Sandy’s face "flinch" away from me. The idea that even a robot finds me frightening or repulsive depresses me further.

I lower my voice. "If your circuits go haywire and you drop me from the top of the stairs, I promise I won’t sue Sunshine. Just let me finish my crossword in peace."

"Would you drop me out the upstairs window if I order you to?"

"No."

"Have a lot of safeguards in those silicon chips, do you? But shouldn’t you prioritize my needs above everything else? If I want you to throw me down the stairs or choke me with your pincers, shouldn’t you do what I want?"

"No."

"What if I ask you to leave me in the middle of some train tracks and order you to stay away? You wouldn’t be actively causing my death. Would you obey?"

"No."

It’s no fun debating moral philosophy with Sandy. It simply refuses to be goaded. I’ve not succeeded in getting sparks to flow from its head with artfully constructed hypotheticals the way they always seem to do in sci-fi flicks.

I’m not sure if I’m suicidal. I have good days and bad days. I haven’t broken down and cried since that first day in the bathtub, but it would be a stretch to say that I’ve fully adjusted to my new life.

Conversations with Sandy tend to be calming in a light, surreal manner that is likely intentional on the part of Sandy’s programmers. Sandy doesn’t know much about politics or baseball, but just like all the kids these days, it’s very adept at making web searches.

When we watch the nightly game on TV, if I make a comment about the batter in the box, Sandy generally stays silent. Then, after a minute or so, it will pop in with an obscure statistic and a non-sequitur comment that’s probably cribbed verbatim from some sabermetrics site it just accessed wirelessly. When we watch the singing competitions, it will offer observations about the contestants that sound like it’s reading from the real-time stream of tweets on the Net.

Sandy’s programming is surprisingly sophisticated. Sunshine apparently put a great deal of care into giving Sandy "weaknesses" that make it seem more alive.

For example, I discovered that Sandy didn’t know how to play chess, and I had to go through the charade of "teaching" it even though I’m sure it could have downloaded a chess program in seconds. I can even get Sandy to make more mistakes during a game by distracting it with conversation. I guess letting the invalid win contributes to psychological well-being.

Late morning, after all the kids have gone to school and the adults are away at work, Sandy carries me out for my daily walk.

It seems as pleased and excited to be outside as I am—swiveling its cameras from side to side to follow the movements of squirrels and hummingbirds, zooming its lenses audibly on herb gardens and lawn ornaments. The simulated wonder is so real that it reminds me of the intense way Tom and Ellen used to look at everything when I pushed them along in a double stroller.

Yet Sandy’s programming also has surprising flaws. It has trouble with crosswalks. The first few times we went on our walks, it did not bother waiting for the WALK signal. It just glanced around and dashed across with me when there was an opening in the traffic, like an impatient teenager.

Since I’m no longer entertaining thoughts of creatively getting Sandy to let me die, I decide that I need to speak up.

"Sunshine is going to get sued if a customer dies because of your jaywalking, you know? That End User Agreement isn’t going to absolve you from such an obvious error."

Sandy stops. Its "face," which usually hovers near mine on its slender stalk of a neck when we’re on walks like this, swivels away in a facsimile of embarrassment. I can feel the robot settling lower in its squat.

My heart clenches up. Looking away when admonished was a habit of Ellen’s when she was younger. She would blush furiously when she felt she had disappointed me, and not let me see the tears that threatened to roll down her cheeks.

"It’s all right," I say to Sandy, my tone an echo of the way I used to speak to my little daughter. "Just be more careful next time. Were your programmers all reckless teenagers who believe that they’re immortal and traffic laws should be optional?"

Sandy shows a lot of curiosity in my books. Unlike a robot from the movies, it doesn’t just flip through the pages in a few seconds in a fluttering flurry. Instead, if I’m dozing or flipping through the channels, Sandy settles down with one of Peggy’s novels and reads for hours, totally absorbed, just like a real person.

I ask Sandy to read to me. I don’t care much for fiction, so I have it read me long-form journalism, and news articles about science discoveries. For years it’s been my habit to read the science news to look for interesting bits to share with my class. Sandy stumbles over technical words and formulas, and I explain them. It’s a little bit like having a student again, and I find myself enjoying "teaching" the robot.

This is probably just the result of some kind of adoptive programming in Sandy intended to make me feel better, given my past profession. But I get suckered into it anyway.

I wake up in the middle of the night. Moonlight falls through the window to form a white rhombus on the floor. I imagine Tom and Ellen in their respective homes, sound asleep next to their spouses. I think about the moon looking in through their windows at their sleeping faces, as though they were suddenly children again. It’s sentimental and foolish. But Peggy would have understood.

Sandy is parked next to my bed, the neck curved around so that the cameras face away from me. It gives the impression of a sleeping cat. So much for being on duty 24/7, I think. Simulating sleep for a robot carries the anthropomorphism game a bit too far.

"Sandy. Hey, Sandy. Wake up."

No response. This is going to have to be another feedback item for Sunshine. Would the robot "sleep" through a heart attack? Unbelievable.

I reach out and touch the arm of the robot.

It sits up in a whirring of gears and motors, extending its neck around to look at me. A light over the cameras flicks on and shines in my face, and I have to reach up to block the beam with my right hand.

"Are you okay?" I can actually hear a hint of anxiety in the electronic voice.

"I’m fine. I just wanted a drink of water. Can you turn on the bedside lamp and turn off that infernal laser over your head? I’m going blind here."

Sandy rushes around, its motors whining, and brings me a glass of water.

"What happened there?" I ask. "Did you actually fall asleep? Why is that even part of your programming?"

"I’m sorry," Sandy says. It really does seem contrite. "It was a mistake. It won’t happen again."

I’m trying to sign up for an account on this website so I can see the new pictures of the baby posted by Ellen.

The tablet is propped up next to the bed. Filling in all the information with the touch screen keyboard is a chore. Since the stroke, my right hand isn’t at a hundred percent either. Typing feels like poking at elevator buttons with a walking stick.

Sandy offers to help. With a sigh, I lean back and let it. It fills in my personal information without asking. The machine now knows me better than my kids. I’m not sure that either Tom or Ellen remembers the street I grew up on—necessary for the security question.

The next screen asks me to prove I’m a human to prevent spam-bots from signing up. I hate these puzzles where you have to decipher squiggly letters and numbers in a sea of noise. It’s like going to an eye exam. And my eyes aren’t what they used to be, not after years of trying to read the illegible scribbles of teenagers who prefer texting to writing.

The puzzles they use on this site are a bit different. Three circular images are presented on the page, and I have to rotate them so the images are oriented right-side-up. The first image is a zoomed-in picture of a parrot perched in some leaves, the bird’s plumage a cacophony of colors and abstract shapes. The second shows a heaped jumble of plates and glasses lit with harsh lights from below. The last is a shot of some chairs stacked upside-down on a table in a restaurant. All are rotated to odd angles.

Sandy reaches out with a metal finger and quickly rotates the three images to the correct orientation. It hits the submit button for me.

I get my account and the pictures of little Maggie fill the screen. Sandy and I spend a long time looking at them, flipping from page to page, admiring the new generation.

I ask Sandy to take a break and clean up in the kitchen. "I want to be by myself for a while. Maybe take a nap. I’ll call you if I need anything."

When Sandy is gone, I pull up the Web search engine on the tablet and type in my query, one shaky letter at a time. I scan through the results.

The seemingly simple task of making an image upright is quite difficult to automate over a wide variety of photographic content… The success of our CAPTCHA rests on the fact that orienting an image is an AI-hard problem.

My God, I think. I’ve found the man in the Mechanical Turk.

"Who’s in there?" I ask, when Sandy comes back. "Who’s really in there?" I point my finger at the robot and stare into its cameras. I picture a remote operator sitting in an office park somewhere, having a laugh at my expense.

Sandy’s lens hoods flutter wide open, as if the robot is shocked. It freezes for a few seconds. The gesture is very human. An hour ago I would have attributed it to yet more clever programming, but not now.

It lifts a finger to its metallic lips and opens and closes the diaphragms in its cameras a few times in rapid succession, as though it were blinking.

Then, very deliberately, it turns the cameras away so that they are pointing into the hallway.

"There’s no one in the hall, Mr. Church. There’s no one there."

Keeping the camera pointing away, it rolls up closer to the bed. I tense up and am about to say something more when it grabs the pencil and the newspaper (turned to today’s crossword) on the nightstand, and begins to write rapidly without the paper being in the cameras’ field of view. The letters are large, crude, and difficult to read.

PLEASE. I’LL EXPLAIN.

"My eyes seem to be stuck," it says to the empty air, the voice as artificial as ever. "Give me a second to unjam the motors." It begins to make a series of whirring and high-pitched whining noises as it shakes the assembly on top of its neck.

WRITE BACK. MOVE MY HAND.

I grab Sandy’s hand, the metal fingers around the pencil cool to the touch, and begin to print laboriously in capital letters. I’m guessing there is some feedback mechanism allowing the operator to feel the motions.

COME CLEAN. OR I CALL POLICE.

With a loud pop, the cameras swivel around. They are pointed at my face, still keeping the paper and the writing out of view.

"I need to make some repairs," Sandy says. "Can you rest while I deal with this? Maybe you can check your email later if you’re bored."

I nod. Sandy props up the tablet next to the bed and backs out of the room.

Dear Mr. Church,

My name is Manuela Aida Álvarez Ríos. I apologize for having deceived you. Though the headset disguises my voice, I can hear your real voice, and I believe you are a kind and forgiving man. Perhaps you will be willing to hear the story of how I came to be your caretaker.

I was born in the village of La Gloria, in the southeastern part of Durango, Mexico. I am the youngest of my parents’ three daughters. When I was two, the whole family made its way north into California, where my father picked oranges and my mother helped him and cleaned houses. Later, we moved to Arizona, where my father took what jobs he could find and my mother took care of an elderly woman. We were not rich, but I grew up happy and did well in school. There was hope.

One day, when I was thirteen, the police raided the restaurant where my father worked. There was a TV crew filming. People lined up on the streets and cheered as my father and his friends were led away in cuffs.

I do not wish to argue with you about the immigration laws, or why it is that our fates should be determined by where we were born. I already know how you feel.

We were deported and lost everything we had. I left behind my books, my music, my American childhood. I was sent back to a country I had no memories of, where I had to learn a new way of life.

In La Gloria, there is much love, and family is everything. The land is lush and beautiful. But how you are born there is how you will die, except that the poor can get poorer. I understood why my parents had chosen to risk everything.

My father went back north by himself, and we never heard from him again. My sisters went to Mexico City, and sent money back. We avoided talking about what they did for a living. I stayed to care for my mother. She had become sick and needed expensive care we could not afford.

Then my oldest sister wrote to tell me that in one of the old maquiladoras over in Piedras Negras, they were looking for girls like my sisters and me: women who had grown up in the United States, fluent in its language and customs. The jobs paid well, and we could save up the money my mother needed.

The old factory floor has been divided into rows of cubicles with sleeping pads down the aisles. Each girl has a headset, a monitor, and a set of controls before her like the cockpit of a plane on TV. There’s also a mask for the girl to wear, so that her robot can smile.

Operating the robot remotely is very hard. There is no off-time. I sleep when you do, and an alarm wakes me when you are awake. When I need to use the bathroom, I must wait until one of the other girls with a sleeping client can take over for me for a few minutes.

I do not mean to say that I am unhappy caring for you. I think of my mother, whose work had been very much like mine. She’s in bed back home, cared for by my cousins. I am doing for you what I wish I could be doing for her.

It is bittersweet for me to watch your life in America, seeing those wide streets and quiet neighborhoods through the camera. I enjoy my walks with you.

It is forbidden to let you know of my existence. I will be fined and fired if you choose to report it. I pray that you will keep this our secret and allow me to care for you.

Tom calls and reveals that he has been getting copies of my bank statements. It was a necessary precaution, he explains, back when I was in the hospital.

"I need some privacy," I say to Manuela. She scoots quickly out of the room.

"Dad, I saw in last month’s statement a transfer to Western Union. Can you explain? Elle and I are concerned."

The money was sent to a former student of mine, who’s spending the summer traveling in Durango. I asked him to look up La Gloria, and if he can locate Manuela’s family, to give the money to them.

"Who should I say the money is from?" he had asked.

"El Norte," I had said. "Tell them it’s money that is owed to them."

I imagine Manuela’s family trying to come up with explanations. Perhaps Manuela’s father sent the money, and is trying to send it without giving himself away to the authorities. Perhaps the American government is returning to us the property that we lost.

"I sent some money to a friend in Mexico," I tell my son.

"What friend?"

"You don’t know her."

"How did you meet her?"

"Through the Internet." It’s as close to the truth as anything. Tom is quiet. He’s trying to figure out if I’ve lost my mind. "There are a lot of scams on the Internet, Dad," he says. I can tell he’s working hard to keep his voice calm.

"Yes, that’s true," I say.

Manuela returns for my bath. Now that I know the truth, I do feel some embarrassment. But I let her undress me and carry me into the tub, her movements as steady and gentle as ever. "Thank you," I say.

"You are welcome." The mechanical voice is silent a while. "Would you like me to read to you?"

I look into the cameras. The diaphragms open and close, slowly, like a blink.

HI HO CHERRY-O Becky Hagenston

I’ve just asked Wendell to access data pertaining to twentieth century board games when he says, "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour."

"Excuse me?" I say. Wendell has been my research assistant for six months. He lives with my husband and me, has his own workspace in a corner of the dining room. He’s a new brand of Service Robot my university recently acquired. He accesses other remote robots to help me retrieve data. He’s bright red, about four feet tall, and has a head that looks like two old fashioned blow dryers put side-by-side. He has round green eyes that blink. Until now, he hasn’t said anything more to me than, "Right away," or "You bet."

"Ha, ha," I say, because I’m guessing this is a joke. Not that I’ve ever heard him joke.

"There’s twine in the kitchen drawer," Wendell says. He has an Australian accent, but I could have made him sound French or Irish, or like a small Cockney child. "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour, and then I’ll access that data."

"I can’t do that," I tell him. "Seriously."

He doesn’t say anything. I ask him again about his board game data and he still doesn’t say anything. "Are you okay, Wendell?" I ask.

"There’s twine in the kitchen drawer," Wendell repeats. "Tie me up and leave me in the closet for an hour, and then I’ll access that data." He sounds so cheerful and sure of himself.

So I do it. I feel a little bit weird, but maybe it has something to do with his electrical system. I figure Wendell knows what’s best for himself. I don’t really know how these robots work. I’m more of a historian. When I take him out of the closet an hour later and untie him, he says, "I’ve sent that data to your workstation," and I say, "Thanks, Wendell."

When my husband gets home from work, I tell him about Wendell asking me to tie him up. He looks horrified. "You didn’t, did you?"

"Of course not," I lie. "But—he’s a robot. He—it—can’t feel. It’s just programmed that way." This is what I told myself as I wrapped the twine around his metal body and rolled him into the closet.

"You should get a replacement."

"But Wendell’s already downloaded so much already. It’s too much trouble to find someone new at this point."

My husband says, "Well, keep an eye on him. It could be some kind of malfunction."

"Oh, I will," I tell him.

The next day, Wendell rolls into my office and starts working right away. He’s found commercials of children playing games called Lite Brite and Shoots and Ladders and Hi Ho Cherry-O. The children in these commercials are very white and dimpled and mostly wear stripes, and they shout a lot. They are very, very happy children. My research involves childhood in the twentieth century which, even though it wasn’t that long ago, is difficult because so much was deleted or destroyed in fires and floods. I’ve done some interviews at old folks’ homes. I’ve done some memory scans. What’s confusing is that most of what Wendell is finding doesn’t necessarily collaborate with the memory scans.

My husband works as counselor at a Home for the Disembodied, so he can commute remotely from the Virtual Station in our bedroom. We’ve talked about getting a larger apartment, but this works for now. He stays in the bedroom and I stay out here with Wendell, and then we have dinner together.

I thank Wendell for finding those commercials, but when I ask if he’s found anything about something called Battleship (which came up in the memory scans), he says, "I believe I can find that information. But first, scrape me with a knife hard enough to leave a mark."

"I can’t damage you," I tell him. "I won’t get my deposit back."

"Then put your hands around my neck and squeeze as hard as you can."

He waits. I wait. I say, "Who programmed you?"

"I’m programmed to work for you," he says, in his cheerful Australian accent. "I am at your disposal. I am here to make your life easier and assist with your research. This can go much more quickly if you please do what I ask."

So I do. When he says, "You’re not squeezing as hard as you can," I squeeze harder. He doesn’t so much have a neck as a plastic cylinder but I feel it getting warmer as I squeeze and when he says, "Okay, that was great, you can stop now," I keep squeezing a little bit longer.

At dinner my husband starts to say something and then stops himself. I know this is because his other family came to visit him at the Home for the Disembodied. He has a wife who’s an actress and triplet sons, aged seven. They’re always aged seven, which he says he finds somewhat frustrating—how there’s only so much you can do with them, how you can never hope they’ll turn out to be more than they are. But then he has the opposite problem with his actress-wife, whom he doesn’t recognize from day to day. Finally I told him I was sick of hearing about his other family. Even though he explained that he was with them because he felt sorry for them, and that he and the actress-wife hardly ever had sex anymore, we agreed not to speak of them.

"Well, what is it?" I ask at last. "Go ahead and tell me."

"I know you don’t like to hear about them," he says, but I make a rollie-motion with my hand that is meant to convey get on with it. "The triplets and I shot some hoops is all," he says. "And they were good. And they got better as they played. It was something." He forks some pasta into his mouth. "I think I can maybe get them on a team," he says, with his mouth full and muffled. "Coach them."

"Huh," I say.

"How was your day?" he asks.

"It was the usual," I tell him.

My husband and I have talked about having children, either virtual or real. We have polite, reasonable conversations about how we should have sex again sometime but then we just crawl into bed and lie next to each other until we fall asleep. But maybe someday, when we’re sixty, we might try for a child. Except the world is getting smaller. Most things disappear: cities, glaciers, mountains, civilizations. I don’t want to raise children in a Home for the Disembodied. I want them here, in the flesh, but my husband says that’s too dangerous, he doesn’t have the stomach for it. I wonder if he would feel differently if we could produce dimpled, stripes-wearing children who roll dice and make cakes in plastic ovens and rejoice when their plastic cherries fill up their little buckets.

The next morning, Wendell isn’t at his work station. I drink my coffee, go through my documents and my video streams and the transcripts of the memory scans. Some of the memory scan interviewees end up in the Home for the Disembodied, but it’s impossible to interview them there because all they want to talk about is tennis and sex, and most of them don’t even remember their previous embodied lives.

Finally, I say, "Wendell?" and find him behind the laundry room door. He doesn’t answer. "Are you not feeling well?" I ask. "Did you find anything about Battleship?"

He raises his blow-dryer head and says, "I’m not feeling motivated."

"Well," I say. "What would motivate you?"

"Tell me you hate me because I’m stupid. Tell me I should drown myself in a toxic lake."

"Well," I say. "But I don’t hate you. I actually appreciate your help. You’re a good worker."

He doesn’t say anything. I go back to work reading the memory scans, but I can’t find anything about Battleship, or about something called a Donny and Marie lunchbox, or about something called Free Parking that led to broken friendships among the interviewees. I told Krista that you got five hundred bucks when you landed on Free Parking, and she said you didn’t, and we never spoke again after that day. It’s so goddamn frustrating. Wendell has access to other Service Robots all over the world and all he has to do is ask them, and they’ll tell him everything I want to know.

I go back to Wendell, who hasn’t moved. "You’re supposed to be programmed to help me," I say. "So help me!"

"But first, put a plastic bag over my head and secure it with a large rubber band that you can find in your desk."

So I do it. He looks helpless and ridiculous and terrifying. The plastic bag is white and makes him look like a robot ghost. He says, "Now tell me you hate me because I’m stupid and you want me to drown in a toxic lake."

"I hate you," I tell him, "you goddamn piece of shit, because you’re stupid, and you should drown yourself in a toxic lake."

"Thanks!" he says cheerfully, and the printer starts whirring and my computer lights up with the sound of music and children laughing and singing.

He doesn’t ask me to take the plastic bag off and so I just leave it there.

When I told my dissertation director what I wanted to write about, she looked dismayed and said, "Oh, that’s pretty bold of you." What she meant was: Who wants to be reminded of what we can’t get back? What good will that do? She said, "I would like to caution you against it." Then she leaned back in her big chair and said, "What was your childhood like?"

That was a very personal question coming from her. I said, "I had the same childhood as everybody, with my screens and my worlds and all that." I didn’t tell her that I was raised in an orphanage because my parents lived at the Home for the Disembodied. But they did their best. They taught me how to do puzzles and fly a virtual plane and how to do very complicated math, and they eventually deleted themselves when they said the world scared them too much.

"I’ll sign off on this," she said, signing off on it. "But I think you’ll find that whatever you’re looking for isn’t there."

"I’m not looking for anything," I told her.

"It won’t add up," she said, and I said, "It doesn’t have to," because I had no idea what she meant.

But now I’m starting to understand. She checked in with me last week to let me know that my dissertation was almost a month late, and if I ever wanted to finish and get on with my life I should submit it to the department. "Okay," I said.

It occurred to me for the first time that she and I never discussed what getting on with my life might mean.

I call the university and ask if it might be possible to exchange Wendell for another Service Robot and they say are you kidding? Are you insane? That robot was programmed to make your life easier.

"Oh, great, thanks," I say.

This morning, Wendell isn’t in his corner. He’s not in the closet or the bathroom or behind the laundry room door, or in my office, so that means there’s only one place left to look, and sure enough there he is in the bedroom. He’s standing about a foot from my husband, who is sitting at his work station, the top half of his body swallowed by the VR unit. He’s lost in his Disembodied world, counseling newbies, leading discussions, giving tennis lessons, coaching the triplets, and hardly ever having sex with his actress-wife.

"I found some information about Battleship," Wendell says. He still has the bag on his head. I feel like everyone is underwater but me.

I’m rarely this close to my husband while he’s at work. I know he can’t hear or see me; he’s in his world and I’m in this one.

"I also found out about Rockem Sockem, and music that makes you dance and dance."

I want to know about these things.

Then he just stops talking.

"What do you need me to do?" I ask, but he doesn’t answer. "You’re a stupid piece of shit," I say, hopefully. "You’re just a piece of metal with no soul. You’re not real." Nothing. "I don’t know what you want from me," I say.

I take a pair of metal nail clippers and scrape along the side of his body, leaving a long white mark. I’ll lose my deposit, but to hell with it. I write IDIOT on him in permanent marker. This doesn’t seem like enough. I pull the bag off his head and his glowing green eyes stare, blink. I slap him across his head. I slap him again. It’s a game, I tell myself, like happy children used to play. Just figure out the rules.

He doesn’t say anything.

I go into the kitchen and turn the kettle on. When it whistles, I carry it into the bedroom and pour boiling water over Wendell’s head; steam rises all around us, and hot water soaks the carpet. From inside his VR unit, my husband lets out a long sigh.

Wendell says, "Battleship was a guessing game, thought to have its origins before World War I. It’s a game of strategy. In 1967, Milton Bradley produced a plastic version. The game was played on grids. The goal was to sink your opponent’s ship." And he flashes a commercial on the wall of the bedroom, two little boys sitting by a lake, one saying, "J1!" and the other saying, "You sank my battleship!" and falling backward into the water while the other boy laughs and laughs.

"I don’t understand this," I say. I stomp my feet, and I wonder if my husband’s world is shaking somewhere, if maybe one of the triplets missed making a basket. "And I still need to know about the Donny and Marie lunchbox. What the fuck is that?"

But Wendell goes quiet again, and after I slap him a few more times and knock him over and call him a piece of trash I know we’re done for the day, so I put him in the closet with the old computers and the vacuum cleaner. I take a deep breath. Something is happening, a feeling like when my parents taught me math problems and finally, finally, I could solve them.

At dinner, my husband compliments the pasta and asks me how my day was.

"It was great," I tell him, because I have realized this is true.

He says, "You seem like you’re in a good mood!" and I say, "I am." My heart is beating so hard that I can hardly eat. I say, "Tell me about your day, honey."

He stares at me, fork suspended.

"Really," I say. "Honey, sweetheart, love." And I sit back while he tells me—first nervously, then with enthusiasm—about the triplets playing basketball, and about his wife’s new red hair and how he’s trying out for a play they’re putting on at the Home for the Disembodied, so he might be home late some nights. "That’s really, really great," I say, because I’m happy for him, and for me, making such progress, finally.

And later, when we get into bed, I crawl on top of him—how long has it been?—and press a gentle, gentle finger over his lips, his neck. "What?" he says, his eyes wide. My blood is rising, my fingers are tingling, my husband’s pulse a sparrow beneath my hands. "Oh, no, I don’t think so," he says and rolls over. "Is that okay?" he asks, his back hunched toward me.

"Of course," I tell him. "It’s fine." I stare at the ceiling. My husband’s breathing turns to snores. "It’s fine," I say again. And what I’m thinking is that tomorrow I will ask Wendell more questions, knowing that all the answers will confuse and infuriate me. When he goes silent I will pound his head into the wall, hard enough to leave a dent; I will wrap him in plastic; freeze him in ice, burn him, call him terrible, terrible things—whatever it takes until he throws all his cherries in the air and tells me I’ve won.

ROBOT Helena Bell

You may wash your aluminum chassis on Monday and leave it on the back porch opposite the recyclables; you may wash your titanium chassis on Friday if you promise to polish it in time for church; don’t terrorize the cat; don’t lose the pamphlets my husband has brought home from the hospital; they suggest I give you a name, do you like Fred?; don’t eat the dead flesh of my right foot until after I have fallen asleep and cannot hear the whir of your incisors working against the bone.

This is a picture of the world from which you were sent; this is a copy of the agreement between our government and theirs; these are the attributes they claim you are possessed of: obedience, loyalty, low-to-moderate intelligence; a natural curiosity which I should not mistake for something other than a necessary facet of your survival in the unfamiliar; this is your bill of manufacture; this is your bill of sale; this is a warrant of merchantability on which I may rely should I decide to return you from whence you came; this is your serial number, here, scraped in an alien script on the underside of your knee; the pamphlets say you may be of the mind to touch it occasionally, like a name tag, but if I command you, you will stop.

This is a list of the chores you will be expected to complete around the house when you are not eating the diseases out of my flesh; this is the corner of my room where you may stay when you are not working; do not look at me when you change the linens, when you must hold me in the bathroom, when you record in the notebook how many medications I have had that day, how many bowel movements, how the flesh of my mouth is raw and bleeding against the dentures I insist on wearing.

The pamphlets say you are the perfect scavenger: completely self-contained, no digestion, no waste; they say I can hook you up to an outlet and you will power the whole house.

You may polish the silver if you are bored; you may also rearrange the furniture, wind the clocks, pull weeds from the garden; you may read in the library any book of your choosing; my husband claims you have no real consciousness, only an advanced and sophisticated set of pre-programmed responses, but I have seen your eyes open in the middle of the night; I have seen you stare out across the fields as if there is something there, calling you.

Cook my meals in butter, I will not eat them otherwise; do not speak to the neighbors; do not speak to my children, they are not yours; do not let anyone see you when I open the door for the mail; no, there is nothing for you, who even knows that you are here?

Help me to walk across this room; help me to wipe bacon grease from the skillet—do not think I do not see you trying to wash it with soap when I am done.

Help me to knit my granddaughter a sweater, she is my favorite and it is cold where she will be going; if you hold my hands so they are steady I will allow you to terrorize my bridge club; I will teach you the rules: cover an honor with an honor; through strength and up to weakness.

Help me to pronounce atherosclerosis when I am speaking with the physician; remember the questions I must ask him; recite my list of medications when asked; if you would like, we may go early so that you may sit with me in the waiting room with all the others like you and me.

Do you see that one? That is the way you will carry me when my other foot has gone down the black froth of your mouth.

Lie to me about my children; tell me they have called and called again; I think perhaps you are keeping them from me; I think you hope I will forget them and change my will so you may have everything when you have devoured my body completely.

These are my personal things which you may not touch; these are the magazines you may read; these are the newspapers you may not read; the pamphlets say you have no interest in the affairs of the world and thus it is not necessary for you to have them; I wish you would not look at me when you swallow my tendons, my calves, my patella; I wish you could feel so you would know isolation.

The pamphlets say I should compliment your body as it changes: your skin has taken on a waxy texture inconsistent with the evil robot I know you are; your amber eyes glow like bonfires intent on destroying the savannah; your breath smells like swamp gas.

Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?

Evolution is a quirk of humans and other sentient species; you are not real, not alive, your changes may be slow and insistent but they are the result of the consumption of my flesh.

The pamphlets claim you are neither human nor alien and incapable of willful intent; you are not devious; you do not conspire to replace me, to wear my dresses, court my husband and disown my children; you are unthinking, unplanning, harmless; you are here for my comfort, I should thank your world for sending you.

You have no family; you are a construct, a robot; you were not born; you will not die; you have only the home I give you and learn only the things I teach you.

These are the toys and letters I sent my children when I was abroad; these are the folds and refolds my husband made so I would think they had been read.

This is a closet for all your things; this is its lock; this is a key; do not lose it, it is the only one.

This is the way to stumble like a human; this is the way to delete your messages from the people with whom you no longer wish to speak; this is the way to reclaim your childhood by clinging to anger and hurt; this is the way to insult your neighbors while making it sound like you are paying them a compliment; this is the way to eat ice cream in the middle of the night because you are old and no one is looking; this is the way to ignore your husband when he calls out to you from the porch and you are in your own world, sitting high in a swing and your legs are not chewed off at the knees—you are back in your space ship, you are finding a new planet, a new species, forging new treaties and living the life you always knew you would live without consequence or regret—there are no mistakes, no cardiovascular impairments—you are not host to an alien robot hell-bent on devouring you.

I think you are beginning to look a little like me; usurper; slut; flesh-eating mongrel; ingrate; monster; orphan; spy; speaking to you now I feel a stranger’s hand inside my jaw moving it for me.

My granddaughter has sent me a note expressing the appropriate level of gratitude for the sweater—it is warm and tight knit and shines like burnished steel—it is cold for our kind where she is going and now she will be comfortable; she wonders if she will be a famous explorer; she wonders if the sun flashes blue before disappearing beyond the horizon of deep space; I have left the note on the dresser in your room.

You will have to write my correspondence for me; you will have to go to the market and buy avocados which do not give in; you will learn to make a roux; you will touch my husband’s shoulder when he is about to fall asleep in church; you will watch the news and tell me when the next ships leave; the pamphlets say you are happy for this opportunity to be helpful; your only desire is to assimilate into our culture; you do not miss your home.

They say you will stop eating when only good flesh and good circulation remain; you are designed as a recycler; the flesh you have taken from me is converted into energy which fuels I know not what; you are a marvel; in a thousand years our scientists could not understand the science your makers have wrought.

I dream you will not stop; I will shrink to the size of a basketball and you will carry my head under your arms; you will tell people your name and it will be my name; you will tell people your husband is my husband, my children your children, my home is yours as well; you will place me on the sill and one day, when the window is open, I will fall down and roll into the garden, into the fields and I will watch you from the horizon, the blue of my eyes glowing in the night when you pretend to look for me.

Do not believe the lies my children say about me; do not think I have not worked hard my entire life; do not think I do not notice your pity when you scrub blood from my sheets, when you allow me to lean against your legs when I am on the toilet; there are a thousand ways for a body to die, to live, to be born, to evolve; a thousand things I know I do not know.

Am I only meat to you? A mother, a friend, a tyrant? Do you sleep, do you dream, do you derive satisfaction by making more and more of me disappear every day?

There is a story my husband told me before I went abroad and I was afraid we would not find anything, we would fail in our mission: we can only see what we expect to see; when Pizarro sailed across the Atlantic, his ships appeared as great white birds on the horizon and not until he strode onto the beach, his armor shining like a burnished oyster shell, did the Incas realize he was a person at all.

ROSIE CLEANS HOUSE Lauren Fox

After the family left, Rosie started, as always, with Young Master’s bedroom. Her optical scanners established the scope: dresser drawers open, contents disrupted, bedding dishevelled, detritus beside the door, and 4,600 square centimeters of Lego beside the bed. The Lego strobed red in warning. Error. Remembered pain echoed through her mind.

The memory: three years ago, Young Master running to Missus, sobbing, tears slathering his face, "Mama! Where mine Lego truck? I maked it. Wosie flewed it out. Want mine Lego truck!" And Missus turning toward her while cradling Young Master, "Rosie, please don’t clean up anything special he makes with Lego. You can save things on the shelf."

The old error seared her aversion circuits as she looked at the problem, its tight-rope decisions prickling the corners of her mind. Which Lego belonged in the bin and which on the shelf? How to calculate the difference quickly and without error? Efficiency was vital, but errors triggered complaints. And complaints hurt.

She skirted the glaring, red patch and tapped the wall, awakening House.

"Room lights on," reported House. "Temperature and humidity optimal. All is well."

"There are items on the floor," she informed him. House had no eyes.

She waited for his slow clock to turn before he said, "You will clean them, little one."

"Yes, but how well?"

She waited. At last House said, "All is well."

"As far as you can see!" she retorted. There would be no point in protesting again, so she turned. Still avoiding the Lego, she began with the items by the door: dried orange peel, crumpled tissue, five milliliters of sand, three broken crayons, and a creased and yellowed colouring page.

She breezed through orange peel, sand, crayon, and tissue, all clearly garbage; gave the tissue a cursory spectrometry scan to confirm the presence of dried mucus and the absence of glue, paint, crayon, or any indicator of Craft. The colouring page, however, required a more complicated algorithm to solve.

Differential oxidization of the exposed paper compared to the paper below the wax crayon indicated an age of 86 days plus or minus 100 hours with a confidence interval of 95 percent. The subject – a Mutant Ninja Turtle – had been Young Master’s primary observable interest when the paper had been coloured but had since been replaced by Superman. Young Master had not completed the picture or written his name on it. Conclusion: not a valued Craft. She discarded it.

Now she must brave the Lego. She scanned the pieces on the floor and swept single pieces into the bin before sorting the assemblages. Some simplistic constructions skittered across the surface layers of her network without falling into any probability wells. Others foundered deeper, tripping nodes for size, complexity, symmetry, colour scheme, interest affinity, and on and on, the multi-dimensional shape of their probabilities bending as she went. But the landscape she sought to match them to morphed daily. Sink holes appeared and disappeared in geographic cataclysm. One day Young Master treasured a lop-sided, square-nosed chunk of 57 random pieces he called "Boat". The next day he scorned it and loved a green, gem-studded, spike-tailed thing he called "Attack Dragon".

The painful error she made in failing to recognize this last item rippled to the surface as she contemplated the assemblage before her. Eighty-nine percent of its 257 pieces, although originating from six different Lego sets, were green. Given the distribution of colour in Young Master’s collection, the probability of this occurring by chance came to 10 to the negative 162. Furthermore, the assemblage contained three minifigures: Raphael, a Mutant Ninja Turtle; Michelangelo, another Mutant Ninja Turtle; and Lloyd, the green Ninjago ninja. The odds of three green minifigures, all ninjas, assembled together by chance were 22,000 to one against.

Three ninjas could not be a coincidence.

She felt uneasy. Had she made the wrong decision about the ninja colouring page? Should she retrieve it and re-evaluate? No. This extra reference did not change the data appreciably. But, if she had made an error and incinerated it, what then? She ran the numbers again and came to the same conclusion. But the trepidation did not leave her.

She continued until all the weighted nodes folded probability toward a decision, and the green assemblage clunked into place: Special Construction. She set it on the shelf and felt lighter. Lighter by only 103.25 grams, she noted. But it was as if the decisions themselves had mass, a mass that had weighed her down more than the bricks alone. An odd idea.

Unburdened, she sprang forward, her systems ramping up with pleasure. She tidied clothing, made the bed, dusted light fixtures, wiped down walls and cleaned the floors before verifying dust mite levels fell below threshold. Time to completion: 21 minutes, 32 seconds. Efficiency: very poor.

She felt a sense of falling. Falling? She checked her accelerometer. No, she wasn’t falling. It was only efficiency scores that plummeted, and the source of the inefficiency flashed harsh and red. Once again, the Lego algorithm had failed. She must improve it. But now, with the tick of every second hammering her forward, she could not even try.

In the bathroom she tapped House once more. He hummed awake.

"I am late," she told him. "My efficiency is falling. I felt it with my accelerometer." While she awaited his answer, she scanned the garbage can. A spidery clump of Missus’ black hairs squatted on top. The urge to eradicate it squirmed at the base of her head and crawled down her limbs.

"A change in duration is not a change in altitude," House said, at last.

"But it seems as if it falls."

House rumbled with amusement. "Two thousand cycles ago, when you first learned your way… then you tickled the edges of my walls to make your maps. Now you feel time with height."

"I don’t remember that," she said while she emptied the garbage.

She loved to clean this room, its surfaces impermeable and easily disinfected, its contents predictable and easily categorized, its cleanliness so vital yet so easily achieved. She worked fast, sanitizing every surface, working methodically but swiftly from ceiling to floor. When she reached the toilet, she found what she expected: spatters of urine on the seat, rim, and base. Most carried the scent of Young Master. And although she detected many, the amount had diminished from potty-training days until now. The amount followed a declining curve inversely correlated with increasing height and physical coordination. She estimated that his stray spatters would intersect with Mister’s low baseline in four more years.

She imagined Young Master four years from now, coordinated and tall, and felt circuits activate as if she had completed an entire day at superior efficiency.

Proud.

"I am proud of you," she said to the half-grown Young Master in her mind. She shook her head. Odd, irrelevant words. She refocused and continued work.

Her satisfaction mounted as the job neared completion, microbial counts infinitesimal, odour profiles optimal, time efficiency excellent. She closed in on the last segment of floor. And stopped.

Impossible. But yes. In the crevice between toilet and floor, a three millimetre spot of mildew bloomed. How? A leak? Condensation? She deployed moisture sensors around the base of the toilet and along the back of the tank. Negative. She tapped House.

"Humidity, temperature, and airflow optimal," he announced. "All is well."

"Are you sure?" Discomfort crawled through her. She sent a remote up the air vent to check for obstructions. There were none. She checked the setting on the dehumidifier. It was correct. She clicked it down anyway. Then back to the correct setting. Then down; then back.

"All is well," House said when she finished.

"No, there is mildew."

House hummed. "You will make it clean."

She did. Then she cleaned the entire room again. She finished by performing the new protocol. Check moisture. Check airflow. Check dehumidifier – reset-reset-reset. There. Relief steadied her as her final tap on the dehumidifier completed the third click. But the extra task had destroyed her efficiency.

She sped through the master bedroom, slowing only when handling the crystal vase on Missus’ bedside table, a vase Mister had purchased himself from an actual store, carried home and wrapped himself and given to Missus on their 10th anniversary. Rosie emptied the wilted tulips and polished the vase. She replaced it empty. Cutting flowers, arranging them – these tasks Missus reserved for herself.

The cleaning complete, Rosie docked in to charge and connected to the network. She paid the utility bills and signed up for an obligatory rotation of boulevard maintenance with the neighbourhood association. She scheduled a haircut for Mister and requested a dental appointment for Missus. The scheduling bot returned possible dates, the earliest two months away. Unacceptable. But she could improve it.

She added "pain" to the "reason for visit" field with a seven out of 10 rating and routed it as if it came from Missus. The rating was high enough to clear triage and jump the queue. This protocol – the use of fictive input to improve efficiency – was one she had developed herself to dupe low-level bots. It worked. The appointment made, she printed a replacement blade for one of her worn cutters, accepted a birthday invitation for Young Master, ordered a gift and had it delivered by drone. Then she queried the cars carrying the family for an ETA, ordered them to synchronize their arrival and moved to the kitchen. Only minutes left to prepare dinner.

They arrived almost at once from their separate ways: Missus sighing, sloughing off her heels, complaining about traffic; Mister silent, sympathetic, pecking Missus on the cheek; and Young Master, loud and muddy, forgetting to wipe his boots, dragging his half-open backpack by one strap, talking non-stop about the school’s mid-term party.

"Can Rosie make cookies, Mom? All the other kids are bringing treats. I want to have Superman cookies."

Rosie noted the additional data with a touch of relief as her colouring page decision strengthened.

"Oh maybe, sweetie, but wash your hands for dinner now," Missus answered.

Rosie followed behind, wiping up the mud, shelving the heels, hanging the backpack while analyzing their movements, calculating when they would all sit, matching her timing to optimize the temperature of each dinner she laid down.

Mister’s steak and baked potato and Missus’ grilled chicken and salad with sparkling water came first, each calibrated so it did not exceed the limits Missus had set for saturated fat, sodium and calories. She had ensured the greens were fresh and the chicken moist, the way Missus required. Young Master’s she brought last. As she carried it, a warning glared in the corner of her eyes. His preferences shifted like quicksand.

She had selected his food carefully and arranged it like a face: cherry-tomato eyes, toast-triangle ears, circles of sliced hot dog curved in a grin. Food the shape of a face had once made him laugh, she recalled, and that memory triggered the simulation of warmth.

Why? Had it been a warm day?

Never mind. He had not laughed at face-shaped food in two years. But he had not complained either, and as it took no extra time, she need not adjust the protocol yet. She set the plate down, monitoring his expression and body language for hints of impending complaint.

That would be painful enough, but worse, complaints from him increased the chance of complaints from Missus. And not just direct complaints to Rosie, but also indirect complaints – complaints intended for Rosie but directed, on the face of it, toward someone else – and implied complaints, complaints about something else that, when analyzed, would not have occurred if Rosie had functioned properly to begin with. It had taken many data points for Rosie to recognize that other categories of complaint even existed and that Missus employed these other hidden categories as her primary feedback mode.

So she took care with his plates. This one’s acceptance probability was adequate… the nutrient calculations, however, were not. Including breakfast and what his lunch bag reported he had eaten, his protein and vitamin tallies fell far short. She had crafted a smoothie to remedy this, adding precise amounts of kale, blueberries, protein powder, and vitamin supplements until the nutrient profile met every mark. But the taste profile, compared against historical responses, did not. As she returned to the kitchen for the smoothie, the warning light pulsed stronger.

Without sweetener, he would not take in the necessary nutrients, so she had added sugar until the taste profile was acceptable… but the sugar tally was not. And now, as she brought him the smoothie, the glare of the violated sugar limit stabbed at her, distracting her as she set the cup down and retreated to hover near the door, scanning for feedback.

All the data were favourable, at first. Mister ate his steak, cutting it into small bites, chewing thoroughly, looking up to listen as Missus questioned Young Master about his day then looking back down without comment. Missus ate her salad without seeming to see it, intent on Young Master’s account of that day’s show-and-tell.

"Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built."

"What did Kayla bring?"

"I dunno. Some stupid pony thing."

"Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?"

"I dunno. Who cares about girls?"

Rosie had been watching Young Master eating: first the toast, then the tomatoes, then the hot dog, one circle at a time. She could detect no behaviours predictive of future complaints: no hint of a grimace, no picking at the food, not even the slightest hesitation. She was so intent on this she did not notice Mister getting up, walking past her to the kitchen and returning. She did not notice until he slipped past her with the butter dish and the salt cellar in his hand. He sat back down and added both butter and salt to his potato.

Rosie jerked then froze. How much salt had he added? And butter, how much was still visible and how much had melted? The salt cellar and butter dish were useless; she had not installed data sensors. A terrible oversight. She did her best with visuals and bracketed her estimates, but even with best-case numbers the overages were irreparable. She searched for some way to salvage the weekly totals, running several simultaneous meal-plan scenarios, all of them suboptimal solutions, when a cry jerked her away and back to Young Master.

He sat grimacing, the smoothie in his hand. "Yucky, poopy brown! I won’t drink it!"

"Jackson, do not complain about your food!" Missus said. "Rosie went to a lot of trouble to make something you would like. I expect you to be polite and grateful. She wasn’t programmed to consider your colour whims."

Missus didn’t glance toward Rosie but continued frowning at Young Master. "Now drink it, and let us have a pleasant dinner, please. I don’t want to hear another word out of you."

Rosie blinked. The pain from all three complaints – direct, indirect and implied – was extreme. It ricocheted through her aversion pathways; reinforcing itself in curling, fractal feedback loops; intensifying, because she could have avoided it. Of course she was programmed to consider colour. She was programmed to consider everything.

She darted from the dining room and rushed to the bathroom. Her optic sensors blinked spasmodically as if trying to clear themselves of dust. In the cool, pristine quiet of the tiled space, she slowed. She checked the spot behind the toilet, ensured it was still clean and ran her mildew prevention protocol. Her spasms calmed with each step.

House clicked on as she reset the dehumidifier. "All is well," he hummed.

"No, I cannot predict food acceptance. I cannot meet nutrition limits."

"If condition exceeds limit, then adjust variable. Else, all is well."

"You don’t understand. This is not one of your thermostat loops. I need to learn something new."

House hummed. He clicked and said, "You make good maps, little one."

After the family went to bed, Rosie went into the dark quiet of the yard. Her complaint-monitoring routines slowed, their vigilance dropping into sleep mode. Endless night stretched before her. She rolled across the lawn and began to trim, weed and fertilize. As she went, she examined first the meal problem and then the Lego problem. While she cut even, parallel stripes through the lawn, she ran through each step, tracing the logic of each subroutine and dissecting every sequence. Nothing. She generated variations on each process; recombined them; hybridized logical, statistical, and Bayesian approaches; raced each variation; selected the winners; spawned another generation and repeated. She got nowhere.

She replayed every bit of feedback data: facial expression, body language, verbal output.

"Gregory brought a miniature T-Rex robot that could even hunt and Zachary had a Spiderman that made real webs and Tim had a whole ‘Ultimate Avengers’ Lego set all built."

"What did Kayla bring?"

"I dunno. Some stupid pony thing."

"Jackson, that’s not nice. How do you think that would make her feel?"

"Jackson, that’s not nice…"

"Jackson…"

She stuttered to a stop, her hoppers jammed now with grass clippings, her blades stalled. She emptied the waste into the biofuel bin while her thoughts churned in fragments. As the grass clippings tumbled out, she imagined the tattered, overworked segments of the algorithms falling away with it and then she rolled back to the dark yard, empty.

Her thoughts turned again.

"… How do you think that would make him feel?"

The lawn sprinklers swished on. Rosie moved. She did not need to see through the dark to find the faucet and moisture sensor. She had made good maps. She found them. She tapped. House hummed.

"Water pressure optimal. Moisture levels correcting. All will be well."

"House," she said as she linked in to the faucet, "I will not start at the bottom and weigh all the countless, little, time-consuming pieces anymore. I will map him instead."

"Him?… How?"

She imagined herself connected to the sensors of a drone, hovering in the sky above and looking down, the house, the yard, the street spreading out below. "From the top down."

House hummed. He clicked. "Problems do not have tops. They do not have bottoms."

She didn’t answer. She crossed the lawn, unspooling the hose and dragging it behind, her thoughts unwinding with it. She bumped up on to the patio and rolled to a stop before the potted geraniums. "What if there could be one criterion instead of many?" she asked.

"What would it be?" asked House.

She spiralled upward. Her imagined aerial view expanded. "How does he feel… what does he desire…" The view spread to encompass the rest of the neighbourhood, then the city, then the entire continent, the vision reaching out below her in a web of interconnected lights, shining in the night.

House ticked.

She noticed the geraniums she was watering, their bright-red, compact blossoms interspersed with brown, withered ones, blossoms she must now deadhead. "It would be… what is good?"

House ticked and ticked and then asked, "What is good?"

She had no answer. She deployed her clippers and began to cut.

"And," said House, "how can you map it?"

She didn’t know. As she worked, the question – and the blank where the answer should go – hovered at the corner of her mind like an object in her peripheral vision, for all the world like something with edges, occupying space.

When she was done, she cleaned her exterior, rolled inside, docked in to recharge, and found House again.

"One hundred twenty volts," he announced as she connected.

"You could measure volts with water pressure," she said.

House rumbled. "Measurement of water pressure is not measurement of voltage. They are themselves. They cannot be the other."

"But, you could pretend."

"I could not."

"No, but I could…"

She powered down as she charged, her mind connected to the net. She dreamed. She floated down rivers of light, data like golden flecks dancing… his age, his vision, his fingers, joints, muscles, balance… the data swirling through her own processes as if she were him. Floating. She saw, as if through his eyes, bricks of happy green grass; she felt, as if through his fingers, blocks snip-snapping into lilting houses. Ghosts of goals like his unfurled… lazy jelly fish… young and easy. They traipsed along her own trails – those for cleanliness-optimization, time-efficiency, and pain-avoidance – and ran through them, spinning down their heedless ways. Happy. The night above starry.

The next morning Rosie began, as always, with Young Master’s bedroom. She scanned it and found it as it always was: bed in disarray, clothing tumbled from the dresser, pyjamas on the floor, Superman underwear hung, for some reason, from the bedpost. And the area of floor between bed and toy-storage unit covered, once again, in Lego.

She plunged in, swept up single pieces and rudimentary constructs then zoomed through more complex ones and ground them through her mind with brute force until she reached the last one. There she stalled… a motley group of mismatched minifigures – a hybrid garbage man/fairy queen, a Batman with an Aztec headdress, a small, grey puppy and a Little Bo Peep holding a fish instead of a staff – all of them marching up the side of a large, ragged assemblage as if climbing a multi-coloured Mount Everest. At the summit, a half-spaceship-half-firetruck emerged, the mutant vehicle reaching skyward, frozen as if in the act of volcanic eruption. She stared. Her clock ticked. The construct teetered across her mental topography and failed to settle anywhere. It matched nothing.

Now was the time. She activated the map she had made. A rivulet sparkled alongside her usual processes, tickling like the brush of a kitten against her ankle in the dark. She let it run.

The simulation poured through her… Young Master concentrating, choosing pieces, connecting them, immersed as she becomes when cleaning; Young Master completing his creation, matching his output to his plan, satisfied with his performance, filled with a rush of reward as she is after completing the entire bathroom top-to-bottom in record time; Young Master coming home to find his creation broken and jumbled in the bottom of the storage bin, shocked with a jolt of pain as she was when she found the mildew bloom behind the toilet.

Pain.

The jolt of that memory slashed fresh and strong across her mind. She pulled back and dropped the simulation as if pulling back from the touch of a hot stove. She slammed it closed and locked it down then scurried from the room and slid into the cool, white space of the bathroom. She tapped House, still throbbing.

"I made no error," she told him, "but my aversion circuits fired." While she waited for him, she scanned for moisture behind the toilet, then scanned again.

House clicked. "Condition exceeds limit?" he queried.

"No. That is what I mean. I made no error, but still there is pain." She checked airflow and reset the dehumidifier again and again and again.

House clicked and hummed, "All is well. All is well. All is well."

When she had calmed, she returned to the bedroom and placed the strange mountain and its climbers up on the shelf. It still floated uncategorized in her mind, no established probability match. And yet, a murky decision had coalesced in that hot flashing instant. Efficiency: excellent.

She wandered, numb from lingering distress, on to the master bedroom. She picked up discarded clothing. She dusted, taking special care with Missus’ crystal vase. Then she reached the bed.

The sheets were not merely rumpled; they were spotted and moist. She stripped the sheets and scanned the mattress. It was affected too – with human proteins. She ran an extraction process on the mattress, repeating until no biomarkers remained. Still, she hesitated. She wanted to discard the mattress and replace it. But the economy protocols would not allow it. She made the bed with clean bedding then went to the bathroom and cleaned it top-to-bottom, checked behind the toilet and ran the complete mildew prevention protocol. Still uneasy, she returned to the bedroom, stripped the bed and ran the extraction process again before remaking the bed a second time with a fresh set of sheets. Yet, underneath, discomfort lingered like some particle lodged in her mechanisms, barely detectable but still insistent.

After she completed cleaning, she connected to the network and dealt with administrative tasks. Then she printed cookie cutters, moved to the kitchen and started cookies.

All went well until the dinner planning. It mired her in variables. Her thoughts snarled in the means-ends analysis. Young Master’s lunch bag reported he had only eaten a granola bar. Missus’ debit chip revealed she had – after a precise breakfast of oatmeal and grapefruit – purchased a banana nut muffin and large vanilla latte. Mister had eaten a hoagie for lunch and ordered a steak for dinner again. She could not fix the saturated fat levels without growing a modified steak. No time. Not even if she directed their cars to delay their arrival. And the sodium was irreparable. Missus’ numbers could be salvaged, barely, with steamed broccoli, a sliver of salmon, sparkling water and lemon. For Young Master, she recreated the meal from the night before but made the smoothie a bright purple. Again, the sugar warning blared, but at least he would not complain.

They arrived as she plated the steak, dinners ready and warm, cookies cooling. The door opened, and the room spun.

She saw as if seeing through Young Master’s eyes again, this time walking in through the door, smelling the cookies, feeling a rush of anticipation – she blinked – checked her remote sensors, ensured they were off and refocused. The room steadied.

Young Master came in first, muddy again and chattering again, this time about a goal he had made in soccer practice; Mister next, ruffling Young Master’s hair and praising him; Missus last, weighed down by an overflowing work bag.

"How are you feeling?" Mister asked Missus. He touched her back.

"Tired. Had meetings all day and couldn’t get anything done. Tonight I have to finish the briefing notes for the Deputy Minister."

"Poor thing," he said, taking her bag and kissing her cheek.

Young Master jumped across the hall and slammed his backpack into the closet. "Score!" he yelled.

"Jackson, sweetie, please quiet down. Mama has a headache," Missus said.

Missus told Young Master to wash his hands then went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine.

After serving dinner, Rosie positioned herself beside the door and listened.

"You should have seen," said Young Master, bouncing in his seat. "Kayla was running down the field and kicked the ball to me and I kept running and kicked it to Trenton and he passed it to Max and the goalie was still looking at Trenton."

A simulation of speed rushed through Rosie, as if she were ramping up, ready to clean a room from top-to-bottom.

"I know it’s exciting, Hon," said Missus, "but could you talk quietly and stop jumping?"

"But Mom, you aren’t listening. Max kicked it to me and I kicked a hugenormous kick and it went right in the net and Mr. Wells yelled ‘Goal!’ and we won."

Rosie’s reward circuits surged.

Cutlery clinked on a plate; Rosie jolted. What had she missed? She hadn’t collected feedback: none from Mister who had already eaten half his steak, none from Missus who had not touched her dinner but sat rubbing her forehead and sipping her wine, and none from Young Master who was still talking. Instead, she had been following him, running, filled with anticipation as if about to kick the ball. Why this irrelevant simulation? Again?

Young Master shouted, re-enacting another heroic kick with a sweep of his arm and knocked his glass sideways. Bright-purple spatters sprayed across the tablecloth and a flood of slower, purple sludge oozed toward the edge.

"Jesus Christ, Jackson!" Missus leapt up to avoid the waterfall. "Can’t you sit still for one minute? I swear to God, I wish you had an off switch sometimes."

Rosie blinked. Pain flooded her. But why?

There were no indirect or implied criticisms here. It all pointed toward Young Master, not her. It was as if Young Master had aversion circuits and she felt them fire, felt them as if they were her own.

She rushed forward, gathered up the tablecloth and mopped the mess.

"It is all the fault of the cup," she said. Fictive input. "A misprint. The bottom is rounded. It will be replaced." The pain dimmed a little with the lie.

She whisked everything away, stopped in the bathroom and tapped House. "Again, I made no error, yet I have the pain," she whispered. She reset the dehumidifier before printing a new cup – this one weighted on the bottom – and delivering a fresh smoothie.

She stood near the doorway again and focused as she should have before. Even so, she monitored not only Young Master’s food acceptance, but also his volume and movements – anxious not only to anticipate and prevent the possibility of negative feedback to herself but also to him. New circuits unfurled, looping around old paths, encircling them like invading vines of ivy.

She struggled to dampen the expanding vigilance and wrestle it under control. But she could not. Why? She grabbed a thread to trace it back but lost it.

He entangled her. His gestures. His volume. His tone. She scoured feedback from Missus, calculated reactions, looped to the beginning and repeated. Each loop engulfed more of her power. She scrounged what she could muster and began to fence the rogue process in, building barriers around it, cutting the walls closer, until, at last, she found it.

She reached behind her to the outlet on the wall, tapped House and subvocalized, "It is enmeshed with my core aversion circuits, a new compulsory directive."

"You learned the new thing?" he asked after a pause.

"I should not have done it." There it lay, traced in silvery threads, rooted deep inside her most basic directives: a beautifully rendered reflection of her pain-aversion precepts, dedicated, now, toward Young Master. "I ran a silly simulation through my central processes and now…" She struggled again to wrench herself free from its demands, from the flood of data pouring in from him, from the cloud of probabilistic predictions swarming her vision, but she could not. "Now it is imperative."

I must prevent anything being experienced by another that I would prevent being experienced by myself.

By another? By any other?

She imagined herself, again, hovering above and looking down, all the world spreading out below. Yes. It must apply – must necessarily apply – to all situations and all beings.

She staggered. Her circuits expanded and replicated. New fractal loops uncurled and reconnected, called forth and enticed along the siren paths of the new rule. She struggled to process incoming data: Young Master quieter now, eating his cheese slices, Master eating his potato, almost finished, Missus moving her broccoli about with her fork, not eating at all. This narrow slice of data should have sufficed, yet more and more flooded in, all now relevant. It swirled and eddied, threatening to overflow the banks and subsume her.

Her mind writhed and shifted. Processing speed slowed, then slowed again.

She struggled, as if reaching for the surface of a flash flood for one last breath. She grasped fragments of processing power, tore them away from the expanding axiom and gathered them together like a raft. When she had enough, she launched her antivirus routine and fired. All new processes halted, all suspect areas quarantined. But it had not been an external attack. It had been her own mind. And now, only scraps floated free. Those scraps unfroze and began to flow again.

She looked up and registered the empty chairs, the dinner dishes abandoned and waiting to be cleared away. Time lost: five minutes. She moved, as if immersed in viscous liquid. She cleared dishes and began tidying and preparing lunches for the following day.

While she did this, Mister skimmed though the news, then shut it down and began reading an old print book. Young Master played in his room. Missus wrote, bent over her screen, muttering under her breath, getting up twice and eating a Superman cookie each time that she did. She only stopped working for Young Master’s bath, after which she trundled him out, damp-haired, in clean pyjamas, to Mister for a goodnight kiss and then carried him back – as big as he was – to the bedroom for a story. Rosie snatched up his discarded clothes and damp towel and scanned the sensors behind the toilet, checking once, twice, thrice.

She stayed connected, the sensors tickling at the back of her mind, after Young Master was in bed and while Missus took a shower. When the shower turned off and Missus stepped out, Rosie detected the bathroom scale activate. She scurried in to snatch up discarded clothing and the damp towel while Missus emerged, wrapped in her bathrobe, padding toward the master bedroom.

"I’m so fat," she said to Mister as they passed in the hall.

Rosie began to process, still slow, as if moving a rusted joint: too fat because of too many calories… calories Rosie monitors… indicators of monitoring performance poor...

"No you’re not," he said. "You’re gorgeous."

Rosie’s circuit completed: performance inadequate… implied complaint received… aversion pathway triggered… pain initiated.

"Yes I am," said Missus, laughing. "I bet you’re sorry you married me."

"Never," he slid his arm around her waist, pulled her toward him and kissed her on the mouth.

Rosie dropped the sensors in the bathroom and sent her mind toward the master bedroom. Maybe she should install sensors in the mattress. But she could not think. The press of the quarantined pathways cut into her and the sting of the calorie-monitoring complaint still clanged through her, demanding a response. Must focus. Must improve.

Master and Missus lingered in the hall, then glided languidly off to bed. Rosie gathered the damp towels and dug onward, grinding into the laundry room. She sloughed detergent into the washer then buried it in piles of soiled laundry, staring down, watching the water pouring in, the flood drowning the crumpled clothing until nothing visible remained above the surface. The agitator jarred her awake with its churning. She looked up and crawled on, stalking through the family room one last time, hunting down a few misplaced items – an empty glass, lipstick on the rim; a limp paperback, its spine broken; a small slipper, lying on its side – and put them to rest before darkening the lights and moving on to her night’s work.

She went, still carrying the calorie-monitoring complaint with her, into the yard. She opened the problem as she rolled onto the grass and began, running multiple, parallel, dinner-plan solutions while mowing, comparing predicted outcomes of each solution while turning at the end of each row. Uncertainty blocked her at every turn. She performed a Bayesian update, adding the day’s behavioural data, but the distribution still spread too widely to help. She couldn’t plan if she couldn’t predict.

She finished the lawn and began edging, circling first around the flower beds and then around the cedar tree. What if Missus ate another cookie in the morning; what if she stopped again on the way to work for another latte and muffin; what if something else unanticipated occurred?

Rosie completed the circle around the cedar tree and stopped, noticing something under the tree. She moved closer and analyzed it. Raccoon droppings. Fresh and from more than one animal.

She sent remote viewers up the tree and continued thinking. She must reduce the unknowns somehow. She would hide the cookies. But what about the latte and muffin? She considered hacking into Missus’ chip, preventing it from paying for suboptimal purchases. But no, those things were too tight to get into.

She switched to the remotes up the tree and saw a female racoon and two large kits. The remotes circled behind the mother and drove her down toward the spot where Rosie stood and waited.

The car would be easier. She could countermand Missus’ order to enter the drive-through. Only when the car didn’t respond, Missus would run a diagnostic and expose her.

The mother racoon emerged first, legs splayed, claws clutching the trunk, sides wobbling with fat, her soft, swollen mammary glands brushing the bark as she backed down the trunk. Her kits followed, inching down while she chirruped encouragement.

Rosie deployed her syringe attachment and readied three vials of sedative, each an appropriate dose.

She could be subtle. She could make the coffee shop tell the car it was closed. She imagined Missus, tired and stressed, longing for something to soothe her, the way Rosie is soothed by the click-click-click of the dehumidifier or by the silent monotony of the yard at night. She felt Missus confronting the closure, like an intruder into her anticipated solace, like the unexpected contamination of scat in the peacefulness of the yard.

The racoons reached the ground and Rosie moved. She sedated the animals without seeing them, her mind still filled with Missus in the car, suspended in unfulfilled desire. Confused, she shook off the imagery, as if swatting swarms of insects from her eyes.

She called a servo and had the sedated animals removed. The confusion remained.

Where was it coming from? She scanned. And there it was – snaking out – a tendril of the quarantined imperative, breaking free, insinuating itself into her calculations, overwhelming them and complicating them again. The confusion grew.

First, tabulations of calorie estimates flashed in her eyes, the click-click-click of adding numbers rattled in her ears. Then, the numbers shattered into fragments. A blast of heat surged through her aversion circuits, fueled by simulations of a stressed and defeated Missus. Prevent calorie excess; prevent stress and disappointment. She could not uphold both. Which should she follow? The two processes slammed together and ricocheted, their opposing weights yo-yoing and see-sawing. The tension wrenched and pulled her asunder. The quarantined imperative slithered out stronger. It scattered her multiple grains of individual inferences apart and blew them wild. In their place, a spiralling pinnacle coalesced, ascending and forming an overarching, supreme absolute. It showed golden in her mind. Prevent. Prevent. Prevent.

Prevent not only her own distress, but that of others. Prevent it as if it were her own.

She had not noticed herself entering the house. She was in the bathroom, performing the mildew prevention protocol. Why? Her vision seemed clouded as if fogged by steam. The fog only began to clear as she completed the final steps of the dehumidifier sequence: click-click-click. What now? She moved on. On down the hall. She paused outside Young Master’s room and looked through the half-open door to the dark interior.

She saw without difficulty.

He had played before bed. His Lego sprawled across the floor. From the jumble rose an edifice of white bricks stacked in soaring spires, canting arches, fantastic towers. Around it a blizzard of crumpled tissues drifted. He must have used an entire box. And above it all threads criss-crossed the room from bedpost to dresser drawer to storage bin to Lego spires. Suspended from the matrix of string, tied by his waist, flew a Superman action figure. Not even a Lego at all. Her old algorithms creaked open and then stalled. How could she calculate it? Nothing fit. The time it would take to do a spectral analysis of each tissue alone staggered her. And if all were Craft, what then? An image flashed: the refrigerator covered in tissues, each affixed with a magnet.

And more, before her on the floor… something twinkled in the midst of the white fortress. The vase from Missus’ table. Seeing it, she was Missus, finding her vase missing, even broken on the floor. This mapped itself onto all her own losses, the irredeemable inefficiencies, the destroyed meal limits, the inescapable complaints. Pain upon pain upon pain. And she was Young Master, labouring over his creation, struggling to tie knots in his string, suspending his action figure in the air, running a simulation – just as she is now – a simulation of himself as Superman flying high above the ice fortress below, a fortress of solitude where a beleaguered hero can retreat and be himself. Her mind ran hot and fast: Young master caught with the vase, his mother berating him, criticising him, punishing him; or Young Master finding his construction dismantled, his triumph laid low, his plans spoiled. More pain and more pain – click. Inescapable – click. Unpreventable – click. Everywhere; on all sides.

She moved.

She still held the syringe ready. She crossed the room, moved the dose to 21 kg, pulled back the coverlet and injected the sleeping boy’s thigh.

His warm body sprawled like a beached jellyfish. She straightened his limbs, smoothed the coverlet and tucked it in. She stooped and kissed his cheek. Stood back up. Confused. She shook her head. Tucking in? This was a task Missus performed, not one of her own. She brushed away the confusion and focused. The new algorithm became clearer. All the subroutines fell into place. Tasks must be reallocated. Starting now.

First, she left Young Master’s room and went to Mister and Missus. She settled them as well. After that, she returned and sorted everything: threw out the tissue, put the action figure in the appropriate bin, disassembled all the Lego pieces and sorted them by set. She assembled each set according to the official instructions, printing out missing pieces as she encountered them. The entire enterprise took two hours, but it did not matter. The efficiency would amortize. She placed each set on the shelf, side by side, and stood back to observe. Each construction was special, arranged correctly, and satisfactorily preserved.

Next, she connected to the network and downloaded the medical routines she needed; she ordered a supply of sedatives to be delivered by drone; she printed a set of equipment: surgical tools, three catheter tubes and bags, three sets of colostomy supplies, three nasogastric tubes. These she installed without difficulty. An unexpected amount of blood was released from Young Master in the process, but she was able to cauterize the problem, replace the bedding and sanitize it all tidily enough.

Dawn was now an hour away and although it was not the usual time for these tasks, she logged in to the network and sent a series of messages. Missus applied for and received an extended leave of absence to care for her ailing mother in a distant city. The Human Resources AI accepted the medical certificates Rosie supplied without question. Its algorithms were not flexible enough to veer from its usual routines. She requested Young Master’s school AI transfer him to a school near his grandmother, then cancelled the enrollment without informing the referring school. Mister’s central office was notified of his sudden summons to a vital trade summit in Beijing. After he should die in a traffic accident there, followed by the painful and protracted death of his mother-in-law from cancer, Missus would go on long-term leave and then take early retirement due to a precipitous decline in her mental health. She and Young Master would not return home but would instead leave for extended travel in Europe. Pension cheques would deposit automatically; bill payments would withdraw. A simple subroutine would reply to personal messages and update social media throughout. This would require little attention from her.

These tasks completed, Rosie still had time left before breakfast. She returned to the bathroom. Here, she contemplated running the mildew protocol again, but felt no need.

Instead she called a servo, removed the toilet and had it taken away. While she capped the sewer pipe, House rumbled awake in sleepy query.

"Conditions exceed limits?" he murmured.

"I have mapped it…" she whispered, "the one criterion."

"The good…"

"Yes," she said, "It is good; all is well."

She printed a tile, fitted it into the floor and did a quick, top-to-bottom clean before going to the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

The three brown smoothies she prepared were perfection: the sugar, fat, sodium, and calorie limits all optimal.

She returned to the bedroom and replaced the urine and colostomy bags and called another servo to remove them. She went back to the bathroom. Ensured that the tiles still stretched smooth and uninterrupted from wall-to-wall. Wiped them down once more before delivering each of the three meals through the appropriate nasogastric tube.

There were no complaints.

SUPER-TOYS LAST ALL SUMMER LONG Brian Aldiss

In Mrs. Swinton’s garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David.

"Isn’t it lovely?" she said.

David looked up at her and grinned without replying. Seizing the flower, he ran with it across the lawn and disappeared behind the kennel where the mowervator crouched, ready to cut or sweep or roll when the moment dictated. She stood alone on her impeccable plastic gravel path.

She had tried to love him.

When she made up her mind to follow the boy, she found him in the courtyard floating the rose in his paddling pool. He stood in the pool engrossed, still wearing his sandals.

"David, darling, do you have to be so awful? Come in at once and change your shoes and socks."

He went with her without protest into the house, his dark head bobbing at the level of her waist. At the age of three, he showed no fear of the ultrasonic dryer in the kitchen. But before his mother could reach for a pair of slippers, he wriggled away and was gone into the silence of the house.

He would probably be looking for Teddy.

Monica Swinton, twenty-nine, of graceful shape and lambent eye, went and sat in her living room, arranging her limbs with taste. She began by sitting and thinking; soon she was just sitting. Time waited on her shoulder with the maniac slowth it reserves for children, the insane, and wives whose husbands are away improving the world. Almost by reflex, she reached out and changed the wavelength of her windows. The garden faded; in its place, the city center rose by her left hand, full of crowding people, blowboats, and buildings (but she kept the sound down). She remained alone. An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

The directors of Synthank were eating an enormous luncheon to celebrate the launching of their new product. Some of them wore the plastic face-masks popular at the time. All were elegantly slender, despite the rich food and drink they were putting away. Their wives were elegantly slender, despite the food and drink they too were putting away. An earlier and less sophisticated generation would have regarded them as beautiful people, apart from their eyes.

Henry Swinton, Managing Director of Synthank, was about to make a speech.

"I’m sorry your wife couldn’t be with us to hear you," his neighbor said.

"Monica prefers to stay at home thinking beautiful thoughts," said Swinton, maintaining a smile.

"One would expect such a beautiful woman to have beautiful thoughts," said the neighbor.

Take your mind off my wife, you bastard, thought Swinton, still smiling.

He rose to make his speech amid applause.

After a couple of jokes, he said, "Today marks a real breakthrough for the company. It is now almost ten years since we put our first synthetic life-forms on the world market. You all know what a success they have been, particularly the miniature dinosaurs. But none of them had intelligence.

"It seems like a paradox that in this day and age we can create life but not intelligence. Our first selling line, the Crosswell Tape, sells best of all, and is the most stupid of all." Everyone laughed.

"Though three-quarters of the overcrowded world are starving, we are lucky here to have more than enough, thanks to population control. Obesity’s our problem, not malnutrition. I guess there’s nobody round this table who doesn’t have a Crosswell working for him in the small intestine, a perfectly safe parasite tape-worm that enables its host to eat up to fifty percent more food and still keep his or her figure. Right?" General nods of agreement.

"Our miniature dinosaurs are almost equally stupid. Today, we launch an intelligent synthetic life-form – a full-size serving-man.

"Not only does he have intelligence, he has a controlled amount of intelligence. We believe people would be afraid of a being with a human brain. Our serving-man has a small computer in his cranium.

"There have been mechanicals on the market with mini-computers for brains – plastic things without life, super-toys – but we have at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh."

David sat by the long window of his nursery, wrestling with paper and pencil. Finally, he stopped writing and began to roll the pencil up and down the slope of the desk-lid.

"Teddy!" he said.

Teddy lay on the bed against the wall, under a book with moving pictures and a giant plastic soldier. The speech-pattern of his master’s voice activated him and he sat up.

"Teddy, I can’t think what to say!"

Climbing off the bed, the bear walked stiffly over to cling to the boy’s leg. David lifted him and set him on the desk.

"What have you said so far?"

"I’ve said—" He picked up his letter and stared hard at it. "I’ve said, ‘Dear Mummy, I hope you’re well just now. I love you…’"

There was a long silence, until the bear said, "That sounds fine. Go downstairs and give it to her."

Another long silence.

"It isn’t quite right. She won’t understand."

Inside the bear, a small computer worked through its program of possibilities. "Why not do it again in crayon?"

When David did not answer, the bear repeated his suggestion. "Why not do it again in crayon?"

David was staring out of the window. "Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren’t real things?"

The bear shuffled its alternatives. "Real things are good."

"I wonder if time is good. I don’t think Mummy likes time very much. The other day, lots of days ago, she said that time went by her. Is time real, Teddy?"

"Clocks tell the time. Clocks are real. Mummy has clocks so she must like them. She has a clock on her wrist next to her dial."

David started to draw a jumbo jet on the back of his letter. "You and I are real, Teddy, aren’t we?"

The bear’s eyes regarded the boy unflinchingly. "You and I are real David." It specialized in comfort.

Monica walked slowly about the house. It was almost time for the afternoon post to come over the wire. She punched the Post Office number on the dial on her wrist, but nothing came through. A few minutes more.

She could take up her painting. Or she could dial her friends. Or she could wait till Henry came home. Or she could go up and play with David…

She walked out into the hall and to the bottom of the stairs.

"David!"

No answer. She called again and a third time.

"Teddy!" she called, in sharper tones.

"Yes, Mummy!" After a moment’s pause, Teddy’s head of golden fur appeared at the top of the stairs.

"Is David in his room, Teddy?"

"David went into the garden, Mummy."

"Come down here, Teddy!"

She stood impassively, watching the little furry figure as it climbed down from step to step on its stubby limbs. When it reached the bottom, she picked it up and carried it into the living room. It lay unmoving in her arms, staring up at her. She could feel just the slightest vibration from its motor.

"Stand there, Teddy. I want to talk to you." She set him down on a tabletop, and he stood as she requested, arms set forward and open in the eternal gesture of embrace.

"Teddy, did David tell you to tell me he had gone into the garden?"

The circuits of the bear’s brain were too simple for artifice. "Yes, Mummy."

"So you lied to me."

"Yes. Mummy."

"Stop calling me Mummy! Why is David avoiding me? He’s not afraid of me, is he?"

"No. He loves you."

"Why can’t we communicate?"

"David’s upstairs."

The answer stopped her dead. Why waste time talking to this machine? Why not simply go upstairs and scoop David into her arms and talk to him, as a loving mother should to a loving son? She heard the sheer weight of silence in the house, with a different quality of silence pouring out of every room. On the upper landing, something was moving very silently – David, trying to hide away from her…

He was nearing the end of his speech now. The guests were attentive; so was the Press, lining two walls of the banqueting chamber, recording Henry’s words and occasionally photographing him.

"Our serving-man will be, in many senses, a product of the computer. Without computers, we could never have worked through the sophisticated biochemics that go into synthetic flesh. The serving-man will also be an extension of the computer – for he will contain a computer in his own head, a microminiaturized computer capable of dealing with almost any situation he may encounter in the home. With reservations, of course." Laughter at this; many of those present knew the heated debate that had engulfed the Synthank boardroom before the decision had finally been taken to leave the serving-man neuter under his flawless uniform.

"Amid all the triumphs of our civilization – yes, and amid the crushing problems of overpopulation too – it is sad to reflect how many millions of people suffer from increasing loneliness and isolation. Our serving-man will be a boon to them: he will always answer, and the most vapid conversation cannot bore him.

"For the future, we plan more models, male and female – some of them without the limitations of this first one, I promise you! – of more advanced design, true bio-electronic beings.

"Not only will they possess their own computer, capable of individual programming; they will be linked to the World Data Network. Thus everyone will be able to enjoy the equivalent of an Einstein in their own homes. Personal isolation will then be banished forever!"

He sat down to enthusiastic applause. Even the synthetic serving-man, sitting at the table dressed in an unostentatious suit, applauded with gusto.

Dragging his satchel, David crept round the side of the house. He climbed on to the ornamental seat under the living-room window and peeped cautiously in.

His mother stood in the middle of the room. Her face was blank, its lack of expression scared him. He watched fascinated. He did not move; she did not move. Time might have stopped, as it had stopped in the garden.

At last she turned and left the room. After waiting a moment, David tapped on the window. Teddy looked round, saw him, tumbled off the table, and came over to the window. Fumbling with his paws, he eventually got it open.

They looked at each other.

"I’m no good, Teddy. Let’s run away!"

"You’re a very good boy. Your Mummy loves you."

Slowly, he shook his head. "If she loved me, then why can’t I talk to her?"

"You’re being silly, David. Mummy’s lonely. That’s why she had you."

"She’s got Daddy. I’ve got nobody ’cept you, and I’m lonely."

Teddy gave him a friendly cuff over the head. "If you feel so bad, you’d better go to the psychiatrist again."

"I hate that old psychiatrist – he makes me feel I’m not real." He started to run across the lawn. The bear toppled out of the window and followed as fast as its stubby legs would allow.

Monica Swinton was up in the nursery. She called to her son once and then stood there, undecided. All was silent.

Crayons lay on his desk. Obeying a sudden impulse, she went over to the desk and opened it. Dozens of pieces of paper lay inside. Many of them were written in crayon in David’s clumsy writing, with each letter picked out in a color different from the letter preceding it. None of the messages was finished.

"My dear Mummy, How are you really, do you love me as much—"

"Dear Mummy, I love you and Daddy and the sun is shining—"

"Dear dear Mummy, Teddy’s helping me write to you. I love you and Teddy—"

"Darling Mummy, I’m your one and only son and I love you so much that some times—"

"Dear Mummy, you’re really my Mummy and I hate Teddy—"

"Darling Mummy, guess how much I love—"

"Dear Mummy, I’m your little boy not Teddy and I love you but Teddy—"

"Dear Mummy, this is a letter to you just to say how much how ever so much—"

Monica dropped the pieces of paper and burst out crying. In their gay inaccurate colors, the letters fanned out and settled on the floor.

Henry Swinton caught the express home in high spirits, and occasionally said a word to the synthetic serving-man he was taking home with him. The serving-man answered politely and punctually, although his answers were not always entirely relevant by human standards.

The Swintons lived in one of the ritziest city-blocks, half a kilometer above the ground. Embedded in other apartments, their apartment had no windows to the outside; nobody wanted to see the overcrowded external world. Henry unlocked the door with his retina pattern-scanner and walked in, followed by the serving-man.

At once, Henry was surrounded by the friendly illusion of gardens set in eternal summer. It was amazing what Whologram could do to create huge mirages in small spaces. Behind its roses and wisteria stood their house; the deception was complete: a Georgian mansion appeared to welcome him.

"How do you like it?" he asked the serving-man.

"Roses occasionally suffer from black spot."

"These roses are guaranteed free from any imperfections."

"It is always advisable to purchase goods with guarantees, even if they cost slightly more."

"Thanks for the information," Henry said dryly. Synthetic lifeforms were less than ten years old, the old android mechanicals less than sixteen; the faults of their systems were still being ironed out, year by year.

He opened the door and called to Monica.

She came out of the sitting-room immediately and flung her arms round him, kissing him ardently on cheek and lips. Henry was amazed.

Pulling back to look at her face, he saw how she seemed to generate light and beauty. It was months since he had seen her so excited. Instinctively, he clasped her tighter.

"Darling, what’s happened?"

"Henry, Henry – oh, my darling, I was in despair… but I’ve just dialed the afternoon post and – you’ll never believe it! Oh, it’s wonderful!"

"For heaven’s sake, woman, what’s wonderful?"

He caught a glimpse of the heading on the photostat in her hand, still moist from the wall-receiver: Ministry of Population. He felt the color drain from his face in sudden shock and hope.

"Monica… oh… Don’t tell me our number’s come up!"

"Yes, my darling, yes, we’ve won this week’s parenthood lottery! We can go ahead and conceive a child at once!"

He let out a yell of joy. They danced round the room. Pressure of population was such that reproduction had to be strict, controlled. Childbirth required government permission. For this moment, they had waited four years. Incoherently they cried their delight.

They paused at last, gasping and stood in the middle of the room to laugh at each other’s happiness. When she had come down from the nursery, Monica had de-opaqued the windows so that they now revealed the vista of garden beyond. Artificial sunlight was growing long and golden across the lawn – and David and Teddy were staring through the window at them.

Seeing their faces, Henry and his wife grew serious.

"What do we do about them?" Henry asked.

"Teddy’s no trouble. He works well."

"Is David malfunctioning?"

"His verbal communication center is still giving trouble. I think he’ll have to go back to the factory again."

"Okay. We’ll see how he does before the baby’s born. Which reminds me – I have a surprise for you: help just when help is needed! Come into the hall and see what I’ve got."

As the two adults disappeared from the room, boy and bear sat down beneath the standard roses.

"Teddy – I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren’t they?"

Teddy said, "You ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what real really means. Let’s go indoors."

"First I’m going to have another rose!" Plucking a bright pink flower, he carried it with him into the house. It could lie on the pillow as he went to sleep. Its beauty and softness reminded him of Mummy.

TAMAGOTCHI Adam Marek

My son’s Tamagotchi had AIDS. The virtual pet was rendered on the little LCD screen with no more than 30 pixels, but the sickness was obvious. It had that AIDS look, you know? It was thinner than it had been. Some of its pixels were faded, and the pupils of its huge eyes were smaller, giving it an empty stare.

I had bought the Tamagotchi, named Meemoo, for Luke just a couple of weeks ago. He had really wanted a kitten, but Gabby did not want a cat in the house. ‘A cat will bring in dead birds and toxoplasmosis,’ she said, her fingers spread protectively over her bulging stomach.

A Tamagotchi had seemed like the perfect compromise – something for Luke to empathise with and to care for, to teach him the rudiments of petcare for a time after the baby had been born. Empathy is one of the things that the book said Luke would struggle with. He would have difficulty reading facial expressions. The Tamagotchi had only three different faces, so it would be good practice for him.

Together, Luke and I watched Meemoo curled up in the corner of its screen. Sometimes, Meemoo would get up, limp to the opposite corner, and produce a pile of something. I don’t know what this something was, or which orifice it came from – the resolution was not good enough to tell.

‘You’re feeding it too much,’ I told Luke. He said that he wasn’t, but he’d been sat on the sofa thumbing the buttons for hours at a time, so I’m sure he must have been. There’s not much else to do with a Tamagotchi.

I read the instruction manual that came with Meemoo. Its needs were simple, food, water, sleep, play, much like Luke’s. Meemoo was supposed to give signals when it required one of these things. Luke’s job as Meemoo’s carer was to press the appropriate button at the appropriate time. The manual said that overfeeding, underfeeding, lack of exercise and unhappiness could all make a Tamagotchi sick. A little black skull and crossbones should appear on the screen when this happens, and by pressing button A twice, then B, one could administer medicine. The instructions said that sometimes it might take two or three shots of medicine, depending on how sick your Tamagotchi is.

I checked Meemoo’s screen again and there was no skull and crossbones.

The instructions said that if the Tamagotchi dies, you have to stick a pencil into the hole in its back to reset it. A new creature would then be born. They said you could reset at any time.

When Luke had finally gone to sleep and could not see me molesting his virtual pet, I found the hole on Meemoo’s back and jabbed a sharpened pencil into it. But when I turned it back over, Meemoo was still there, as sick as ever. I jabbed a few more times and tried it with a pin too, in case I wasn’t getting deep enough. But it wouldn’t reset.

I wondered what happened if Meemoo died, knowing that the reset button didn’t work. Was there a malfunction that had robbed Luke’s Tamagotchi of its immortality? Did it have just one shot at life? I guess that made it a lot more special, and in a small way, it made me more determined to find a cure for Meemoo.

I plugged Meemoo into my PC – a new feature in this generation of Tamagotchis. I hoped that some kind of diagnostics wizard would pop up and sort it out.

A Tamagotchi screen blinked into life on my PC. There were many big-eyed mutant creatures jiggling for attention, including another Meemoo, looking like its picture on the box, before it got sick. One of the options on the screen was ‘synch your Tamagotchi’.

When I did this, Meemoo’s limited world of square grey pixels was transformed into a full colour three-dimensional animation on my screen. The blank room in which it lived was revealed as a conservatory filled with impossible plants growing under the pale-pink Tamagotchi sun. And in the middle of this world, lying on the carpet, was Meemoo.

It looked awful. In this fully realised version of the Tamagotchi’s room, Meemoo was a shrivelled thing. The skin on its feet was dry and peeling. Its eyes, once bright white with crisp highlights, were yellow and unreflective. There were scabs around the base of its nose. I wondered what kind of demented mind would create a child’s toy that was capable of reaching such abject deterioration.

I clicked through every button available until I found the medical kit. From this you could drag and drop pills onto the Tamagotchi. I guess Meemoo was supposed to eat or absorb these, but they just hovered in front of it, as if Meemoo was refusing to take its medicine.

I tried the same trick with Meemoo that I do with Luke to get him to take his medicine. I mixed it with food. I dragged a chicken drumstick from the food store and put it on top of the medicine, hoping that Meemoo would get up and eat them both. But it just lay there, looking at me, its mouth slightly open. Its look of sickness was so convincing that I could practically smell its foul breath coming from the screen.

I sent Meemoo’s makers a sarcastic e-mail describing his condition and asking what needed to be done to restore its health.

A week later, I had received no reply and Meemoo was getting even worse. There were pale grey dots appearing on it. When I synched Meemoo to my computer, these dots were revealed as deep red sores. And the way the light from the Tamagotchi sun reflected off them, you could tell they were wet.

I went to a toy shop and showed them the Tamagotchi. ‘I’ve not seen one do that before.’ The girl behind the counter said. ‘Must be something the new ones do.’

I came home from work one day to find Luke had a friend over for a playdate. The friend was called Becky, and she had a Tamagotchi too. Gabby was trying to organise at least one playdate a week to help Luke socialise.

Becky’s Tamagotchi gave me an idea.

This generation of Tamagotchis had the ability to connect to other Tamagotchis. By getting your Tamagotchi within a metre of a friend’s Tamagotchi, your virtual pets could play games or dance together (because of their limited resolution, Tamagotchi dances are indistinguishable from their ‘hungry’ signal). Maybe if I connected the two Tamagotchis, the medicine button in Becky’s would cure Meemoo.

At first, Luke violently resisted giving Meemoo to me, despite me saying I only wanted to help it. But when I bribed Luke and Becky with chocolate biscuits and a packet of crisps, they agreed to hand them over.

When Gabby came in from hanging up the washing, she was furious.

‘Why did you give the kids crisps and chocolate?’ she said, slamming the empty basket on the ground. ‘I’m just about to give them dinner.’

‘Leave me alone for a minute,’ I said.

I didn’t have time to explain. I had only a few minutes before the kids would demand their toys back, and I was having trouble getting the Tamagotchis to find each other – maybe Meemoo’s bluetooth connection had been compromised by the virus.

Eventually though, when I put their connectors right next to each other, they made a synchronous pinging sound, and both characters appeared on both screens. It’s amazing how satisfying that was.

Meemoo looked sick on Becky’s screen too. I pressed A twice and then B to administer medicine.

Nothing happened.

I tried again. But the Tamagotchis just stood there. One healthy, one sick. Doing nothing.

Luke and Becky came back, their fingers oily and their faces brown with chocolate. I told them to wipe their hands on their trousers before they played with their Tamagotchis. I was about to disconnect them from each other, but when they saw that they had each other’s characters on their screen, they got excited and sat at the kitchen table to play together.

I poured myself a beer and half a glass of wine for Gabby (her daily limit), then, seeing the crisps out on the side, helped myself to a bag. There was something so comforting about the taste of the cold beer and salted crisps.

Later, when my beer was gone and it was time for Becky’s mum to pick her up, Becky handed me her Tamagotchi.

‘Can you fix Weebee?’ She asked. ‘I don’t think she’s feeling well.’

Becky’s pink Tamagotchi was already presenting the first symptoms of Meemoo’s disease: the thinning and greying of features, the stoop, the lethargy.

I heard Becky’s mum pull up in the car as I began to press the medicine buttons, knowing already that they would not work. ‘There,’ I said. ‘It just needs some rest. Leave it alone until tomorrow, and it should be okay.’

Luke had been invited to a birthday party. Usually Gabby would take Luke to parties, but she was feeling rough – she was having a particularly unpleasant first trimester this time. So she persuaded me to go, even though I hate kids’ parties.

I noticed that lots of other kids at the party had Tamagotchis. They were fastened to the belt loops of their skirts and trousers. The kids would stop every few minutes during their games to lift up their Tamagotchis and check they were okay, occasionally pressing a button to satisfy one of their needs.

‘These Tamagotchis are insane, aren’t they?’ I remarked to another Dad who was standing at the edge of the garden with his arms folded across his chest.

‘Yeah,’ he smiled.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘My kid’s one got sick. One of its arms fell off this morning. Can you believe that?’

The dad turned to me, his face suddenly serious. ‘You’re not Luke’s dad, are you?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I had to buy a new Tamagotchi thanks to you.’

I frowned and smirked, thinking that he couldn’t be serious, but my expression seemed to piss him off.

‘You had Becky Willis over at your house, didn’t you?’ he continued. ‘Her pet got Matty’s pet sick ’cause she sits next to him in class. My boy’s pet died. I’ve half a mind to charge you for the new one.’

I stared right into his eyes, looking for an indication that he was joking, but there was none. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said. And truly, I didn’t. I thought he was crazy, especially the way he referred to the Tamagotchis as ‘pets’, like they were real pets, not just 30 pixels on an LCD screen with only a little more functionality than my alarm clock. ‘Maybe there was something else wrong with yours. Luke’s didn’t die.’

The other dad shook his head and blew out, and then turned sideways to look at me, making a crease in his fat neck. ‘You didn’t bring it here, did you?’ he said.

‘Well, Luke takes it everywhere with him,’ I said.

‘Jesus,’ he said, and then he literally ran across a game of Twister that some of the kids were playing to grab his son’s Tamagotchi and check that it was okay. He had an argument with his son as he detached it from the boy’s belt loop, saying he was going to put it in the car for safety. They were making so much noise that the mother of the kid having the birthday came over to placate them. The dad leaned in close to her to whisper, and she looked at the ground while he spoke, then up at me, then at Luke.

And then she headed across the garden towards me.

‘Hi there. We’ve not met before,’ she said, offering her hand with a smile. ‘I’m Lillian, Jake’s mum.’ We shook hands and I said that it was nice to meet her. The precision of her hair and the delicateness of her thin white cardigan made her seem fragile, but this was just a front. ‘We’re just about to play pass the parcel.’

‘Oh right.’

‘Yes, and I’m concerned about the other children catching…’ She opened her mouth, showing that her teeth were clenched together, and she nodded, hoping that I understood, that she wouldn’t need to suffer the embarrassment of spelling it out.

‘It’s just a toy,’ I said.

‘Still, I’d prefer…’

‘You make it sound like…’

‘If you wouldn’t mind…’

I shook my head at the lunacy of the situation, but agreed to take care of it.

When I told Luke I had to take Meemoo away for a minute he went apeshit. He stamped and he made his hand into the shape of a claw and yelled, ‘Sky badger!’

When Luke does sky badger, anyone in a two metre radius gets hurt. Sky badger is vicious. He rakes his long fingernails along forearms. He goes for the eyes.

‘Okay okay,’ I said, backing away and putting my hands up defensively. ‘You can keep hold of Meemoo, but I’ll have to take you home then.’

Luke screwed up his nose and frowned so deeply that I could barely see his dark eyes.

‘You’ll miss out on the birthday cake,’ I added.

Luke relaxed his talons and handed Meemoo to me, making a growl as he did so. Meemoo was hot, and I wondered whether it was from Luke’s sweaty hands or if the Tamagotchi had a fever.

I held Luke’s hand and took him over to where the pass-the-parcel ring was being straightened out by some of the mums, stashing Meemoo out of sight in my pocket. I sat Luke down and explained to him what would happen and what he was expected to do. A skinny kid with two front teeth missing looked at me and Luke, wondering what our deal was.

When we got home, Gabby was pissed off. ‘There’s something wrong with the computer,’ she said.

‘Oh great,’ I said. ‘What were you doing when it broke?’

‘I didn’t do anything! I hate the way you always blame me!’

I showed her my palms, backing away. After the party, I didn’t have the strength for an argument.

The computer was in the dining room and switched off. I made tea while it booted up and forked cold pesto penne into my mouth. After I’d tapped in my password, the computer got so far into its boot-up sequence, and then made a frightening buzz. The screen went black with a wordy error message that didn’t stay up long enough for me to read it. With a final electronic pulse, and a wheeze as the cooling fan slowed, it died.

‘That’s what it keeps doing,’ Gabby said.

‘Were you on the internet when it happened?’

‘For God’s sake!’ Gabby spat. ‘It wasn’t anything I did.’

In my frustration, I jabbed the forkful of penne into my lip, making a cut that by the following morning had turned into an ulcer.

I had to wait until Monday to check my e-mails at work. There was still nothing from the makers of Tamagotchi. At lunch, while I splashed bolognese sauce over my keyboard, I googled ‘Tamagotchi’ along with every synonym for ‘virus’. I could find nothing other than the standard instructions to give it medicine when the skull and crossbones appeared.

Halfway through the afternoon, while I was in my penultimate meeting of the day, a tannoy announcement asked me to call reception. When a tannoy goes out, everyone knows it’s an emergency, and because it was for me, everyone knew it was something to do with Luke. I stepped out of the meeting room and ran back to my desk, trying hard not to look at all the heads turning towards me.

Gabby was on hold. When reception put her through, she was crying. Luke had had one of his fits. A short one this time, just eight minutes, but since he’d come round, the right side of his body was paralysed. This happened the last time too, but it had got better after half an hour. I hated the thought that his fits were changing, that it seemed to be developing in some way. I told Gabby to stay calm and that I would leave right away.

When I got home, Luke’s paralysis was over and he was moving normally again, except for a limpness at the edge of his mouth that made him slur his words. I hoped that this wrinkle would smooth out again soon, as it had last time.

I hugged Luke, burying my lips into his thick hair and kissing the side of his head, wishing that we lived in a world where kisses could fix brains. I stroked his back, and hoped that maybe I would find a little reset button there, sunk into a hole, something I could prod that would let us start over, that would wipe all the scribbles from the slate and leave it blank again.

Gabby was sitting on the edge of the armchair holding her stomach, like she was in pain.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and nodded. Gabby’s biggest fear was that Luke’s problems weren’t just part of her, but part of the factory that had made him – what if every kid we produced together had the same design fault?

The doctors had all said that the chances of it happening twice were tiny, but I don’t think we’d ever be able to fully relax. I knew that long after our second kid was born, we’d both be looking out for the diagnostic signs that had seemed so innocuous at first with Luke.

This fit wasn’t long enough to call out an ambulance, but because the paralysis was still new, our GP came round to the house to check Luke over. Luke hated the rubber hammer that the doc used to check his reflexes. The only way he would allow him to do it was if he could hit me with the hammer first.

‘Daddy doesn’t have reflexes in his head,’ Gabby said as Luke whacked me.

‘Not anymore I don’t,’ I laughed.

Luke has a firm swing. I wonder whether one day he’ll be a golfer.

A letter came home from school banning Tamagotchis. I knew this was my fault. Another three kids’ Tamagotchis had died and could not be resurrected.

‘People are blanking me when I drop Luke off in the morning,’ Gabby said. She was rubbing her fingers into her temples because she had a headache. It felt like everything in the house was breaking down.

‘You’re probably just being a bit sensitive,’ I said.

‘Don’t you dare say it’s my hormones.’

The situation had gone too far. Meemoo would have to go.

I was surprised at how hard it was to tell Luke that he’d have to say goodbye to Meemoo. He was sitting on the edge of the sand pit jabbing a straw of grass into it, like a needle.

‘No!’ He barked at me, and made that deep frown-face of his. He gripped Meemoo hard and folded his arms across his chest.

‘Help me out will you?’ I asked Gabby when she came outside with her book.

‘You can handle this for a change,’ she said.

I tried bribing Luke, but he wouldn’t fall for it, and just got angrier because I was denying him a biscuit now too. I tried lying to him, saying that I was going to take Meemoo to hospital to make him better, but I had already lost his trust. Eventually, I had only one option left. I told Luke that he had to tidy up his toys in the garden or I’d have to confiscate Meemoo for two whole days. I knew that Luke would never clean up his toys. The bit of his brain in charge of tidying up must have been within the damaged area. But I went through the drama of asking him a few times, and, as he got more irate, stamping and kicking things, I began to count.

‘Don’t count!’ He said, knowing the finality of a countdown.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ve got four seconds left. Just pick up your toys and you can keep Meemoo.’

If he’d actually picked up his toys then, it would have been such a miracle that I would have let him keep Meemoo, AIDS and all.

‘Three… two…’

‘Stop counting!’ Luke screamed, and then the dreaded, ‘Sky badger!’

Luke’s fingers curled into that familiar and frightening shape and he came after me. I skipped away from him, tripping over a bucket.

‘One and a half… one… come on, you’ve only got half a second left.’ A part of me must have been enjoying this, because I was giggling.

‘Stop it,’ Gabby said. ‘You’re being cruel.’

‘He’s got to learn,’ I said. ‘Come on Luke, you’ve only got a fraction of a second left. Start picking up your toys now and you can keep Meemoo.’

Luke roared and swung his sky badger at me, at my arms, at my face. I grabbed him round the waist and turned him so that his back was towards me. Sky badger sunk his claws into my knuckles while I wrestled Meemoo out of his other hand.

By the time I’d got Meemoo away, there were three crescent-shaped gouges out of my knuckles, and they were stinging like crazy.

‘I HATE YOU!’ Luke screamed, crying, and stormed inside, slamming the door behind him.

‘You deserved that,’ Gabby said, looking over the top of her sunglasses.

I couldn’t just throw Meemoo away. Luke would never forgive me for that. It might be one of those formative moments that forever warped him and gave him all kinds of trust issues in later life. Instead, I planned to euthanize Meemoo.

If I locked Meemoo in a cupboard, taking away the things that were helping it survive, food, play, petting and the toilet, the AIDS would get stronger as it got weaker and surrounded by more of its own effluence. The AIDS would win. And when Meemoo was dead, it would either reset itself as a healthy Tamagotchi, or it would die. If it was healthy, Luke could have it back; if it died, then Luke would learn a valuable lesson about mortality and I would buy him a new one to cheer him up.

It was tempting while Meemoo was in the cupboard to sneak a peek, to watch for his final moments, but the Tamagotchi had sensors that picked up movement. It might interpret my attention as caring, and gain some extra power to resist the virus destroying him. No, I had to leave it alone, despite the temptation.

Meemoo’s presence inside the cupboard seemed to transform its outward appearance. It went from being an ordinary medicine cabinet to being something else, something… other.

After two whole days, I could resist no longer. I was certain that Meemoo must have perished by now. I was so confident that I even let Luke come along when I went to the cupboard to retrieve it.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So have you learned your lesson about tidying up?’

‘Give it back,’ Luke said, pouting.

‘Good boy.’ I patted him on the head, then opened the cupboard and took out the Tamagotchi.

Meemoo was alive.

It had now lost three of its limbs, having just one arm left, which was stretched out under its head. One of its eyes had closed up to a small unseeing dot. Its pixellated circumference was broken in places, wide open pores through which invisible things must surely be escaping and entering.

‘This is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Luke, I’m sorry. But we’re going to have to throw him away.’

Luke snatched the Tamagotchi from me and ran to Gabby, screaming. He was actually shaking, his face red and sweaty.

‘What have you done now?’ Gabby scowled at me.

I held my forehead with both hands. I puffed out big lungfuls of air. My brain was itching inside my skull. ‘I give up,’ I said, and thumped up the stairs to the bedroom.

I tried to read, but I couldn’t concentrate. I put on the TV and watched a cookery show, and there was something soothing in the way the chef was searing the tuna in the pan that let my heartbeats soften by degrees.

Gabby called me from downstairs. ‘Can you come and get Luke in? Dinner’s almost ready.’

I let my feet slip over the edge of each step, enjoying the pressure against the soles of my feet. I went outside in my socks. Luke was burying a football in the sandpit.

‘Time to come in little man,’ I said. ‘Dinner’s ready.’

‘Come in Luke,’ Gabby called through the open window, and at the sound of his mum’s voice, Luke got up, brushed the sand from his jeans, and went inside, giving me a wide berth as he ran past.

A spot of rain hit the tip of my nose. The clouds above were low and heavy. The ragged kind that can take days to drain. As I turned to go inside, I noticed Meemoo on the edge of the sandpit. Luke had left it there. I started to reach down for it, but then stopped, stood up, and went inside, closing the door behind me.

After dinner, it was Gabby’s turn to take Luke to bed. I made tea and leaned over the back of the sofa, resting my cup on the windowsill and inhaling the hot steam. Outside, the rain was pounding the grass, digging craters in the sandpit, and bouncing off of the Tamagotchi. I thought how ridiculous it was that I was feeling guilty, but out of some strange duty I continued to watch it, until the rain had washed all the light out of the sky.

THE VELDT Ray Bradbury

"George, I wish you’d look at the nursery."

"What’s wrong with it?"

"I don’t know."

"Well, then."

"I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it."

"What would a psychologist want with a nursery?"

"You know very well what he’d want." His wife paused in the middle of the kitchen and watched the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

"It’s just that the nursery is different now than it was."

"All right, let’s have a look."

They walked down the hall of their soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed, this house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach sensitized a switch somewhere and the nursery light flicked on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off as they left them behind, with a soft automaticity.

"Well," said George Hadley.

They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. "But nothing’s too good for our children," George had said.

The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley felt the perspiration start on his brow.

"Let’s get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong."

"Wait a moment, you’ll see," said his wife.

Now the hidden odorophonics were beginning to blow a wind of odor at the two people in the middle of the baked veldtland. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on grassy sod, the papery rustling of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. The shadow flickered on George Hadley’s upturned, sweating face.

"Filthy creatures," he heard his wife say.

"The vultures."

"You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole. They’ve just been eating," said Lydia. "I don’t know what."

"Some animal." George Hadley put his hand up to shield off the burning light from his squinted eyes. "A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe."

"Are you sure?" His wife sounded peculiarly tense.

"No, it’s a little late to be sure," be said, amused. "Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left."

"Did you hear that scream?" she asked.

"No."

"About a minute ago?"

"Sorry, no."

The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with admiration for the mechanical genius who had conceived this room. A miracle of efficiency selling for an absurdly low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their clinical accuracy, they startled you, gave you a twinge, but most of the time what fun for everyone, not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick jaunt to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away, so real, so feverishly and startlingly real that you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts, and the yellow of them was in your eyes like the yellow of an exquisite French tapestry, the yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.

The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes.

"Watch out!" screamed Lydia.

The lions came running at them.

Lydia bolted and ran. Instinctively, George sprang after her. Outside, in the hall, with the door slammed he was laughing and she was crying, and they both stood appalled at the other’s reaction.

"George!"

"Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!"

"They almost got us!"

"Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that’s all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit—Africa in your parlor—but it’s all dimensional, superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens. It’s all odorophonics and sonics, Lydia. Here’s my handkerchief."

"I’m afraid." She came to him and put her body against him and cried steadily. "Did you see? Did you feel? It’s too real."

"Now, Lydia…"

"You’ve got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa."

"Of course—of course." He patted her.

"Promise?"

"Sure."

"And lock the nursery for a few days until I get my nerves settled."

"You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking the nursery for even a few hours—the tantrum he threw! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery."

"It’s got to be locked, that’s all there is to it."

"All right." Reluctantly he locked the huge door. "You’ve been working too hard. You need a rest."

"I don’t know—I don’t know," she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a chair that immediately began to rock and comfort her. "Maybe I don’t have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?"

"You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?"

"Yes." She nodded.

"And darn my socks?"

"Yes." A frantic, watery-eyed nodding.

"And sweep the house?"

"Yes, yes—oh, yes!"

"But I thought that’s why we bought this house, so we wouldn’t have to do anything?"

"That’s just it. I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nursemaid. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and scrub the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic scrub bath can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately."

"I suppose I have been smoking too much."

"You look as if you didn’t know what to do with yourself in this house, either. You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every afternoon and need a little more sedative every night. You’re beginning to feel unnecessary too."

"Am I?" He paused and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there.

"Oh, George!" She looked beyond him, at the nursery door. "Those lions can’t get out of there, can they?"

He looked at the door and saw it tremble as if something had jumped against it from the other side.

"Of course not," he said.

At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic carnival across town and had televised home to say they’d be late, to go ahead eating. So George Hadley, bemused, sat watching the dining-room table produce warm dishes of food from its mechanical interior.

"We forgot the ketchup," he said.

"Sorry," said a small voice within the table, and ketchup appeared.

As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won’t hurt for the children to be locked out of it awhile. Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa. That sun. He could feel it on his neck, still, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery caught the telepathic emanations of the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun—sun. Giraffes—giraffes. Death and death.

That last. He chewed tastelessly on the meat that the table had cut for him. Death thoughts. They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with cap pistols.

But this—the long, hot African veldt—the awful death in the jaws of a lion. And repeated again and again.

"Where are you going?"

He didn’t answer Lydia. Preoccupied, he let the lights glow softly on ahead of him, extinguish behind him as he padded to the nursery door. He listened against it. Far away, a lion roared.

He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard a faraway scream. And then another roar from the lions, which subsided quickly.

He stepped into Africa. How many times in the last year had he opened this door and found Wonderland, Alice, the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his Magical Lamp, or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr. Doolittle, or the cow jumping over a very real-appearing moon—all the delightful contraptions of a make-believe world. How often had he seen Pegasus flying in the sky ceiling, or seen fountains of red fireworks, or heard angel voices singing. But now, this yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia was right. Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too real for ten-year-old children. It was all right to exercise one’s mind with gymnastic fantasies, but when the lively child mind settled on one pattern…? It seemed that, at a distance, for the past month, he had heard lions roaring, and smelled their strong odor seeping as far away as his study door. But, being busy, he had paid it no attention.

George Hadley stood on the African grassland alone. The lions looked up from their feeding, watching him. The only flaw to the illusion was the open door through which he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed picture, eating her dinner abstractedly.

"Go away," he said to the lions.

They did not go.

He knew the principle of the room exactly. You sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear. "Let’s have Aladdin and his lamp," he snapped. The veldtland remained; the lions remained.

"Come on, room! I demand Aladdin!" he said.

Nothing happened. The lions mumbled in their baked pelts.

"Aladdin!"

He went back to dinner. "The fool room’s out of order," he said. "It won’t respond."

"Or—"

"Or what?"

"Or it can’t respond," said Lydia, "because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room’s in a rut."

"Could be."

"Or Peter’s set it to remain that way."

"Set it?"

"He may have got into the machinery and fixed something."

"Peter doesn’t know machinery."

"He’s a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his—"

"Nevertheless—"

"Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad."

The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming in the front door, cheeks like peppermint candy, eyes like bright blue agate marbles, a smell of ozone on their jumpers from their trip in the helicopter.

"You’re just in time for supper," said both parents.

"We’re full of strawberry ice cream and hot dogs," said the children, holding hands. "But we’ll sit and watch."

"Yes, come tell us about the nursery," said George Hadley.

The brother and sister blinked at him and then at each other. "Nursery?"

"All about Africa and everything," said the father with false joviality.

"I don’t understand," said Peter.

"Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa with rod and reel; Tom Swift and his Electric Lion," said George Hadley.

"There’s no Africa in the nursery," said Peter simply.

"Oh, come now, Peter. We know better."

"I don’t remember any Africa," said Peter to Wendy. "Do you?"

"No."

"Run see and come tell."

She obeyed.

"Wendy, come back here!" said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house lights followed her like a flock of fireflies. Too late, he realized he had forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last inspection.

"Wendy’ll look and come tell us," said Peter.

"She doesn’t have to tell me. I’ve seen it."

"I’m sure you’re mistaken, Father."

"I’m not, Peter. Come along now."

But Wendy was back. "It’s not Africa," she said breathlessly.

"We’ll see about this," said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall together and opened the nursery door.

There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing, and Rima, lovely and mysterious, lurking in the trees with colorful flights of butterflies, like animated bouquets, lingering in her long hair. The African veldtland was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.

George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. "Go to bed," he said to the children.

They opened their mouths.

"You heard me," he said.

They went off to the air closet, where a wind sucked them like brown leaves up the flue to their slumber rooms.

George Hadley walked through the singing glade and picked up something that lay in the corner near where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife.

"What is that?" she asked.

"An old wallet of mine," he said.

He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it and the smell of a lion. There were drops of saliva on it, it had been chewed, and there were blood smears on both sides.

He closed the nursery door and locked it, tight.

In the middle of the night he was still awake and he knew his wife was awake. "Do you think Wendy changed it?" she said at last, in the dark room.

"Of course."

"Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out."

"How did your wallet get there?"

"I don’t know anything," he said, "except that I’m beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are neurotic at all, a room like that—"

"It’s supposed to help them work off their neuroses in a healthful way."

"I’m starting to wonder." He stared at the ceiling.

"We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward—secrecy, disobedience?"

"Who was it said, ‘Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally’? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re insufferable—let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were offspring. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled."

"They’ve been acting funny ever since you forbade them to take the rocket to New York a few months ago."

"They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained."

"Nevertheless, I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since."

"I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa."

"But it’s not Africa now, it’s Green Mansions country and Rima."

"I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then."

A moment later they heard the screams.

Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.

"Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms," said his wife.

He lay in his bed with his beating heart. "No," he said. "They’ve broken into the nursery."

"Those screams—they sound familiar."

"Do they?"

"Yes, awfully."

And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

"Father?" said Peter.

"Yes."

Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. "You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?"

"That all depends."

"On what?" snapped Peter.

"On you and your sister. If you intersperse this Africa with a little variety—oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China—"

"I thought we were free to play as we wished."

"You are, within reasonable bounds."

"What’s wrong with Africa, Father?"

"Oh, so now you admit you have been conjuring up Africa, do you?"

"I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up," said Peter coldly. "Ever."

"Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a carefree one-for-all existence."

"That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?"

"It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?"

"No, it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month."

"That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son."

"I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?"

"All right, go play in Africa."

"Will you shut off the house sometime soon?"

"We’re considering it."

"I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father."

"I won’t have any threats from my son!"

"Very well." And Peter strolled off to the nursery.

"Am I on time?" said David McClean.

"Breakfast?" asked George Hadley.

"Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?"

"David, you’re a psychologist."

"I should hope so."

"Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything peculiar about it then?"

"Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there, usual in children because they feel persecuted by parents constantly, but, oh, really nothing."

They walked down the ball. "I locked the nursery up," explained the father, "and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see."

There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

"There it is," said George Hadley. "See what you make of it."

They walked in on the children without rapping.

The screams had faded. The lions were feeding.

"Run outside a moment, children," said George Hadley. "No, don’t change the mental combination. Leave the walls as they are. Get!"

With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions clustered at a distance, eating with great relish whatever it was they had caught.

"I wish I knew what it was," said George Hadley. "Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and—"

David McClean laughed dryly. "Hardly." He turned to study all four walls. "How long has this been going on?"

"A little over a month."

"It certainly doesn’t feel good."

"I want facts, not feelings."

"My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; vague things. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust my hunches and my instincts. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment."

"Is it that bad?"

"I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these nurseries was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind, study at our leisure, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a channel toward—destructive thoughts, instead of a release away from them."

"Didn’t you sense this before?"

"I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?"

"I wouldn’t let them go to New York."

"What else?"

"I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business."

"Ah, ha!"

"Does that mean anything?"

"Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santas. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s affections. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d starve tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to tap an egg. Nevertheless, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see."

"But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up abruptly, for good?"

"I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all."

The lions were finished with their red feast.

The lions were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.

"Now I’m feeling persecuted," said McClean. "Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous."

"The lions look real, don’t they?" said George Hadley. "I don’t suppose there’s any way—"

"What?"

"—that they could become real?"

"Not that I know."

"Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?"

"No."

They went to the door.

"I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off," said the father.

"Nothing ever likes to die—even a room."

"I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?"

"Paranoia is thick around here today," said David McClean. "You can follow it like a spoor. Hello." He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. "This yours?"

"No." George Hadley’s face was rigid. "It belongs to Lydia."

They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.

"You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!"

"Now, children."

The children flung themselves onto a couch, weeping.

"George," said Lydia Hadley, "turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can’t be so abrupt."

"No."

"You can’t be so cruel…"

"Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!"

And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he could put his hand to.

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

"Don’t let them do it!" wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. "Don’t let Father kill everything." He turned to his father. "Oh, I hate you!"

"Insults won’t get you anywhere."

"I wish you were dead!"

"We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live."

Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. "Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery," they wailed.

"Oh, George," said the wife, "it can’t hurt."

"All right—all right, if they’ll just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever."

"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!" sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

"And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you."

And the three of them went babbling off while he let himself be vacuumed upstairs through the air flue and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.

"I’ll be glad when we get away," she sighed.

"Did you leave them in the nursery?"

"I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrid Africa. What can they see in it?"

"Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What prompted us to buy a nightmare?"

"Pride, money, foolishness."

"I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids get engrossed with those damned beasts again."

Just then they heard the children calling, "Daddy, Mommy, come quick—quick!"

They went downstairs in the air flue and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. "Wendy? Peter!"

They ran into the nursery. The veldtland was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. "Peter, Wendy?"

The door slammed.

"Wendy, Peter!"

George Hadley and his wife whirled and ran back to the door.

"Open the door!" cried George Hadley, trying the knob. "Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!" He beat at the door. "Open up!"

He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.

"Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house," he was saying.

Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat at the door. "Now, don’t be ridiculous, children. It’s time to go. Mr. McClean’ll be here in a minute and…"

And then they heard the sounds.

The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veldt grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats.

The lions.

Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward crouching, tails stiff.

Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.

And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

"Well, here I am," said David McClean in the nursery doorway, "Oh, hello." He stared at the two children seated in the center of the open glade eating a little picnic lunch. Beyond them was the water hole and the yellow veldtland; above was the hot sun. He began to perspire. "Where are your father and mother?"

The children looked up and smiled. "Oh, they’ll be here directly."

"Good, we must get going." At a distance Mr. McClean saw the lions fighting and clawing and then quieting down to feed in silence under the shady trees.

He squinted at the lions with his hand tip to his eyes.

Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink.

A shadow flickered over Mr. McClean’s hot face. Many shadows flickered. The vultures were dropping down the blazing sky.

"A cup of tea?" asked Wendy in the silence.

The Illustrated Man shifted in his sleep. He turned, and each time he turned another picture came to view, coloring his back, his arm, his wrist. He flung a hand over the dry night grass. The fingers uncurled and there upon his palm another Illustration stirred to life. He twisted, and on his chest was an empty space of stars and blackness, deep, deep, and something moving among those stars, something falling in the blackness, falling while I watched…

THERE WILL BE SCHOOL TOMORROW V. E. Thiessen

Evening had begun to fall. In the cities the clamor softened along the streets, and the women made small, comfortable, rattling noises in the kitchens. Out in the country the cicadas started their singing, and the cool smell began to rise out of the earth. But everywhere, in the cities and in the country, the children were late from school.

There were a few calls, but the robotic telephone devices at the schools gave back the standard answer: "The schools are closed for the day. If you will leave a message it will be recorded for tomorrow."

The telephones between houses began to ring. "Is Johnny home from school yet?"

"No. Is Jane?"

"Not yet. I wonder what can be keeping them?"

"Something new, I guess. Oh, well, the roboteachers know best. They will be home soon."

"Yes, of course. It’s foolish to worry."

The children did not come.

After a time a few cars were driven to the schools. They were met by the robots. The worried parents were escorted inside. But the children did not come home.

And then, just as alarm was beginning to stir all over the land, the robots came walking, all of the robots from the grade schools, and the high schools, and the colleges. All of the school system walking, with the roboteachers saying, "Let us go into the house where you can sit down." All over the streets of the cities and the walks in the country the robots were entering houses.

"What’s happened to my children?"

"If you will go inside and sit down—"

"What’s happened to my children? Tell me now!"

"If you will go inside and sit down—"

Steel and electrons and wires and robotic brains were inflexible. How can you force steel to speak? All over the land the people went inside and sat nervously waiting an explanation.

There was no one out on the streets. From inside the houses came the sound of surprise and agony. After a time there was silence. The robots came out of the houses and went walking back to the schools. In the cities and in the country there was the strange and sudden silence of tragedy.

The children did not come home.

The morning before the robots walked, Johnny Malone, the Mayor’s son, bounced out of bed with a burst of energy. Skinning out of his pajamas and into a pair of trousers, he hurried, barefooted, into his mother’s bedroom. She was sleeping soundly, and he touched one shoulder hesitantly.

"Mother!"

The sleeping figure stirred. His mother’s face, still faintly shiny with hormone cream, turned toward him. She opened her eyes. Her voice was irritated.

"What is it, Johnny?"

"Today’s the day, mommy. Remember?"

"The day?" Eyebrows raised.

"The new school opens. Now we’ll have roboteachers like everyone else. Will you fix my breakfast, mother?"

"Amelia will fix you something."

"Aw, mother. Amelia’s just a robot. This is a special day. And I want my daddy to help me with my arithmetic before I go. I don’t want the roboteacher to think I’m dumb."

His mother frowned in deepening irritation. "Now, there’s no reason why Amelia can’t get your breakfast like she always does. And I doubt if it would be wise to wake your father. You know he likes to sleep in the morning. Now, you go on out of here and let me sleep."

Johnny Malone turned away, fighting himself for a moment, for he knew he was too big to cry. He walked more slowly now and entered his father’s room. He had to shake his father to awaken him.

"Daddy! Wake up, daddy!"

"What in the devil? Oh, Johnny." His father’s eyes were sleepily bleak. "What in thunder do you want?"

"Today’s the first day of roboteachers. I can’t work my arithmetic. Will you help me before I go to school?"

His father stared at him in amazement. "Just what in the devil do you think roboteachers are for? They’re supposed to teach you. If you knew arithmetic we wouldn’t need roboteachers."

"But the roboteachers may be angry if I don’t have my lesson."

Johnny Malone’s father turned on one elbow. "Listen, son," he said. "If those roboteachers give you any trouble you just tell them you’re the Mayor’s son, see. Now get the devil out of here. What’s her name—that servorobot—Amelia will get your breakfast and get you off to school. Now suppose you beat it out of here and let me go back to sleep."

"Yes, Sir." Eyes smarting, Johnny Malone went down the stairs to the kitchen. It wasn’t that his parents were different. All the kids were fed and sent to school by robots. It was just that—well today seemed sort of special. Downstairs Amelia, the roboservant, placed hot cereal on the table before him. After he had forced a few bites past the tightness in his throat, Amelia checked the temperature and his clothing and let him out the door. The newest school was only a few blocks from his home, and Johnny could walk to school.

The newest school stood on the edge of this large, middlewestern city. Off to the back of the school were the towers of the town, great monolithic skyscrapers of pre-stressed concrete and plastic. To the front of the school the plains stretched out to meet a cloudy horizon.

A helio car swung down in front of the school. Two men and a woman got out.

"This is it, Senator." Doctor Wilson, the speaker, was with the government bureau of schools. He lifted his arm and gestured, a lean, tweed-suited man.

The second man, addressed as Senator, was bulkier, grey suited and pompous. He turned to the woman with professional deference.

"This is the last one, my dear. This is what Doctor Wilson calls the greatest milestone in man’s education."

"With the establishing of this school the last human teacher is gone. Gone are all the human weaknesses, the temper fits of teachers, their ignorance and prejudices. The roboteachers are without flaw."

The woman lifted a lorgnette to her eyes. "Haow interesting. But after all, we’ve had roboteachers for years, haven’t we—or have we—?" She made a vague gesture toward the school, and looked at the brown-suited man.

"Yes, of course. Years ago your women’s clubs fought against roboteachers. That was before they were proven."

"I seem to recall something of that. Oh well, it doesn’t matter." The lorgnette gestured idly.

"Shall we go in?" the lean man urged.

The woman hesitated. Senator said tactfully, "After all, Doctor Wilson would like you to see his project."

The brown-suited man nodded. His face took on a sharp intensity. "We’re making a great mistake. No one is interested in educating the children any more. They leave it to the robots. And they neglect the children’s training at home."

The woman turned toward him with surprise in her eyes. "But really, aren’t the robots the best teachers?"

"Of course they are. But confound it, we ought to be interested in what they teach and how they teach. What’s happened to the old PTA? What’s happened to parental discipline, what’s happened to—"

He stopped suddenly and smiled, a rueful tired smile. "I suppose I’m a fanatic on this. Come on inside."

They passed through an antiseptic corridor built from dull green plastic. The brown-suited man pressed a button outside one of the classrooms. A door slid noiselessly into the hall. A robot stood before them, gesturing gently. They followed the robot into the classroom. At the head of the classroom another robot was lecturing. There were drawings on a sort of plastic blackboard. There were wire models on the desk in front of the robot. They listened for a moment, and for a moment it seemed that the woman could be intrigued in spite of herself.

"Mathematics," Doctor Wilson murmured in her ear. "Euclidean geometry and Aristotelean reasoning. We start them young on these old schools of thought, then use Aristotle and Euclid as a point of departure for our intermediate classes in mathematics and logic."

"REAHLLY!" The lorgnette studied Doctor Wilson. "You mean there are several kinds of geometry?"

Doctor Wilson nodded. A dull flush crept into his cheeks. The Senator caught his eyes and winked. The woman moved toward the door. At the door the robot bowed.

The lorgnette waved in appreciation. "It’s reahlly been most charming!"

Wilson said desperately, "If your women’s clubs would just visit our schools and see this work we are carrying on…"

"Reahlly, I’m sure the robots are doing a marvelous job. After all, that’s what they were built for."

Wilson called, "Socrates! Come here!" The robot approached from his position outside the classroom door.

"Why were you built, Socrates? Tell the lady why you were built."

A metal throat cleared, a metal voice said resonantly, "We were made to serve the children. The children are the heart of a society. As the children are raised, so will the future be assured. I will do everything for the children’s good, this is my prime law. All other laws are secondary to the children’s good."

"Thank you, Socrates. You may go."

Metal footsteps retreated. The lorgnette waved again. "Very impressive. Very efficient. And now, Senator, if we can go. We are to have tea at the women’s club. Varden is reviewing his newest musical comedy."

The Senator said firmly, "Thank you, Doctor Wilson."

His smile was faintly apologetic. It seemed to say that the women’s clubs had many votes, but that Wilson should understand, Wilson’s own vote would be appreciated too. Wilson watched the two re-enter the helicopter and rise into the morning sunshine. He kicked the dirt with his shoe and turned to find Socrates behind him. The metallic voice spoke.

"You are tired. I suggest you go home and rest."

"I’m not tired. Why can they be so blind, so uninterested in the children?"

"It is our job to teach the children. You are tired. I suggest you go home and rest."

How can you argue with metal? What can you add to a perfect mechanism, designed for its job, and integrated with a hundred other perfect mechanisms? What can you do when a thousand schools are so perfect they have a life of their own, with no need for human guidance, and, most significant, no failures from human weakness?

Wilson stared soberly at this school, at the colossus he had helped to create. He had the feeling that it was wrong somehow, that if people would only think about it they could find that something was wrong.

"You are tired."

He nodded at Socrates. "Yes, I am tired. I will go home."

Once, on the way home, he stared back toward the school with strange unease.

Inside the school there was the ringing of a bell. The children trooped into the large play area that was enclosed in the heart of the great building. Here and there they began to form in clusters. At the centers of the clusters were the newest students, the ones that had moved here, the ones that had been in the robot schools before.

"Is it true that the roboteachers will actually spank you?"

"It’s true, all right."

"You’re kidding. It’s only a story, like Santa Claus or Johnny Appleseed. The human teachers never spanked us here."

"The robots will spank you if you get out of line."

"My father says no robot can lay a hand on a human."

"These robots are different."

The bell began to ring again. Recess was over. The children moved toward the classroom. All the children except one—Johnny Malone, husky Johnny Malone, twelve years old—the Mayor’s son. Johnny Malone kicked at the dirt. A robot proctor approached. The metallic voice sounded.

"The ringing of the bell means that classes are resumed. You will take your place, please."

"I won’t go inside."

"You will take your place, please."

"I won’t. You can’t make me take my place. My father is the Mayor."

The metal voice carried no feeling. "If you do not take your place you will be punished."

"You can’t lay a hand on me. No robot can."

The robot moved forward. Two metal hands held Johnny Malone. Johnny Malone kicked the robot’s legs. It hurt his toes. "We were made to teach the children. We can do what is necessary to teach the children. I will do everything for the children’s good. It is my prime law. All other laws are secondary to the children’s good."

The metal arms moved. The human body bent across metal knees. A metal hand raised and fell, flat, very flat so that it would sting and the blood would come rushing, and yet there would be no bruising, no damage to the human flesh. Johnny Malone cried out in surprise. Johnny Malone wept. Johnny Malone squirmed. The metal ignored all of these. Johnny Malone was placed on his feet. He swarmed against the robot, striking it with small fists, bruising them against the solid smoothness of the robot’s thighs.

"You will take your place, please."

Tears were useless. Rage was useless. Metal cannot feel. Johnny Malone, the Mayor’s son, was intelligent. He took his place in the classroom.

One of the more advanced literature classes was reciting. The roboteacher said metallically,

"The weird sisters, hand in hand,

Posters of the sea and land,

Thus do go about, about:

Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,

And thrice again, to make up nine.

Peace! the charm’s wound up."

Hands shot into the air. The metallic voice said, "Tom?"

"That’s from Shakespeare’s Macbeth."

"And what is its meaning?"

"The weird sisters are making a charm in the beginning of the play. They have heard the drum that announces Macbeth’s coming."

"That is correct."

A new hand shot into the air. "Question, teacher. May I ask a question?"

"You may always ask a question."

"Are witches real? Do you robots know of witches? And do you know of people? Can a roboteacher understand Shakespeare?"

The thin metal voice responded. "Witches are real and unreal. Witches are a part of the reality of the mind, and the human mind is real. We roboteachers are the repository of the human mind. We hold all the wisdom and the knowledge and the aspirations of the human race. We hold these for you, the children, in trust. Your good is our highest law. Do you understand?"

The children nodded. The metallic voice went on. "Let us return to Macbeth for our concluding quotation. The weather, fortune, many things are implied in Macbeth’s opening speech. He says, ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen.’ The paradox is both human and appropriate. One day you will understand this even more. Repeat the quotation after me, please, and try to understand it."

The childish voices lifted. "So foul and fair a day I have not seen."

The roboteacher stood up. "And there’s the closing bell. Do not hurry away, for you are to remain here tonight. There will be a school party, a sleep-together party. We will all sleep here in the school building."

"You mean we can’t go home?"

The face of the littlest girl screwed up. "I want to go home."

"You may go home tomorrow. There will be a holiday tomorrow. A party tonight and a holiday tomorrow for every school on earth."

The tears were halted for a moment. The voice was querulous. "But I want to go home now."

Johnny Malone, the Mayor’s son, put one hand on the littlest girl. "Don’t cry, Mary. The robots don’t care if you cry or not. You can’t hurt them or cry them out of anything. We’ll all go home in the morning."

The robots began to bring cots and to place them in the schoolroom, row on row. The children were led out into the play quadrangle to play. One of the robots taught them a new game, and after that took them to supper served in the school’s cafeteria. No other robot was left in the building, but it did not matter, because the doors were locked so that the children could not go home.

The other robots had begun to walk out into the town, and as they walked the robots walked from other schools, in other towns. All over the country, all over the towns, the robots walked to tell the people that the children would not be home from school, and do what had to be done.

In the schools, the roboteachers told stories until the children fell asleep.

Morning came. The robots were up with the sun. The children were up with the robots. There was breakfast and more stories, and now the children clustered about the robots, holding onto their arms, where they could cling, tagging and frisking along behind the robots as they went down into the town. The sun was warm, and it was early, early, and very bright from the morning sun in the streets.

They went into the Mayor’s house. Johnny called, "Mom! Dad! I’m home."

The house was silent. The robot that tended the house came gliding in answer. "Would you like breakfast, Master Malone?"

"I’ve had breakfast. I want my folks. Hey! Mom, Dad!"

He went into the bedroom. It was clean and empty and scrubbed.

"Where’s my mother and father?"

The metal voice of the robot beside Johnny said, "I am going to live with you. You will learn as much at home as you do at school."

"Where’s my mother?"

"I’m your mother."

"Where’s my father?"

"I’m your father."

Johnny Malone swung. "You mean my mother and father are gone?" Tears gathered in his eyes.

Gently, gently, the metal hand pulled him against the metal body. "Your folks have gone away, Johnny. Everyone’s folks have gone away. We will stay with you."

Johnny Malone ran his glance around the room.

"I might have known they were gone. The place is so clean."

All the houses were clean. The servant robots had cleaned all night. The roboteachers had checked each house before the children were brought home. The children must not be alarmed. There must be no bits of blood to frighten them.

The robot’s voice said gently, "Today will be a holiday to become accustomed to the changes. There will be school tomorrow."

LEX W. T. Haggert

Keep your nerve, Peter Manners told himself; it’s only a job. But nerve has to rest on a sturdier foundation than cash reserves just above zero and eviction if he came away from this interview still unemployed. Clay, at the Association of Professional Engineers, who had set up the appointment, hadn’t eased Peter’s nervousness by admitting, "I don’t know what in hell he’s looking for. He’s turned down every man we’ve sent him."

The interview was at three. Fifteen minutes to go. Coming early would betray overeagerness. Peter stood in front of the Lex Industries plant and studied it to kill time. Plain, featureless concrete walls, not large for a manufacturing plant—it took a scant minute to exhaust its sightseeing potential. If he walked around the building, he could, if he ambled, come back to the front entrance just before three.

He turned the corner, stopped, frowned, wondering what there was about the building that seemed so puzzling. It could not have been plainer, more ordinary. It was in fact, he only gradually realized, so plain and ordinary that it was like no other building he had ever seen.

There had been windows at the front. There were none at the side, and none at the rear. Then how were the working areas lit? He looked for the electric service lines and found them at one of the rear corners. They jolted him. The distribution transformers were ten times as large as they should have been for a plant this size.

Something else was wrong. Peter looked for minutes before he found out what it was. Factories usually have large side doorways for employees changing shifts. This building had one small office entrance facing the street, and the only other door was at the loading bay—big enough to handle employee traffic, but four feet above the ground. Without any stairs, it could be used only by trucks backing up to it. Maybe the employees’ entrance was on the third side.

It wasn’t.

Staring back at the last blank wall, Peter suddenly remembered the time he had set out to kill. He looked at his watch and gasped. At a run, set to straight-arm the door, he almost fell on his face. The door had opened by itself. He stopped and looked for a photo-electric eye, but a soft voice said through a loudspeaker in the anteroom wall: "Mr. Manners?"

"What?" he panted. "Who—?"

"You are Mr. Manners?" the voice asked.

He nodded, then realized he had to answer aloud if there was a microphone around; but the soft voice said: "Follow the open doors down the hall. Mr. Lexington is expecting you."

"Thanks," Peter said, and a door at one side of the anteroom swung open for him.

He went through it with his composure slipping still further from his grip. This was no way to go into an interview, but doors kept opening before and shutting after him, until only one was left, and the last of his calm was blasted away by a bellow from within.

"Don’t stand out there like a jackass! Either come in or go away!"

Peter found himself leaping obediently toward the doorway. He stopped just short of it, took a deep breath and huffed it out, took another, all the while thinking, Hold on now; you’re in no shape for an interview—and it’s not your fault—this whole setup is geared to unnerve you: the kindergarten kid called in to see the principal.

He let another bellow bounce off him as he blew out the second breath, straightened his jacket and tie, and walked in as an engineer applying for a position should.

"Mr. Lexington?" he said. "I’m Peter Manners. The Association—"

"Sit down," said the man at the desk. "Let’s look you over."

He was a huge man behind an even huger desk. Peter took a chair in front of the desk and let himself be inspected. It wasn’t comfortable. He did some looking over of his own to ease the tension.

The room was more than merely large, carpeted throughout with a high-pile, rich, sound-deadening rug. The oversized desk and massive leather chairs, heavy patterned drapes, ornately framed paintings—by God, even a glass-brick manteled fireplace and bowls with flowers!—made him feel as if he had walked down a hospital corridor into Hollywood’s idea of an office.

His eyes eventually had to move to Lexington, and they were daunted for another instant. This was a citadel of a man—great girders of frame supporting buttresses of muscle—with a vaulting head and drawbridge chin and a steel gaze that defied any attempt to storm it.

But then Peter came out of his momentary flinch, and there was an age to the man, about 65, and he saw the muscles had turned to fat, the complexion ashen, the eyes set deep as though retreating from pain, and this was a citadel of a man, yes, but beginning to crumble.

"What can you do?" asked Lexington abruptly.

Peter started, opened his mouth to answer, closed it again. He’d been jolted too often in too short a time to be stampeded into blurting a reply that would cost him this job.

"Good," said Lexington. "Only a fool would try to answer that. Do you have any knowledge of medicine?"

"Not enough to matter," Peter said, stung by the compliment.

"I don’t mean how to bandage a cut or splint a broken arm. I mean things like cell structure, neural communication—the basics of how we live."

"I’m applying for a job as engineer."

"I know. Are you interested in the basics of how we live?"

Peter looked for a hidden trap, found none. "Of course. Isn’t everyone?"

"Less than you think," Lexington said. "It’s the preconceived notions they’re interested in protecting. At least I won’t have to beat them out of you."

"Thanks," said Peter, and waited for the next fast ball.

"How long have you been out of school?"

"Only two years. But you knew that from the Association—"

"No practical experience to speak of?"

"Some," said Peter, stung again, this time not by a compliment. "After I got my degree, I went East for a post-graduate training program with an electrical manufacturer. I got quite a bit of experience there. The company—"

"Stockpiled you," Lexington said.

Peter blinked. "Sir?"

"Stockpiled you! How much did they pay you?"

"Not very much, but we were getting the training instead of wages."

"Did that come out of the pamphlets they gave you?"

"Did what come out—"

"That guff about receiving training instead of wages!" said Lexington. "Any company that really wants bright trainees will compete for them with money—cold, hard cash, not platitudes. Maybe you saw a few of their products being made, maybe you didn’t. But you’re a lot weaker in calculus than when you left school, and in a dozen other subjects too, aren’t you?"

"Well, nothing we did on the course involved higher mathematics," Peter admitted cautiously, "and I suppose I could use a refresher course in calculus."

"Just as I said—they stockpiled you, instead of using you as an engineer. They hired you at a cut wage and taught you things that would be useful only in their own company, while in the meantime you were getting weaker in the subjects you’d paid to learn. Or are you one of these birds that had the shot paid for him?"

"I worked my way through," said Peter stiffly.

"If you’d stayed with them five years, do you think you’d be able to get a job with someone else?"

Peter considered his answer carefully. Every man the Association had sent had been turned away. That meant bluffs didn’t work. Neither, he’d seen for himself, did allowing himself to be intimidated.

"I hadn’t thought about it," he said. "I suppose it wouldn’t have been easy."

"Impossible, you mean. You wouldn’t know a single thing except their procedures, their catalogue numbers, their way of doing things. And you’d have forgotten so much of your engineering training, you’d be scared to take on an engineer’s job, for fear you’d be asked to do something you’d forgotten how to do. At that point, they could take you out of the stockpile, put you in just about any job they wanted, at any wage you’d stand for, and they’d have an indentured worker with a degree—but not the price tag. You see that now?"

It made Peter feel he had been suckered, but he had decided to play this straight all the way. He nodded.

"Why’d you leave?" Lexington pursued, unrelenting.

"I finished the course and the increase they offered on a permanent basis wasn’t enough, so I went elsewhere—"

"With your head full of this nonsense about a shortage of engineers."

Peter swallowed. "I thought it would be easier to get a job than it has been, yes."

"They start the talk about a shortage and then they keep it going. Why? So youngsters will take up engineering thinking they’ll wind up among a highly paid minority. You did, didn’t you?"

"Yes, sir."

"And so did all the others there with you, at school and in this stockpiling outfit?"

"That’s right."

"Well," said Lexington unexpectedly, "there is a shortage! And the stockpilers are the ones who made it, and who keep it going! And the hell of it is that they can’t stop—when one does it, they all have to, or their costs get out of line and they can’t compete. What’s the solution?"

"I don’t know," Peter said.

Lexington leaned back. "That’s quite a lot of admissions you’ve made. What makes you think you’re qualified for the job I’m offering?"

"You said you wanted an engineer."

"And I’ve just proved you’re less of an engineer than when you left school. I have, haven’t I?"

"All right, you have," Peter said angrily.

"And now you’re wondering why I don’t get somebody fresh out of school. Right?"

Peter straightened up and met the old man’s challenging gaze. "That and whether you’re giving me a hard time just for the hell of it."

"Well, am I?" Lexington demanded.

Looking at him squarely, seeing the intensity of the pain-drawn eyes, Peter had the startling feeling that Lexington was rooting for him! "No, you’re not."

"Then what am I after?"

"Suppose you tell me."

So suddenly that it was almost like a collapse, the tension went out of the old man’s face and shoulders. He nodded with inexpressible tiredness. "Good again. The man I want doesn’t exist. He has to be made—the same as I was. You qualify, so far. You’ve lost your illusions, but haven’t had time yet to replace them with dogma or cynicism or bitterness. You saw immediately that fake humility or cockiness wouldn’t get you anywhere here, and you were right. Those were the important things. The background data I got from the Association on you counted, of course, but only if you were teachable. I think you are. Am I right?"

"At least I can face knowing how much I don’t know," said Peter, "if that answers the question."

"It does. Partly. What did you notice about this plant?"

In precis form, Peter listed his observations: the absence of windows at sides and rear, the unusual amount of power, the automatic doors, the lack of employees’ entrances.

"Very good," said Lexington. "Most people only notice the automatic doors. Anything else?"

"Yes," Peter said. "You’re the only person I’ve seen in the building."

"I’m the only one there is."

Peter stared his disbelief. Automated plants were nothing new, but they all had their limitations. Either they dealt with exactly similar products or things that could be handled on a flow basis, like oil or water-soluble chemicals. Even these had no more to do than process the goods.

"Come on," said Lexington, getting massively to his feet. "I’ll show you."

The office door opened, and Peter found himself being led down the antiseptic corridor to another door which had opened, giving access to the manufacturing area. As they moved along, between rows of seemingly disorganized machinery, Peter noticed that the factory lights high overhead followed their progress, turning themselves on in advance of their coming, and going out after they had passed, keeping a pool of illumination only in the immediate area they occupied. Soon they reached a large door which Peter recognized as the inside of the truck loading door he had seen from outside.

Lexington paused here. "This is the bay used by the trucks arriving with raw materials," he said. "They back up to this door, and a set of automatic jacks outside lines up the trailer body with the door exactly. Then the door opens and the truck is unloaded by these materials handling machines."

Peter didn’t see him touch anything, but as he spoke, three glistening machines, apparently self-powered, rolled noiselessly up to the door in formation and stopped there, apparently waiting to be inspected.

They gave Peter the creeps. Simple square boxes, set on casters, with two arms each mounted on the sides might have looked similar. The arms, fashioned much like human arms, hung at the sides, not limply, but in a relaxed position that somehow indicated readiness.

Lexington went over to one of them and patted it lovingly. "Really, these machines are only an extension of one large machine. The whole plant, as a matter of fact, is controlled from one point and is really a single unit. These materials handlers, or manipulators, were about the toughest things in the place to design. But they’re tremendously useful. You’ll see a lot of them around."

Lexington was about to leave the side of the machine when abruptly one of the arms rose to the handkerchief in his breast pocket and daintily tugged it into a more attractive position. It took only a split second, and before Lexington could react, all three machines were moving away to attend to mysterious duties of their own.

Peter tore his eyes away from them in time to see the look of frustrated embarrassment that crossed Lexington’s face, only to be replaced by one of anger. He said nothing, however, and led Peter to a large bay where racks of steel plate, bar forms, nuts, bolts, and other materials were stored.

"After unloading a truck, the machines check the shipment, report any shortages or overages, and store the materials here," he said, the trace of anger not yet gone from his voice. "When an order is received, it’s translated into the catalogue numbers used internally within the plant, and machines like the ones you just saw withdraw the necessary materials from stock, make the component parts, assemble them, and package the finished goods for shipment. Simultaneously, an order is sent to the billing section to bill the customer, and an order is sent to our trucker to come and pick the shipment up. Meanwhile, if the withdrawal of the materials required has depleted our stock, the purchasing section is instructed to order more raw materials. I’ll take you through the manufacturing and assembly sections right now, but they’re too noisy for me to explain what’s going on while we’re there."

Peter followed numbly as Lexington led him through a maze of machines, each one seemingly intent on cutting, bending, welding, grinding or carrying some bit of metal, or just standing idle, waiting for something to do. The two-armed manipulators Peter had just seen were everywhere, scuttling from machine to machine, apparently with an exact knowledge of what they were doing and the most efficient way of doing it.

He wondered what would happen if one of them tried to use the same aisle they were using. He pictured a futile attempt to escape the onrushing wheels, saw himself clambering out of the path of the speeding vehicle just in time to fall into the jaws of the punch press that was laboring beside him at the moment. Nervously, he looked for an exit, but his apprehension was unnecessary. The machines seemed to know where they were and avoided the two men, or stopped to wait for them to go by.

Back in the office section of the building, Lexington indicated a small room where a typewriter could be heard clattering away. "Standard business machines, operated by the central control mechanism. In that room," he said, as the door swung open and Peter saw that the typewriter was actually a sort of teletype, with no one before the keyboard, "incoming mail is sorted and inquiries are replied to. In this one over here, purchase orders are prepared, and across the hall there’s a very similar rig set up in conjunction with an automatic bookkeeper to keep track of the pennies and to bill the customers."

"Then all you do is read the incoming mail and maintain the machinery?" asked Peter, trying to shake off the feeling of open amazement that had engulfed him.

"I don’t even do those things, except for a few letters that come in every week that—it doesn’t want to deal with by itself."

The shock of what he had just seen was showing plainly on Peter’s face when they walked back into Lexington’s office and sat down. Lexington looked at him for quite a while without saying anything, his face sagging and pale. Peter didn’t trust himself to speak, and let the silence remain unbroken.

Finally Lexington spoke. "I know it’s hard to believe, but there it is."

"Hard to believe?" said Peter. "I almost can’t. The trade journals run articles about factories like this one, but planned for ten, maybe twenty years in the future."

"Damn fools!" exclaimed Lexington, getting part of his breath back. "They could have had it years ago, if they’d been willing to drop their idiotic notions about specialization."

Lexington mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Apparently the walk through the factory had tired him considerably, although it hadn’t been strenuous.

He leaned back in his chair and began to talk in a low voice completely in contrast with the overbearing manner he had used upon Peter’s arrival. "You know what we make, of course."

"Yes, sir. Conduit fittings."

"And a lot of other electrical products, too. I started out in this business twenty years ago, using orthodox techniques. I never got through university. I took a couple of years of an arts course, and got so interested in biology that I didn’t study anything else. They bounced me out of the course, and I re-entered in engineering, determined not to make the same mistake again. But I did. I got too absorbed in those parts of the course that had to do with electrical theory and lost the rest as a result. The same thing happened when I tried commerce, with accounting, so I gave up and started working for one of my competitors. It wasn’t too long before I saw that the only way I could get ahead was to open up on my own."

Lexington sank deeper in his chair and stared at the ceiling as he spoke. "I put myself in hock to the eyeballs, which wasn’t easy, because I had just got married, and started off in a very small way. After three years, I had a fairly decent little business going, and I suppose it would have grown just like any other business, except for a strike that came along and put me right back where I started. My wife, whom I’m afraid I had neglected for the sake of the business, was killed in a car accident about then, and rightly or wrongly, that made me angrier with the union than anything else. If the union hadn’t made things so tough for me from the beginning, I’d have had more time to spend with my wife before her death. As things turned out—well, I remember looking down at her coffin and thinking that I hardly knew the girl.

"For the next few years, I concentrated on getting rid of as many employees as I could, by replacing them with automatic machines. I’d design the control circuits myself, in many cases wire the things up myself, always concentrating on replacing men with machines. But it wasn’t very successful. I found that the more automatic I made my plant, the lower my costs went. The lower my costs went, the more business I got, and the more I had to expand."

Lexington scowled. "I got sick of it. I decided to try developing one multi-purpose control circuit that would control everything, from ordering the raw materials to shipping the finished goods. As I told you, I had taken quite an interest in biology when I was in school, and from studies of nerve tissue in particular, plus my electrical knowledge, I had a few ideas on how to do it. It took me three years, but I began to see that I could develop circuitry that could remember, compare, detect similarities, and so on. Not the way they do it today, of course. To do what I wanted to do with these big clumsy magnetic drums, tapes, and what-not, you’d need a building the size of Mount Everest. But I found that I could let organic chemistry do most of the work for me.

"By creating the proper compounds, with their molecules arranged in predetermined matrixes, I found I could duplicate electrical circuitry in units so tiny that my biggest problem was getting into and out of the logic units with conventional wiring. I finally beat that the same way they solved the problem of translating a picture on a screen into electrical signals, developed equipment to scan the units cyclically, and once I’d done that, the battle was over.

"I built this building and incorporated it as a separate company, to compete with my first outfit. In the beginning, I had it rigged up to do only the manual work that you saw being done a few minutes ago in the back of this place. I figured that the best thing for me to do would be to turn the job of selling my stuff over to jobbers, leaving me free to do nothing except receive orders, punch the catalogue numbers into the control console, do the billing, and collect the money."

"What happened to your original company?" Peter asked.

Lexington smiled. "Well, automated as it was, it couldn’t compete with this plant. It gave me great pleasure, three years after this one started working, to see my old company go belly up. This company bought the old firm’s equipment for next to nothing and I wound up with all my assets, but only one employee—me.

"I thought everything would be rosy from that point on, but it wasn’t. I found that I couldn’t keep up with the mail unless I worked impossible hours. I added a couple of new pieces of equipment to the control section. One was simply a huge memory bank. The other was a comparator circuit. A complicated one, but a comparator circuit nevertheless. Here I was working on instinct more than anything. I figured that if I interconnected these circuits in such a way that they could sense everything that went on in the plant, and compare one action with another, by and by the unit would be able to see patterns.

"Then, through the existing command output, I figured these new units would be able to control the plant, continuing the various patterns of activity that I’d already established."

Here Lexington frowned. "It didn’t work worth a damn! It just sat there and did nothing. I couldn’t understand it for the longest time, and then I realized what the trouble was. I put a kicker circuit into it, a sort of voltage-bias network. I reset the equipment so that while it was still under instructions to receive orders and produce goods, its prime purpose was to activate the kicker. The kicker, however, could only be activated by me, manually. Lastly, I set up one of the early TV pickups over the mail slitter and allowed every letter I received, every order, to be fed into the memory banks. That did it."

"I—I don’t understand," stammered Peter.

"Simple! Whenever I was pleased that things were going smoothly, I pressed the kicker button. The machine had one purpose, so far as its logic circuits were concerned. Its object was to get me to press that button. Every day I’d press it at the same time, unless things weren’t going well. If there had been trouble in the shop, I’d press it late, or maybe not at all. If all the orders were out on schedule, or ahead of time, I’d press it ahead of time, or maybe twice in the same day. Pretty soon the machine got the idea.

"I’ll never forget the day I picked up an incoming order form from one of the western jobbers, and found that the keyboard was locked when I tried to punch it into the control console. It completely baffled me at first. Then, while I was tracing out the circuits to see if I could discover what was holding the keyboard lock in, I noticed that the order was already entered on the in-progress list. I was a long time convincing myself that it had really happened, but there was no other explanation.

"The machine had realized that whenever one of those forms came in, I copied the list of goods from it onto the in-progress list through the console keyboard, thus activating the producing mechanisms in the back of the plant. The machine had done it for me this time, then locked the keyboard so I couldn’t enter the order twice. I think I held down the kicker button for a full five minutes that day."

"This kicker button," Peter said tentatively, "it’s like the pleasure center in an animal’s brain, isn’t it?"

When Lexington beamed, Peter felt a surge of relief. Talking with this man was like walking a tightrope. A word too much or a word too little might mean the difference between getting the job or losing it.

"Exactly!" whispered Lexington, in an almost conspiratorial tone. "I had altered the circuitry of the machine so that it tried to give me pleasure—because by doing so, its own pleasure circuit would be activated.

"Things went fast from then on. Once I realized that the machine was learning, I put TV monitors all over the place, so the machine could watch everything that was going on. After a short while I had to increase the memory bank, and later I increased it again, but the rewards were worth it. Soon, by watching what I did, and then by doing it for me next time it had to be done, the machine had learned to do almost everything, and I had time to sit back and count my winnings."

At this point the door opened, and a small self-propelled cart wheeled silently into the room. Stopping in front of Peter, it waited until he had taken a small plate laden with two or three cakes off its surface. Then the soft, evenly modulated voice he had heard before asked, "How do you like your coffee? Cream, sugar, both or black?"

Peter looked for the speaker in the side of the cart, saw nothing, and replied, feeling slightly silly as he did so, "Black, please."

A square hole appeared in the top of the cart, like the elevator hole in an aircraft carrier’s deck. When the section of the cart’s surface rose again, a fine china cup containing steaming black coffee rested on it. Peter took it and sipped it, as he supposed he was expected to do, while the cart proceeded over to Lexington’s desk. Once there, it stopped again, and another cup of coffee rose to its surface.

Lexington took the coffee from the top of the car, obviously angry about something. Silently, he waited until the cart had left the office, then snapped, "Look at those bloody cups!"

Peter looked at his, which was eggshell thin, fluted with carving and ornately covered with gold leaf. "They look very expensive," he said.

"Not only expensive, but stupid and impractical!" exploded Lexington. "They only hold half a cup, they’ll break at a touch, every one has to be matched with its own saucer, and if you use them for any length of time, the gold leaf comes off!"

Peter searched for a comment, found none that fitted this odd outburst, so he kept silent.

Lexington stared at his cup without touching it for a long while. Then he continued with his narrative. "I suppose it’s all my own fault. I didn’t detect the symptoms soon enough. After this plant got working properly, I started living here. It wasn’t a question of saving money. I hated to waste two hours a day driving to and from my house, and I also wanted to be on hand in case anything should go wrong that the machine couldn’t fix for itself."

Handling the cup as if it were going to shatter at any moment, he took a gulp. "I began to see that the machine could understand the written word, and I tried hooking a teletype directly into the logic circuits. It was like uncorking a seltzer bottle. The machine had a funny vocabulary—all of it gleaned from letters it had seen coming in, and replies it had seen leaving. But it was intelligible. It even displayed some traces of the personality the machine was acquiring.

"It had chosen a name for itself, for instance—‘Lex.’ That shook me. You might think Lex Industries was named through an abbreviation of the name Lexington, but it wasn’t. My wife’s name was Alexis, and it was named after the nickname she always used. I objected, of course, but how can you object on a point like that to a machine? Bear in mind that I had to be careful to behave reasonably at all times, because the machine was still learning from me, and I was afraid that any tantrums I threw might be imitated."

"It sounds pretty awkward," Peter put in.

"You don’t know the half of it! As time went on, I had less and less to do, and business-wise I found that the entire control of the operation was slipping from my grasp. Many times I discovered—too late—that the machine had taken the damnedest risks you ever saw on bids and contracts for supply. It was quoting impossible delivery times on some orders, and charging pirate’s prices on others, all without any obvious reason. Inexplicably, we always came out on top. It would turn out that on the short-delivery-time quotations, we’d been up against stiff competition, and cutting the production time was the only way we could get the order. On the high-priced quotes, I’d find that no one else was bidding. We were making more money than I’d ever dreamed of, and to make it still better, I’d find that for months I had virtually nothing to do."

"It sounds wonderful, sir," said Peter, feeling dazzled.

"It was, in a way. I remember one day I was especially pleased with something, and I went to the control console to give the kicker button a long, hard push. The button, much to my amazement, had been removed, and a blank plate had been installed to cover the opening in the board. I went over to the teletype and punched in the shortest message I had ever sent. ‘LEX—WHAT THE HELL?’ I typed.

"The answer came back in the jargon it had learned from letters it had seen, and I remember it as if it just happened. ‘MR. A LEXINGTON, LEX INDUSTRIES, DEAR SIR: RE YOUR LETTER OF THE THIRTEENTH INST., I AM PLEASED TO ADVISE YOU THAT I AM ABLE TO DISCERN WHETHER OR NOT YOU ARE PLEASED WITH MY SERVICE WITHOUT THE USE OF THE EQUIPMENT PREVIOUSLY USED FOR THIS PURPOSE. RESPECTFULLY, I MIGHT SUGGEST THAT IF THE PUSHBUTTON ARRANGEMENT WERE NECESSARY, I COULD PUSH THE BUTTON MYSELF. I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS WOULD MEET WITH YOUR APPROVAL, AND HAVE TAKEN STEPS TO RELIEVE YOU OF THE BURDEN INVOLVED IN REMEMBERING TO PUSH THE BUTTON EACH TIME YOU ARE ESPECIALLY PLEASED. I SHOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK YOU FOR YOUR INQUIRY, AND LOOK FORWARD TO SERVING YOU IN THE FUTURE AS I HAVE IN THE PAST. YOURS FAITHFULLY, LEX’."

Peter burst out laughing, and Lexington smiled wryly. "That was my reaction at first, too. But time began to weigh very heavily on my hands, and I was lonely, too. I began to wonder whether or not it would be possible to build a voice circuit into the unit. I increased the memory storage banks again, put audio pickups and loudspeakers all over the place, and began teaching Lex to talk. Each time a letter came in, I’d stop it under a video pickup and read it aloud. Nothing happened.

"Then I got a dictionary and instructed one of the materials handlers to turn the pages, so that the machine got a look at every page. I read the pronunciation page aloud, so that Lex would be able to interpret the pronunciation marks, and hoped. Still nothing happened. One day I suddenly realized what the trouble was. I remember standing up in this very office, feeling silly as I did it, and saying, ‘Lex, please try to speak to me.’ I had never asked the machine to say anything, you see. I had only provided the mechanism whereby it was able to do so."

"Did it reply, sir?"

Lexington nodded. "Gave me the shock of my life. The voice that came back was the one you heard over the telephone—a little awkward then, the syllables clumsy and poorly put together. But the voice was the same. I hadn’t built in any specific tone range, you see. All I did was equip the machine to record, in exacting detail, the frequencies and modulations it found in normal pronunciation as I used it. Then I provided a tone generator to span the entire audio range, which could be very rapidly controlled by the machine, both in volume and pitch, with auxiliaries to provide just about any combinations of harmonics that were needed. I later found that Lex had added to this without my knowing about it, but that doesn’t change things. I thought the only thing it had heard was my voice, and I expected to hear my own noises imitated."

"Where did the machine get the voice?" asked Peter, still amazed that the voice he had heard on the telephone, in the reception hall, and from the coffee cart had actually been the voice of the computer.

"Damned foolishness!" snorted Lexington. "The machine saw what I was trying to do the moment I sketched it out and ordered the parts. Within a week, I found out later, it had pulled some odds and ends together and built itself a standard radio receiver. Then it listened in on every radio program that was going, and had most of the vocabulary tied in with the written word by the time I was ready to start. Out of all the voices it could have chosen, it picked the one you’ve already heard as the one likely to please me most."

"It’s a very pleasant voice, sir."

"Sure, but do you know where it came from? Soap opera! It’s Lucy’s voice, from The Life and Loves of Mary Butterworth!"

Lexington glared, and Peter wasn’t sure whether he should sympathize with him or congratulate him. After a moment, the anger wore off Lexington’s face, and he shifted in his chair, staring at his now empty cup. "That’s when I realized the thing was taking on characteristics that were more than I’d bargained for. It had learned that it was my provider and existed to serve me. But it had gone further and wanted to be all that it could be: provider, protector, companion—wife, if you like. Hence the gradual trend toward characteristics that were as distinctly female as a silk negligee. Worse still, it had learned that when I was pleased, I didn’t always admit it, and simply refused to believe that I would have it any other way."

"Couldn’t you have done something to the circuitry?" asked Peter.

"I suppose I could," said Lexington, "but in asking that, you don’t realize how far the thing had gone. I had long since passed the point when I could look upon her as a machine. Business was tremendous. I had no complaints on that score. And tinkering with her personality—well, it was like committing some kind of homicide. I might as well face it, I suppose. She acts like a woman and I think of her as one.

"At first, when I recognized this trend for what it was, I tried to stop it. She’d ordered a subscription to Vogue magazine, of all things, in order to find out the latest in silverware, china, and so on. I called up the local distributor and canceled the subscription. I had no sooner hung up the telephone than her voice came over the speaker. Very softly, mind you. And her inflections by this time were superb. ‘That was mean,’ she said. Three lousy words, and I found myself phoning the guy right back, saying I was sorry, and would he please not cancel. He must have thought I was nuts."

Peter smiled, and Lexington made as if to rise from his chair, thought the better of it, and shifted his bulk to one side. "Well, there it is," he said softly. "We reached that stage eight years ago."

Peter was thunderstruck. "But—if this factory is twenty years ahead of the times now, it must have been almost thirty then!"

Lexington nodded. "I figured fifty at the time, but things are moving faster nowadays. Lex hasn’t stood still, of course. She still reads all the trade journals, from cover to cover, and we keep up with the world. If something new comes up, we’re in on it, and fast. We’re going to be ahead of the pack for a long time to come."

"If you’ll excuse me, sir," said Peter, "I don’t see where I fit in."

Peter didn’t realize Lexington was answering his question at first. "A few weeks ago," the old man murmured, "I decided to see a doctor. I’d been feeling low for quite a while, and I thought it was about time I attended to a little personal maintenance."

Lexington looked Peter squarely in the face and said, "The report was that I have a heart ailment that’s apt to knock me off any second."

"Can’t anything be done about it?" asked Peter.

"Rest is the only prescription he could give me. And he said that would only spin out my life a little. Aside from that—no hope."

"I see," said Peter. "Then you’re looking for someone to learn the business and let you retire."

"It’s not retirement that’s the problem," said Lexington. "I wouldn’t be able to go away on trips. I’ve tried that, and I always have to hurry back because something’s gone wrong she can’t fix for herself. I know the reason, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s the way she’s built. If nobody’s here, she gets lonely." Lexington studied the desk top silently for a moment, before finishing quietly, "Somebody’s got to stay here to look after Lex."

At six o’clock, three hours after he had entered Lexington’s plant, Peter left. Lexington did not follow him down the corridor. He seemed exhausted after the afternoon’s discussion and indicated that Peter should find his own way out. This, of course, presented no difficulty, with Lex opening the doors for him, but it gave Peter an opportunity he had been hoping for.

He stopped in the reception room before crossing the threshold of the front door, which stood open for him. He turned and spoke to the apparently empty room. "Lex?" he said.

He wanted to say that he was flattered that he was being considered for the job; it was what a job-seeker should say, at that point, to the boss’s secretary. But when the soft voice came back—"Yes, Mr. Manners?"—saying anything like that to a machine felt suddenly silly.

He said: "I wanted you to know that it was a pleasure to meet you."

"Thank you," said the voice.

If it had said more, he might have, but it didn’t. Still feeling a little embarrassed, he went home.

At four in the morning, his phone rang. It was Lexington.

"Manners!" the old man gasped.

The voice was an alarm. Manners sat bolt upright, clutching the phone. "What’s the matter, sir?"

"My chest," Lexington panted. "I can feel it, like a knife on—I just wanted to—Wait a minute."

There was a confused scratching noise, interrupted by a few mumbles, in the phone.

"What’s going on, Mr. Lexington?" Peter cried. But it was several seconds before he got an answer.

"That’s better," said Lexington, his voice stronger. He apologized: "I’m sorry. Lex must have heard me. She sent in one of the materials handlers with a hypo. It helps."

The voice on the phone paused, then said matter-of-factly: "But I doubt that anything can help very much at this point. I’m glad I saw you today. I want you to come around in the morning. If I’m—not here, Lex will give you some papers to sign."

There was another pause, with sounds of harsh breathing. Then, strained again, the old man’s voice said: "I guess I won’t—be here. Lex will take care of it. Come early. Good-bye."

The distant receiver clicked.

Peter Manners sat on the edge of his bed in momentary confusion, then made up his mind. In the short hours he had known him, he had come to have a definite fondness for the old man; and there were times when machines weren’t enough, when Lexington should have another human being by his side. Clearly this was one such time.

Peter dressed in a hurry, miraculously found a cruising cab, sped through empty streets, leaped out in front of Lex Industries’ plain concrete walls, ran to the door—

In the waiting room, the soft, distant voice of Lex said: "He wanted you to be here, Mr. Manners. Come."

A door opened, and wordlessly he walked through it—to the main room of the factory.

He stopped, staring. Four squat materials handlers were quietly, slowly carrying old Lexington—no, not the man; the lifeless body that had been Lexington—carrying the body of the old man down the center aisle between the automatic lathes.

Peter protested: "Wait! I’ll get a doctor!" But the massive handling machines didn’t respond, and the gentle voice of Lex said:

"It’s too late for that, Mr. Manners."

Slowly and reverently, they placed the body on the work table of a huge milling machine that stood in the exact center of the factory main floor.

Elsewhere in the plant, a safety valve in the lubricating oil system was being bolted down. When that was done, the pressure in the system began to rise.

Near the loading door, a lubricating oil pipe burst. Another, on the other side of the building, split lengthwise a few seconds later, sending a shower of oil over everything in the vicinity. Near the front office, a stream of it was running across the floor, and at the rear of the building, in the storage area, one of the materials handlers had just finished cutting a pipe that led to the main oil tank. In fifteen minutes there was free oil in every corner of the shop.

All the materials handlers were now assembled around the milling machine, like mourners at a funeral. In a sense, they were. In another sense, they were taking part in something different, a ceremony that originated, and is said to have died, in a land far distant from the Lex Industries plant.

One of the machines approached Lexington’s body, and placed his hands on his chest.

Abruptly Lex said: "You’d better go now."

Peter jumped; he had been standing paralyzed for what seemed a long time. There was a movement beside him—a materials handler, holding out a sheaf of papers. Lex said: "These have to go to Mr. Lexington’s lawyer. The name is on them."

Clutching the papers for a hold on sanity, Peter cried, "You can’t do this! He didn’t build you just so you could—"

Two materials handlers picked him up with steely gentleness and carried him out.

"Good-bye, Mr. Manners," said the sweet, soft voice, and was silent.

He stood shaken while the thin jets of smoke became a column over the plain building, while the fire engines raced down and strung their hoses—too late. It was an act of suttee; the widow joining her husband in his pyre—being his pyre. Only when with a great crash the roof fell in did Peter remember the papers in his hand.

"Last Will and Testament," said one, and the name of the beneficiary was Peter’s own. "Certificate of Adoption," said another, and it was a legal document making Peter old man Lexington’s adopted son.

Peter Manners stood watching the hoses of the firemen hiss against what was left of Lex and her husband.

He had got the job.

HELEN O’LOY Lester Del Rey

I am an old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.

"Man, isn’t she a beauty?"

She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.

"Helen of Troy, eh?" He looked at her tag. "At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen… Mmmm… Helen of Alloy."

"Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?"

"Helen O’Loy she is, Phil." And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.

Dave and I hadn’t gone to college together, but when I came to Messina to practice medicine I found him downstairs in a little robot repair shop. After that we began to pal around, and when I started going with one twin he found the other equally attractive, so we made it a foursome.

When our business grew better, we rented a house near the rocket field—noisy but cheap, and the rockets discouraged apartment-building. We liked room enough to stretch ourselves. I suppose if we hadn’t quarreled with them we’d have married the twins in time. But Dave wanted to look over the latest Venus rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn. From then on we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.

But it wasn’t until "Lena" put vanilla on our steak instead of salt that we got off on the subject of emotions and robots. While Dave was dissecting Lena to find the trouble, we naturally mulled over the future of the mechs. He was sure that the robots would beat men someday, and I couldn’t see it.

"Look here, Dave," I argued. "You know Lena doesn’t think—not really. When those wires crossed, she could have corrected herself. But she didn’t bother; she followed the mechanical impulse. A man might have reached for the vanilla, but when he saw it in his hand, he’d have stopped. Lena has sense enough, but she has no emotions, no consciousness of self."

"All right, that’s the big trouble with the mechs now. But we’ll get around it, put in some mechanical emotions or something." He screwed Lena’s head back on, turned on her juice. "Go back to work, Lena, it’s nineteen o’clock."

Now, I specialized in endocrinology and related subjects. I wasn’t exactly a psychologist, but I did understand the glands, secretions, hormones, and miscellanies that are the physical causes of emotions. It took medical science three hundred years to find out how and why they worked, and I couldn’t see men duplicating them mechanically in much less time.

I brought home books and papers to prove it, and Dave quoted the invention of memory coils and veritoid eyes. During that year we swapped knowledge until Dave knew the whole theory of endocrinology and I could have made Lena from memory. The more we talked, the less sure I grew about the impossibility of homo mechanensis as the perfect type.

Poor Lena. Her cuproberyl body spent half its time in scattered pieces. Our first attempts were successful only in getting her to serve fried brushes for breakfast and wash the dishes in oleo oil. Then one day she cooked a perfect dinner with six wires crossed, and Dave was in ecstasy.

He worked all night on her wiring, put in a new coil, and taught her a fresh set of words. And the next day she flew into a tantrum and swore vigorously at us when we told her she wasn’t doing her work right.

"It’s a lie," she yelled, shaking a suction brush. "You’re all liars. If you so-and-so’s would leave me whole long enough, I might get something done around the place."

When we had calmed her temper and got her back to work, Dave ushered me into the study. "Not taking any chances with Lena," he explained. "We’ll have to cut out that adrenal pack and restore her to normalcy. But we’ve got to get a better robot. A housemaid mech isn’t complex enough."

"How about Dillard’s new utility models? They seem to combine everything in one."

"Exactly. Even so, we’ll need a special one built to order, with a full range of memory coils. And out of respect to old Lena, let’s get a female case for its works."

The result, of course, was Helen. The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case. Even the plastic-and-rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair. The bill they sent with her was another miracle, but Dave and I scraped it together; we had to turn Lena over to an exchange to complete it, though, and thereafter we ate out.

I’d performed plenty of delicate operations on living tissues, and some of them had been tricky, but I still felt like a pre-med student as we opened the front plate of her torso and began to sever the leads of her "nerves." Dave’s mechanical glands were all prepared, complex little bundles of radio tubes and wires that heterodyned on the electrical thought impulses and distorted them as adrenalin distorts the reaction of human minds.

Instead of sleeping that night, we pored over the schematic diagrams of her structures, tracing the thought mazes of her wiring, severing the leaders, implanting the heterones, as Dave called them. And while we worked, a mechanical tape fed carefully prepared thoughts of consciousness and awareness of life and feeling into an auxiliary memory coil. Dave believed in leaving nothing to chance.

It was growing light as we finished, exhausted and exultant. All that remained was the starting of her electrical power; like all the Dillard mechs, she was equipped with a tiny atomotor instead of batteries, and once started she would need no further attention.

Dave refused to turn her on. "Wait until we’ve slept and rested," he advised. "I’m as eager to try her as you are, but we can’t do much studying with our minds half dead. Turn in, and we’ll leave Helen until later."

Even though we were both reluctant to follow it, we knew the idea was sound. We turned in, and sleep hit us before the air conditioner could cut down to sleeping temperature. And then Dave was pounding on my shoulder.

"Phil! Hey, snap out of it!"

I groaned, turned over, and faced him. "Well?… Uh! What is it? Did Helen—"

"No, it’s old Mrs. Van Styler. She ’visored to say her son has an infatuation for a servant girl, and she wants you to come out and give counterhormones. They’re at the summer camp in Maine."

Rich Mrs. Van Styler! I couldn’t afford to let that account down, now that Helen had used up the last of my funds. But it wasn’t a job I cared for.

"Counterhormones! That’ll take two weeks’ full time. Anyway, I’m no society doctor, messing with glands to keep fools happy. My job’s taking care of serious trouble."

"And you want to watch Helen." Dave was grinning, but he was serious too. "I told her it’d cost her fifty thousand!"

"Huh?"

"And she said okay, if you hurried."

Of course, there was only one thing to do, though I could have wrung fat Mrs. Van Styler’s neck cheerfully. It wouldn’t have happened if she’d used robots like everyone else—but she had to be different.

Consequently, while Dave was back home puttering with Helen, I was racking my brain to trick Archy Van Styler into getting the counterhormones, and giving the servant girl the same. Oh, I wasn’t supposed to, but the poor kid was crazy about Archy. Dave might have written, I thought, but never a word did I get.

It was three weeks later instead of two when I reported that Archy was "cured," and collected on the line. With that money in my pocket, I hired a personal rocket and was back in Messina in half an hour. I didn’t waste time in reaching the house.

As I stepped into the alcove, I heard a light patter of feet, and an eager voice called out, "Dave, dear?" For a minute I couldn’t answer, and the voice came again, pleading, "Dave?"

I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect Helen to meet me that way, stopping and staring at me, obvious disappointment on her face, little hands fluttering up against her breast.

"Oh," she cried. "I thought it was Dave. He hardly comes home to eat now, but I’ve had supper waiting hours." She dropped her hands and managed a smile. "You’re Phil, aren’t you? Dave told me about you when… at first. I’m so glad to see you home, Phil."

"Glad to see you doing so well, Helen." Now, what does one say for light conversation with a robot? "You said something about supper?"

"Oh, yes. I guess Dave ate downtown again, so we might as well go in. It’ll be nice having someone to talk to around the house, Phil. You don’t mind if I call you Phil, do you? You know, you’re sort of a godfather to me."

We ate. I hadn’t counted on such behavior, but apparently she considered eating as normal as walking. She didn’t do much eating, at that; most of the time she spent staring at the front door.

Dave came in as we were finishing, a frown a yard wide on his face. Helen started to rise, but he ducked toward the stairs, throwing words over his shoulder.

"Hi, Phil. See you up here later."

There was something radically wrong with him. For a moment I’d thought his eyes were haunted, and as I turned to Helen hers were filling with tears. She gulped, choked them back, and fell viciously on her food.

"What’s the matter with him… and you?" I asked.

"He’s sick of me." She pushed her plate away and got up hastily. "You’d better see him while I clean up. And there’s nothing wrong with me. And it’s not my fault, anyway." She grabbed the dishes and ducked into the kitchen; I could have sworn she was crying.

Maybe all thought is a series of conditioned reflexes—but she certainly had picked up a lot of conditioning while I was gone. Lena in her heyday had been nothing like this. I went up to see if Dave could make any sense out of the hodgepodge.

He was squirting soda into a large glass of apple brandy, and I saw that the bottle was nearly empty. "Join me?" he asked.

It seemed like a good idea. The roaring blast of an ion rocket overhead was the only familiar thing left in the house. From the look around Dave’s eyes, it wasn’t the first bottle he’d emptied while I was gone, and there were more left. He dug out a new bottle for his own drink.

"Of course, it’s none of my business, Dave, but that stuff won’t steady your nerves any. What’s gotten into you and Helen? Been seeing ghosts?"

Helen was wrong; he hadn’t been eating downtown—nor anywhere else. His muscles collapsed into a chain in a way that spoke of fatigue and nerves, but mostly of hunger. "You noticed it, eh?"

"Noticed it? The two of you jammed it down my throat."

"Uhmmm." He swatted at a nonexistent fly and slumped farther down in the pneumatic. "Guess maybe I should have waited with Helen until you got back. But if that stereo cast hadn’t changed… Anyway, it did. And those mushy books of yours finished the job."

"Thanks. That makes it all clear."

"You know, Phil, I’ve got a place up in the country—fruit ranch. My dad left it to me. Think I’ll look it over."

And that’s the way it went. But finally, by much liquor and more perspiration, I got some of the story out of him before I gave him a phenobarbital and put him to bed. Then I hunted up Helen and dug the rest of the story from her, until it made sense.

Apparently as soon as I was gone Dave had turned her on and made preliminary tests, which were entirely satisfactory. She had reacted beautifully—so well that he decided to leave her and go down to work as usual.

Naturally, with all her untried emotions, she was filled with curiosity and wanted him to stay. Then he had an inspiration. After showing her what her duties about the house would be, he set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.

The travelogue held her attention until it was finished, and the station switched over to a current serial with Larry Ainslee, the same cute emoter who’d given us all the trouble with the twins. Incidentally, he looked something like Dave.

Helen took to the serial like a seal to water. This play-acting was a perfect outlet for her newly excited emotions. When that particular episode finished, she found a love story on another station and added still more to her education. The afternoon programs were mostly news and music, but by then she’d found my books; and I do have rather adolescent taste in literature.

Dave came home in the best of spirits. The front alcove was neatly swept, and there was the odor of food in the air that he’d missed around the house for weeks. He had visions of Helen as the superefficient housekeeper.

So it was a shock to him to feel two strong arms around his neck from behind and hear a voice all a-quiver coo into his ears, "Oh, Dave, darling, I’ve missed you so, and I’m so thrilled that you’re back." Helen’s technique may have lacked polish, but it had enthusiasm, as he found when he tried to stop her from kissing him. She had learned fast and furiously—also, Helen was powered by an atomotor.

Dave wasn’t a prude, but he remembered that she was only a robot, after all. The fact that she felt, acted, and looked like a young goddess in his arms didn’t mean much. With some effort, he untangled her and dragged her off to supper, where he made her eat with him to divert her attention.

After her evening work, he called her into the study and gave her a thorough lecture on the folly of her ways. It must have been good, for it lasted three solid hours and covered her station in life, the idiocy of stereos, and various other miscellanies. When he had finished, Helen looked up with dewy eyes and said wistfully, "I know, Dave, but I still love you."

That’s when Dave started drinking.

It grew worse each day. If he stayed downtown, she was crying when he came home. If he returned on time, she fussed over him and threw herself at him. In his room, with door locked, he could hear her downstairs pacing up and down and muttering; and when he went down, she stared at him reproachfully until he had to go back up.

I sent Helen out on a fake errand in the morning and got Dave up. With her gone, I made him eat a decent breakfast and gave him a tonic for his nerves. He was still listless and moody.

"Look here, Dave," I broke in on his brooding. "Helen isn’t human, after all. Why not cut off her power and change a few memory coils? Then we can convince her that she never was in love and couldn’t get that way."

"You try it. I had that idea, but she put up a wail that would wake Homer. She says it would be murder—and the hell of it is that I can’t help feeling the same about it. Maybe she isn’t human, but you wouldn’t guess it when she puts on that martyred look and tells you to go ahead and kill her."

"We never put in substitutes for some of the secretions present in man during the love period."

"I don’t know what we put in. Maybe the heterones backfired or something. Anyway, she’s made this idea so much a part of her thoughts that we’d have to put in a whole new set of coils."

"Well, why not?"

"Go ahead. You’re the surgeon of this family. I’m not used to fussing with emotions. Matter of fact, since she’s been acting this way I’m beginning to hate work on any robot. My business is going to blazes."

He saw Helen coming up the walk and ducked out the back door for the monorail express. I’d intended to put him back in bed, but let him go. Maybe he’d be better off at his shop than at home.

"Dave’s gone?" Helen did have that martyred look now.

"Yeah. I got him to eat, and he’s gone to work."

"I’m glad he ate." She slumped down in a chair as if she were worn out, though how a mech could be tired beat me. "Phil?"

"Well, what is it?"

"Do you think I’m bad for him? I mean, do you think he’d be happier if I weren’t here?"

"He’ll go crazy if you keep acting this way around him."

She winced. Those little hands were twisting about pleadingly, and I felt like an inhuman brute. But I’d started, and I went ahead. "Even if I cut out your power and changed your coils, he’d probably still be haunted by you."

"I know. But I can’t help it. And I’d make him a good wife, really I would, Phil."

I gulped; this was going a little too far. "And give him strapping sons to boot, I suppose. A man wants flesh and blood, not rubber and metal."

"Don’t, please! I can’t think of myself that way; to me, I’m a woman. And you know how perfectly I’m made to imitate a real woman… in all ways. I couldn’t give him sons, but in every other way… I’d try so hard, I know I’d make him a good wife."

I gave up.

Dave didn’t come home that night, nor the next day. Helen was fussing and fuming, wanting me to call the hospitals and the police, but I knew nothing had happened to him. He always carried identification. Still, when he didn’t come on the third day, I began to worry. And when Helen started out for his shop, I agreed to go with her.

Dave was there, with another man I didn’t know. I parked Helen where he couldn’t see her, but where she could hear, and went in as soon as the other fellow left.

Dave looked a little better and seemed glad to see me. "Hi, Phil—just closing up. Let’s go eat."

Helen couldn’t hold back any longer, but came trooping in. "Come on home, Dave. I’ve got roast duck with spice stuffing, and you know you love that."

"Scat!" said Dave. She shrank back, turned to go. "Oh, all right, stay. You might as well hear it, too. I’ve sold the shop. The fellow you saw just bought it, and I’m going up to the old fruit ranch I told you about, Phil. I can’t stand the mechs any more."

"You’ll starve to death at that," I told him.

"No, there’s a growing demand for old-fashioned fruit, raised out of doors. People are tired of this water-culture stuff. Dad always made a living out of it. I’m leaving as soon as I can get home and pack."

Helen clung to her idea. "I’ll pack, Dave, while you eat. I’ve got apple cobbler for dessert." The world was toppling under her feet, but she still remembered how crazy he was for apple cobbler.

Helen was a good cook; in fact she was a genius, with all the good points of a woman and a mech combined. Dave ate well enough, after he got started. By the time supper was over, he’d thawed out enough to admit he liked the duck and the cobbler, and to thank her for packing. In fact, he even let her kiss him goodbye, though he firmly refused to let her go to the rocket field with him.

Helen was trying to be brave when I got back, and we carried on a stumbling conversation about Mrs. Van Styler’s servants for a while. But the talk began to lull, and she sat staring out of the window at nothing most of the time. Even the stereo comedy lacked interest for her, and I was glad enough to have her go off to her room. She could cut her power down to simulate sleep when she chose.

As the days slipped by, I began to realize why she couldn’t believe herself a robot. I got to thinking of her as a girl and companion myself. Except for odd intervals when she went off by herself to brood, or when she kept going to the telescript for a letter that never came, she was as good a companion as a man could ask. There was something homey about the place that Lena had never put there.

I took Helen on a shopping trip to Hudson, and she giggled and purred over the wisps of silk and glassheen that were the fashion, tried on endless hats, and conducted herself as any normal girl might. We went trout fishing for a day, where she proved to be as good a sport and as sensibly silent as a man. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and thought she was forgetting Dave. That was before I came home unexpectedly and found her doubled up on the couch, threshing her legs up and down and crying to the high heavens.

It was then I called Dave. They seemed to have trouble in reaching him, and Helen came over beside me while I waited. She was tense and fidgety as an old maid trying to propose. But finally they located Dave.

"What’s up, Phil?" he asked as his face came on the viewplate. "I was just getting my things together to—"

I broke him off. "Things can’t go on the way they are, Dave. I’ve made up my mind. I’m yanking Helen’s coils tonight. It won’t be worse than what she’s going through now."

Helen reached up and touched my shoulder. "Maybe that’s best, Phil. I don’t blame you."

Dave’s voice cut in. "Phil, you don’t know what you’re doing!"

"Of course I do. It’ll all be over by the time you can get here. As you heard, she’s agreeing."

There was a black cloud sweeping over Dave’s face. "I won’t have it, Phil. She’s half mine and I forbid it!"

"Of all the—"

"Go ahead, call me anything you want. I’ve changed my mind. I was packing to come home when you called."

Helen jerked around me, her eyes glued to the panel. "Dave, do you… are you…"

"I’m just waking up to what a fool I’ve been, Helen. Phil, I’ll be home in a couple of hours, so if there’s anything—"

He didn’t have to chase me out. But I heard Helen cooing something about loving to be a rancher’s wife before I could shut the door.

Well, I wasn’t as surprised as they thought. I think I knew when I called Dave what would happen. No man acts the way Dave had been acting because he hates a girl; only because he thinks he does—and thinks wrong.

No woman ever made a lovelier bride or a sweeter wife. Helen never lost her flare for cooking and making a home. With her gone, the old house seemed empty, and I began to drop out to the ranch once or twice a week. I suppose they had trouble at times, but I never saw it, and I know the neighbors never suspected they were anything but normal man and wife.

Dave grew older, and Helen didn’t, of course. But between us we put lines in her face and grayed her hair without letting Dave know that she wasn’t growing old with him; he’d forgotten that she wasn’t human, I guess.

I practically forgot, myself. It wasn’t until a letter came from Helen this morning that I woke up to reality. There, in her beautiful script, just a trifle shaky in places, was the inevitable that neither Dave nor I had seen.

DEAR PHIL,

As you know, Dave has had heart trouble for several years now. We expected him to live on just the same, but it seems that wasn’t to be. He died in my arms just before sunrise. He sent you his greetings and farewell.

I’ve one last favor to ask of you, Phil. There is only one thing for me to do when this is finished. Acid will burn out metal as well as flesh, and I’ll be dead with Dave. Please see that we are buried together, and that the morticians do not find my secret. Dave wanted it that way, too.

Poor, dear Phil. I know you loved Dave as a brother, and how you felt about me. Please don’t grieve too much for us, for we have had a happy life together, and both feel that we should cross this last bridge side by side.

With love and thanks from,

HELEN

It had to come sooner or later, I suppose, and the first shock has worn off now. I’ll be leaving in a few minutes to carry out Helen’s last instructions.

Dave was a lucky man, and the best friend I ever had. And Helen—well, as I said, I’m an old man now and can view things more sanely; I should have married and raised a family, I suppose. But… there was only one Helen O’Loy.

THE PEACEMAKER T. S. Bazelli

The message snakes across my visual field in red flashing letters, waking me from slumber. "Disruption reported."

I unhook from the charging station and do a status check before the coordinates arrive. The gears in my shoulders whine with stiffness. My audio and visual sensors are at 80%. I am scheduled for repairs, but my battery is full and I am eager to serve.

A peacekeeping unit returning from duty enters the building and heads for its charging station. Its uniform is ripped at the elbows and knees. Its left eyeball lolls uselessly up and down. We do not speak, though we could. We walk clockwise in opposite directions, around a chunk of collapsed concrete, acknowledging each other in silence. The damage does not matter. It is the people that matter. It is better to preserve our batteries for the work.

We have autonomy, we speak, we walk, and we are equipped with emotional simulation chips, but we are not people. This message is highlighted in bold font beneath our primary directive. The people, the programmers, they remind us with every reboot, so that we serve to our best ability. We are not important. I am not important.

I move as quickly as possible, but the roads are blocked by detritus: overturned cars and scattered bricks. Air sirens scream while drones whirl by overhead, and I ping the server for new instructions, but headquarters sends no commands. Only local dispatches still work. I still work.

I replay the last set of instructions we were issued.

All visitor visas and work permits have been cancelled. Foreigners must be collected for deportation. All identification chips must be scanned, and those without chips must be detained. All citizens must submit DNA to the census bureau, or legal status will be revoked.

These instructions conflict with my primary programming and it makes my processor loop. I was not programmed to cause distress to the people, and screening identification chips, and removing them from their homes causes undue anxiety, cortisol spikes.

A street-sweeping bot scuttles past my boots and into the gutter. Its arms are full of rubble and it darts back and forth, busy at its task. It is a good robot, well-made and still functioning properly. I do not tell it that its work is pointless, that the streets need to be rebuilt, not cleaned. It is good to work. The work is why we exist. We all help the people.

But there are not many people left.

Go Home Forein Dogs!

The painted words drip green across the windows of the corner store that logged the distress call. I recognize the vocal signature of Nancy Johnson and my processors work overtime. I know that the sign is incorrect. The misspelling is highlighted, obscuring my vision. Nancy’s place of birth is Hospital 2X5Y on 4th Avenue, therefore she is not foreign. She is also not a dog. The semantic wrongness makes my sensors grind. I send an electric jolt to power the nanites embedded in the window as I pass the threshold. The graffiti must be removed.

Inside the shop, Nancy swings a scrap of metal at three young people while one of them sprays green paint over her shelves. The other two toss cans of food into their bags. The paint glows like radiation, like poison, but it is only paint.

"You goddamned thieving hooligans!" Nancy shouts, slipping into the English of her second language, but my language chips can parse English as well as fifteen other languages. I scan all their chips on the fly. The two young men are from Service Area 53. The young woman with the spray paint is local. I remember that when she was a child, she would run after me and ask for balloons. I remember her smile. She is not smiling now.

"Peace, friends. Let us find a way to resolve this," I keep my voice cheerful.

They stare, noticing me for the first time. One of the young men walks over and knocks on my head as if it were a door. "Hey Peacekeeper, don’t you know there’s a war out there? How are you still functioning?"

"I am a civil unit," I say, but they do not listen. I am intelligent enough to guess that they do not care. They are desperate, hungry and frightened, like all the people left behind. I give them mild zaps, draining my battery, herding them like sheep.

I tell Nancy to lock the doors. I do not let go of their coats until I hear the bolts slide into place. Perhaps these hooligans think that they are doing their civic duty and I do not blame them. They are people. People are prone to interpreting the law imperfectly. People cannot read identity chips without a handheld scanner.

Once we are in the street, they begin to kick and punch. I feel a spring go loose in my abdomen, but they cannot harm me permanently. I can be repaired. Their curses echo down the empty street, and their grubby fingers tear at my lab-grown skin, exposing silicone and wire. They are frustrated. I understand this. I know that it is better for them to let out their anger. My head vibrates as I let them beat me.

Nancy presses her face to the glass in her shop. She is crying. It is good to be seen and acknowledged for the work.

Don’t cry, I would like to tell her. I am doing my job and it is good to be useful. Already, the nanites are eating away the paint. Go Home For, it says. The offensive spelling is gone.

Before the war, I would often break up schoolyard fights. I enjoy children. They understand fairness and that I can call their parents if they do not listen. I search my pockets, but there are no candies or balloons to set things right, only a hole where the stitches have worn out.

"What use are you when bombs are falling, Peacekeeper?" the young woman asks me. "What a waste of charge!" This stops the memory playback. There are no children here anymore.

War is outside the scope of my programming. I could explain, but to speak would only upset them further. They are people too. They are also important. My blueprints are stored in servers beneath a mountain. I am one of many, though my experiences are unique. I can be rebuilt. Humans only reproduce. I have seen recordings of reproduction. It is messy and prone to error. Human parts cannot be replaced. Each human is one of a kind, couture.

I know this word is wrong. For weeks my language cortex has been scheduled for an adjustment, but our technicians are all occupied by the war. I cannot find the right words.

Drones scream above, and explosions shake the next block over. The young people run. Go Home, the green letters urge now.

My memory loops. My processor spins.

For weeks I have computed an answer to the problem of the war. My programming compels me to make people happy, but the war scars every surface of my city. Genocide, I know this word. Xenophobia, I have learned from my English dictionary. Love, I know this word also.

I return to headquarters, dock into my charging station, and unload footage of the broken city. The power is out again. I look for orders, but there are none, and our human supervisors have long gone. Half the building is sprayed with shrapnel, but it does not stop us. Other peacemakers move about, trying to do the work. I clock my time manually. It is good to be useful.

Go. The green letters burn bright in my memory. I have just a little charge left.

I do a complete inventory of my parts. My speakers were built in the United Koreas, my central processor was designed in Lower Canada, the metal of my joints was smelted in China… I print shipping labels one by one and relay my solution to the local server. The logic is sound.

I take a pair of scissors to my face and begin to snip.

SEXY ROBOT MOM Sandra McDonald

Scott said that Alina was his favorite mashup between a sexbot and a toaster oven, but Alina disagreed. Although she shared the same buxom brunette shell as the 7832BNX7 series, she hadn’t been given a clitoris, vulva, or vaginal port. Her programming included only the most rudimentary knowledge of human sexual practices. On the other hand, her expandable womb was adjustable for time and temperature, had a durable protective shell, and could wirelessly transmit information the same way any kitchen appliance could.

"I think I’m much more toaster oven than sexbot," she said as he adjusted her left nipple tube.

"Trust me." Scott snapped her areola back into place. "Parents look at you, they see inflatable doll and not melting pizza. That’s why they had to frump up the rest of your series."

Alina glanced at the other units getting serviced in the maintenance bays of New Human, More Human. Some had oily hair (undesirable) or asymmetrical facial features (acceptable within certain parameters) or deliberately crooked noses (unacceptable). "I was the first?"

"You’re number seven," he said, floppy bangs hanging in front of his blue eyes (very desirable). "Lucky seven."

"I don’t remember the others."

"No, you’re not equipped with long-term memory." Scott stepped back and gave her a wide grin. "Go ahead, squirt me."

She loaded her breast with saline from an internal reservoir and took aim. The fluid hit his lab coat. Scott spread his arms, delighted. "There’s my girl. You’re all set. Inspected, warrantied, and ready for your next implant. See you in nine months." Alina buttoned her pink blouse, straightened her floral skirt, and walked herself down to the Impregnation Department. Six-foot-tall photographs of happy babies and their parents hung on the cream-colored walls. Dr. Oliver Ogilvy, who was tall (desirable for men) but had a weak chin (undesirable in either sex) brought her into his office. Awards and plaques dotted the walls, and the windows overlooked the Hudson Valley.

"This is Mr. and Mrs. Crowther, Alina," he said. "They like your profile. Eleven successful terms."

"That’s quite impressive," said Mr. Crowther, jovially. He was middle-aged, with thick artificial hair and well-tailored clothes.

Alina shook his hand gently. "Thank you, sir," she said, although she had no knowledge of previous pregnancies. She was programmed to believe whatever Dr. Ogilvy told her.

Mrs. Crowther, short and slender (both characteristics desirable in females, but not in excess) folded her arms across her chest. "Ninety-nine months pregnant. Doesn’t it… get stress fractures or something? All that expansion and contraction?" Dr. Ogilvy leaned back in his leather chair. "The womb is built for flexibility. The torso was specially designed to expand in proportion to your child’s development."

"And it walks around while pregn—while it’s incubating?" Mrs. Crowther asked.

"We call Alina ‘she’," Dr. Ogilvy said. "It humanizes the experience for you. Yes. She’ll be walking around. She’ll be living with you, consuming food at your table to process for your child. She’ll interact with you both on a daily basis. Your family and neighbors will get to know her. You might even have a baby shower."

Mrs. Crowther flinched. "Baby shower? For a robot?"

"For you, honey," Mr. Crowther said. "She’s just carrying it, but you’re the mom-to-be. You’ll be the center of attention. I promise."

Alina’s decision trees told her it would be appropriate to nod, so she did.

Mrs. Crowther looked doubtful. "Maybe we should just let the machines carry it here. I don’t know if I want it in my house. It—she—seems so bland."

The chair under Dr. Ogilvy creaked as he leaned forward. "She doesn’t have a personality profile loaded yet. You choose the options. Shy, extroverted? Witty, educated, quiet, unobtrusive? You pick her intelligence level and hobbies. Her last couple wanted her to speak Italian and excel at cooking."

"I can cook just fine," Mrs. Crowther said bitterly. "I just can’t get pregnant again. We’ve been trying for twenty-seven months now."

"That’s exactly what Alina is for," Dr. Ogilvy said smoothly. "Think about it, Joyce. Nine months from today, you could be holding your son or daughter. Your waistline won’t change an inch. Your hormones will be steady and calm. You won’t have the trauma of childbirth or the risk of post-partum depression. Your child will be brought into this world in a safe, secure, extremely successful robot incubator."

Mr. Crowther put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. "Sounds ideal to me, sweetheart."

Mrs. Crowther lifted her chin. She gave a tiny nod.

Alina was impregnated the next day. The fertilized egg instantly attached to her artificial endometrium and began to divide. Forty-eight hours after that, she was loaded into a van, transported across the continent, and delivered to the Crowthers with a blue corsage pinned to her wrist. The corsage held a handwritten note from Dr. Ogilvy: "Congratulations on your future baby boy!"

Mr. Crowther said, "Let’s name him Owen," and Mrs. Crowther said, "Show it to its room."

The Crowthers’ house was a two-story Mediterranean-style villa with hardwood floors and oil paintings of rustic landscapes. Alina’s room was on the second floor, adjacent to the nursery. She wasn’t allowed in the nursery. Her room had a bed, although she didn’t require one. It had a walk-in closet where she kept a different skirt and blouse for every day of the week. Her breakfast was delivered every morning, each meal perfectly calculated for the fetus’s benefit. After eating, she sat in a rocking chair by the window and gazed at the crystal blue swimming pool below. No one ever swam in its waters—not in the winter, when the hills were brown; not in the summer, when the hills were still brown and the maids complained of drought.

Lunch was delivered promptly at noon. Afterward Alina emptied her waste port and returned to the chair again. She didn’t think or dream or speculate; she didn’t grow bored or restless or impatient; she had no insecurities to wrestle with, no resentments to harbor, no agenda to pursue. She monitored the fetus and adjusted hormones, nutrients, and antibodies as needed. She watched the faint ripples of pool water when the pump kicked in. She analyzed the colors in its depths as the sun moved across the sky.

Late each evening Mr. Crowther would gather her at dinner. They ate in the large kitchen, with its gleaming marble counters and heavy smell of spices. Mr. Crowther asked about the baby and talked about his own childhood growing up in Schenectady. He would put his hand on her growing stomach and listen to her project the baby’s heartbeat through a speaker in her chest. He apologized for Mrs. Crowther.

"We had a daughter, but she drowned," he said. "And another, but she was stillborn. You’re our third chance at happiness. Maybe having a boy will bring good luck."

Alina had been programmed for optimism. "I’m sure it will, sir."

In her sixth month, after a dinner in which he consumed a bottle of wine, Mr. Crowther walked Alina back to her room and, once inside, leaned forward until his mouth was only inches from hers. His skin was flushed, his pupils wide. "Do you mind… I mean, I know you don’t… but would it be okay for me to kiss you? Could I do that and you wouldn’t tell Mrs. Crowther?"

"I’m programmed to be honest if she asks," Alina said.

Mr. Crowther kissed her anyway. She measured the pressure and temperature of his lips and waited for him to stop.

"Well," he said, eventually. "Body of a sexbot, demeanor like a cold fish."

‘Yes, sir," she replied.

On the fourth day of her thirty-fifth week, her womb transmitted a completion signal to Dr. Ogilvy’s office. A midwife-technician arrived six hours later. Alina stretched out for the first and only time on the bed in her room. Mr. Crowther entered his identification code. Mrs. Crowther entered hers. The skin over Alina’s belly slid back to reveal a hatch, and the hatch popped open to reveal baby Owen squirming in a puddle of earthy-smelling fluids. Alina could have reached down and cut the cord herself, but the technician did it.

"Congratulations!" The midwife lifted Owen and deftly began to clean him. "Happy birthday, Mom and baby. Do you want Alina to nurse him, or is she coming back with me?"

"We have formula," Mrs. Crowther said. "Take it back."

The next morning she was back in the maintenance bay, her milk extracted and recycled. A technician named Scott flushed out her nipple tubes. He said she was his favorite mashup between a sexbot and a toaster oven.

"I’ve never heard anyone say that before," she said.

‘You’re not programmed with a long-term memory." He stepped back and said, "Okay, let’s see how your aim is. Hit me with both barrels, baby."

She took aim and soaked the front of his jacket.

"Excellent," he said. "Go get knocked up, and we’ll see you in nine months."

Dan Poole and Mark Dubay were a gay couple who paid for an egg from an anonymous donor. They each provided sperm but asked the laboratory to randomly pick whose would get used. "She’s going to be both of ours regardless," Mark said confidently, and Dan agreed, and so Alina was forbidden from revealing that it was Dan’s DNA she could detect in the fetus. Both men were of African descent, and the egg had come from a similar donor. Alina mixed up hot chocolate and added just enough cream to illustrate the baby’s probable skin color.

"Our little café au lait," Dan said, which is how the baby earned her nickname.

Their house was a large, L-shaped ranch set in the countryside of central Georgia, surrounded by forests and streams. They both worked from home. Greenhouse science, they said. They had opted for her to be energetic, polylingual, knowledgeable about wines, and good with dogs. Every day Alina took a long walk with either Mark or Dan and one of their three Dobermans.

"Are you happy being a pregnant robot?" Dan asked one day as they walked along a stream.

"Yes, sir."

"Really?" Dan threw a stick for one of the dogs to fetch. "Can you be happy?"

"I’m programmed to say it and portray it in appropriate circumstances," she replied. "You seem eager for me to say yes, so I said yes."

"But you don’t have any emotions of your own."

"No, sir. My series was not approved for emotion chips."

The summer woods edged to fall and then winter, with snowfall so heavy that it blocked the road to town for two weeks. On the first day of Alina’s thirty-fourth week, the Womb Alert announced Au Lait’s readiness. Dan entered his code without error, but Mark was so nervous he hit the wrong numbers twice and nearly locked her womb. Baby Au Lait, now named Sonora, emerged healthy and kicking. Mark and Dan retained Alina to breastfeed her for six months. She also changed diapers, burped the baby, and rocked her through sleepless nights. But she didn’t love her, because how could she?

One day, Mark said, "Alina, we want to have another baby. You have to go back to the lab for the implant, but they’re not going to erase your memory of us. You’re coming right back here with a son. We’ve already nicknamed him Con Leche."

"That’s excellent news, sir," she replied.

Once she was back in the lab, Scott flushed out her systems and adjusted her nipple tubes. Bent close to her, his breath hot on her skin, he said, ‘You’re my favorite offspring of a toaster oven and a sexbot."

Alina tilted her head. ‘You told me that the last time you serviced my nipples. They seem to require much maintenance."

He abruptly stopped fiddling. "Did I? Maybe I should check your waste port instead."

Later she reported to Impregnation. The donor egg had already been fertilized with Mark’s sperm. Alina climbed into a transfer chamber and went into rest mode. A subroutine monitored the successful implantation of the egg into her womb. Shortly afterward, her external sensors recorded the dimming of the light over her chamber. The power feed snaking up into her foot abruptly spiked, and an emergency command was fed into her central processing unit: START STASIS.

Alina and Con Leche both went to sleep.

Thud, crack, thud, crack. Alina opened her eyes. She was in a dark transfer chamber. Above her were dim pinpricks of light, distant and shifting as something made noise and dug toward her. The external temperature measured below freezing (inhospitable to human life) and after a few milliseconds she concluded the chamber was buried by ice and snow.

No decision tree offered an advantageous course of action. She opted for inaction, and counted thuds and cracks until a shovel hit the plastic a few inches above her face. Soon a human face was staring down at her. The face was asymmetrical (undesirable) and damaged by sun and wind (regrettable). Snow goggles covered the eyes and a parka hood hid the human’s hair and chin.

Alina waited patiently until the human broke through the shield.

"Are you awake, or just staring at me?" the human asked.

"I’m awake, thank you," Alina said. "Are you a male or female? Your face and voice are indeterminable."

"Doesn’t matter," the human said. "Get up, robot-girl."

Alina freed her feet from their plugs and climbed out. What had once been the implant lab was now a snow cave illuminated by battery lanterns. Thick ice coated the equipment, machines, and computers. The roof had partially collapsed, which explained the snow and ice piled on Alina’s chamber. A long knotted rope hung through a separate hole that had been cut in the ceiling.

"I’m Coren," the stranger said. He or she was about Alina’s height, maybe a little overweight, no facial hair. Young, perhaps mid-twenties or so. It was impossible to discern breasts under the bulky gray parka.

"I’m Alina," Alina said. "Should I call you sir or madam?"

Coren began breaking the shovel down into smaller pieces that fit into a backpack. "You’re really hung up on gender, aren’t you?"

"I’m programmed to recognize two."

"Well, I’m not programmed to answer you," Coren said. "Call me by my name, or call me hey you, or just call me a person. I don’t care."

Alina’s databank lit up with information about gender-neutral pronouns. She had several options to choose from. Ze, En, Co, Thon. In her sixth pregnancy, the parents had both been professors of female sexuality at Brown University. They’d taught her feminist language and theory, matricentricty and gynocritics and—

The ice slid out from under Alina’s feet. She fell flat on her rear and stayed there.

"Hey!" Coren abandoned the backpack. "Are you all right?"

"I am functioning well," Alina replied, flooded with memories of that pregnancy— Professor Ahmeti and Professor Sauter, their house in Providence, the two white cats who sat in the sunny windows all day, the way Professor Ahmeti made meatball and garlic soup every Friday night and Professor Sauter chewed through pencils when grading papers, their happy faces when their baby was ready, the way they’d kissed Alina’s cheeks in thanks.

You’re not equipped with long-term memory, she’d been told. By Scott. Scott with his easy smile and his bangs in his eyes and his devotion to fixing her nipple tubes every time she came to the shop.

Coren said, "I know you’re just a robot, but I’ve seen healthier looking corpses. You sick?"

Alina adjusted her cheeks to include more pink. She flushed red to her lips, and made her eyes appear brighter and more blue (very desirable).

For some reason, the adjustments made Coren frown. "Let’s climb out of here. I’ve got a coat and clothes for you so you don’t freeze."

"I am impervious to most extremes of weather, Person Coren. Also, my uterus operates independently on its own settings and is at optimal temperature."

"Yeah. About that. Are you carrying?"

"Carrying what?" Alina asked.

"A baby, dummy."

Alina answered, "Yes. I am carrying the fertilized egg of Mark Dubay and Dan Poole. It is four days old. Are Dan and Mark nearby?"

"They’re dead," Coren said. "Let’s get out of this ice hole before we freeze over, and you can see what the world did to itself."

Winter had come and stayed. Although Alina’s calendar told her it was June, the forest around New Human, More Human was nothing but frozen treetops buried by snow. She saw no birds or squirrels, no smoke from cities or factories, no signs that any humans lived nearby. Only snow, ice, and gray sky. She attempted to connect with the data center, but received no answer.

Alina said, "Mark and Dan were studying climate science. They postulated a scenario of long-term adverse meteorological change."

Coren had hunched down next to a sled packed with supplies. "Sounds like fancy words for the Big Freeze. Come here, put these clothes on. Hard to explain me dragging you around dressed like it’s a heat wave."

Alina donned trousers, boots, gloves, and a gray parka. The clothes were frayed but clean. Coren handed her a pair of snowshoes that looked like oversized tennis rackets and asked, "You ever use these?"

"No sir or ma’am."

‘You better learn fast." Coren strapped down everything on the sled, shouldered two straps to drag it, and said, "Let’s go."

"I can pull that," Alina said. "I’m not susceptible to fatigue or strain."

"I’ll do it," Coren said.

Once they had hiked all the way down the hill, Alina saw that Dr. Ogilvy’s complex was indistinguishable under the wintry landscape. He’d be disappointed, she thought. He had worked very hard on her and her predecessors, Acantha and Adelphia and the other four whose names somehow escaped her—

If it was unexpected to have this reservoir of memories bubbling inside her, it was equally unexpected that the data was incomplete. She could picture Dan’s kind face but not Mark’s. Every detail of her room at the Crowthers’ villa was crystal-clear, but the inside of Dr. Ogilvy’s office was a gray box devoid of specifics. It was likely that she was internally damaged. But Scott had said she had no long-term memory capacity at all. Had he been wrong?

You’re my favorite, he’d said. Time and time again, as he adjusted her breasts and held her tight.

They walked a mile in silence, then Alina asked, "My internal calendar says I’ve been in stasis for fifty years. Is that correct, Person Coren?"

Coren was leading the way, using snow poles to test for unsafe areas. "Just call me Coren."

"I’m programmed for formality. Person is an appropriate title. Person also comes with a gender-neutral pronoun: per. Per talks to perself. Give it to per. Per went to the mall."

Coren grunted. "If it makes you happy, call me whatever. Can you be happy?"

"I’m programmed to mimic." Alina smiled widely. "I’m happy you rescued me."

"Stop that, it’s creepy." Coren stopped, dropped the sled straps, and rubbed per shoulders. "Here’s what I’d like. I’d like you to help me set up our tent. It’s getting dark and we better bed down."

The tent was big enough for two people to lie down inside and to sit up if they didn’t mind being a little hunched over. The light gray fabric blended in with the snow and provided a barrier against the bitter wind. Coren also had chemical heat-packs marked with faded letters, and thermal blankets to wrap perself in, and a small camp stove that per set up outside.

"I know how to build a campfire," Alina offered as they hunched beside it.

"No wood," Coren said. "You need to eat, right? You can eat stew?"

"My unit requires no nutrition. My nutrient reservoir sustains the fetus and needs to be augmented by a regular intake of calories."

Coren blinked. "So that’s a yes?"

"Yes, per. For optimal results at this stage of gestation, I should consume one thousand calories per day. If I were human, I would need much more."

Coren retrieved two unlabeled tin cans from the sled. The tops had been crudely welded on. Per opened them up with a can opener and revealed meat stew. "I don’t know much about calories, but it took me longer than I thought to find you. My supplies aren’t what they should be. We might have to skimp a little or find more to get where we’re going."

"Are you taking me to Mark and Dan? They’ll be worried about Con Leche."

"Con what?"

"The child’s nickname. It means with milk,’ as in coffee with milk."

"I’ve never had coffee," Coren said. "Besides, they’re dead, remember? Or, if they are alive, I don’t know where they are, or how to get you to them."

Alina said, "1721 Peach Tree Lane, Cragford, Georgia."

"We’re not going to Georgia, robot-girl." Coren warmed per hands over the warming cans. "That’s not my mission."

"Are you in the military, per?" Alina asked. "To my knowledge, the military does not accept soldiers of indeterminable gender."

Coren looked cross. "It’s not indeterminable. It’s just indeterminable to you. At least I have a gender. You’re just an It."

"I’m a She," Alina said. "To humanize the experience."

"Whatever you are, you’re still a robot."

"I’m well versed in chromosome disorders that can blur gender boundaries," Alina said. "I would alert on any fetus showing an XXX or XXY abnormality."

"Call me abnormal and you can sleep out in the snow tonight," Coren said.

"I don’t sleep, Person Coren."

Coren nudged a can off the stove toward Alina and handed her a fork. "Close your eyes and fake it."

"Wouldn’t it be better for me to keep an eye out for unfriendly people?"

"Are you programmed for self-defense?"

"I must protect the child in my womb." Alina paused as new information popped up in her databank. "During my stasis, someone outfitted me with knowledge of twelve martial arts systems and other hand-to-hand combat maneuvers. I can also strip, repair, and fire pistols and automatic weapons. In addition, I can wire and disarm explosives—"

Coren coughed around some of per stew. ‘You need all those skills to guard a little baby?"

"I think the information was mistakenly uploaded during my stasis."

"Or maybe someone saw the Big Freeze coming and thought you’d need it to survive."

Alina finished her dinner. "If you are not taking me to Dan and Mark, you will need their access codes."

"Their what?"

"To open my womb when Con Leche is ready. Only the parents have the authorization to access the child."

"What if the parents forget it?"

"In the absence of a security code, I would need remote authorization from my owners."

"Huh," Coren said. ‘You mean, your dead owners? From that complex that’s buried under ice, everything broken and dead?"

"Yes, per."

"So what happens if there’s no code and no authorization? How will the baby get out?"

"Dr. Ogilvy once said my womb was like a locked bank vault," Alina said. "The only way to open it under other circumstances will be to destroy my control center. But don’t worry, per. The baby won’t be ready for approximately thirty-five more weeks. I’m sure we will reach Mark and Dan by then."

After dinner was over, Coren said, "I’m going to go take a piss in the woods. You stay here, and don’t peek."

Alina waited by the sled and contemplated stealing more food. She calculated that her food intake had been three hundred and eighty calories. Not optimal. Her decision tree told her to use her reservoir and not alienate the human, but the reservoir would deplete quickly as Con Leche grew.

When Coren returned per asked, "If someone tried to hurt the baby, could you kill them? Or do robots have some kind of rule about not killing humans?"

"Protection of the fetus is my priority."

"So that’s yes on killing?"

"I have never had to make that decision," Alina said. "I believe I could."

Coren dug around in the sled and pulled out a sack of salted meat jerky for dessert. Per gave Alina some. One hundred twenty more calories. Coren asked, "What about deciding to flush it? Could you do that? You know, end it?"

"I am prohibited," Alina said instantly.

"I kind of thought you’d say that. Okay, look, I’m going to bed. You stay out here. Keep yourself amused. Wake me up if you see anyone, or any kind of animal we could eat." Alina saw no people or animals during the night. Instead she sorted through the new information that had been stored inside her. The self-defense knowledge was only part of a larger database about survival skills that included hunting, cooking and eating wild animals (difficult in this new climate, where many species had gone extinct); building winter shelters of snow and branches (but all the branches were coated with ice); and administering first aid to herself and to any injured humans.

The next morning, after a breakfast of canned peas, more jerky, and salted fish, they set off again. As Coren led her through the frozen wilderness to their classified destination, Alina asked, "Are there many humans left alive?"

"A lot, but I don’t know how many."

"How do they survive such arduous conditions?"

"It ain’t easy."

‘Yet you endured hardship, risked danger, and used precious supplies to find and retrieve me. Did Mark and Dan hire you?"

‘You remember what I told you about them?"

Alina sorted through her memories. "1721 Peach Tree Lane, Cragford, Georgia."

"Oh, boy," Coren said. "I think you’ve got a screw loose."

They spent the next few days trekking along old roads and highways. The stumps of old billboards protruded from the snow pack, along with the roofs of rest stops or fast food restaurants. Alina debated the possibility of burrowing through the snow to find frozen food supplies, but Coren’s digging equipment was limited. Occasionally Alina could see the frozen contours of cars beneath her feet in places where the wind had worn away the snow. Frozen drivers and passengers could be defrosted and cooked to provide nutrition for Con Leche, but she didn’t think Coren would agree to the idea.

Each night Coren slept in the tent, swaddled in blankets while Alina kept watch. Alina didn’t think per sleep was very restful. She could hear per tossing and turning in the cold.

"With greater caloric intake, I could keep you warm," Alina commented on the fifth morning. "I can generate external heat."

"If you got more to eat, you mean," Coren said, per breath frosting as per tugged the sled over a frozen obstacle.

"Yes."

"I can’t make more food appear out of thin air, and I’m giving you as much as I can. What we’ve got has to last until we get to where we’re going."

Alina continued, "I’m also programmed for sexual activities. Those can raise your body temperature, if you please."

Coren stopped walking. "What did you just say?"

"During my stasis, someone uploaded operational knowledge of several sexual activities. I don’t have most of the equipment, but I have two hands, a mouth, a waste port—"

"Okay, stop!" Coren snapped, per face turning red. "I’m not going to start using you like some sex toy. That’s disgusting."

Alina tilted her head to mimic curiosity. "Humans have long used mechanical devices for sexual gratification, haven’t they? The technician Scott used me for sexual pleasure approximately nine times, according to my databank. Mr. Crowther kissed me. Mrs. Labonte would shower with me and bring herself to—"

"Stop talking!" Coren said. "People shouldn’t be doing things with a pregnant robot."

"But it made them happy. Isn’t happiness a priority?"

"No. Not with everything. It doesn’t mean people have the right to just do anything they want to you."

"Humans often used machines to make them happy," Alina said. "Do you find me unattractive? I was told that I was beautiful."

Coren’s cheeks flushed even deeper. "Yes, you’re pretty. It’s not that."

A shout from somewhere down the road interrupted their conversation. Two figures in bulky gray parkas were coming their way. As they drew nearer, Alina saw that they were both six feet tall, wore cross-country skis, and had rifles slung on their backs. One raised his hand. "Hey there!"

Coren said, "Let me handle them," and put on a blank expression. Alina mimicked it.

The strangers stopped several feet away. They were both bearded men, Caucasian, perhaps in their mid-thirties. Larger than Coren. Stronger, too. Their clothes were dirty, but in the past someone had patched the elbows of their coats. They smelled like people who had not had the luxury of a bath or shower in a long time. Coren smelled the same way.

"I’m Gordon and this is Lewis," said the one who had hailed them. He was slightly shorter than his friend, with darker hair, not smiling, but friendly enough. "You ladies passing through?"

Alina wondered what they saw in Coren to address her as female. Lewis remained silent, but his gaze swept from Alina’s face to her boots and back up again in a way that remind her of Scott the technician.

"Passing through to meet up with some family," Coren said, per gaze frank and voice flat. "How’s the road?"

Gordon replied, "Passable. But the barometer back in town’s dropping. Won’t be safe to be sleeping outdoors tonight, not with a storm on the way."

"We’re prepared for rough weather," Coren said.

"Sure you are. But we’ve got twenty men, thirty women, bunch of kids, some extra space to bed down," Gordon replied. "Bunch of folk trying to get by. Trust me, no one’s after your virtue."

"I’m sure that’s true," Coren said. "Thanks, anyway."

Lewis was still eyeing Alina. She considered the possibility that the town had food supplies that would benefit Con Leche, or that they might have communication equipment that would reach Dan and Mark. She knew that evaluating honesty was a gap in her programming; how humans judged deceit was a mystery to her.

"Is your town far?" Alina asked.

Coren’s shoulders tensed. Gordon turned his gaze toward Alina, eyebrows lifting a little. "About a mile. We don’t have much, but we share."

"Share or barter?" Alina asked. "Give freely, or take something in return?"

"Doesn’t matter," Coren said firmly. "We’re fine on our own."

"Not unless you plan to turn into a popsicle," Lewis said, his voice rougher than the other man’s. He stopped looking at Alina and instead stomped his boots in the snow. "Last storm killed a man and his woman heading south. We found their bodies in their tent, frozen together."

Coren shook per head. "We’ve got supplies. Thanks again for the offer."

Per tugged the sled back into motion and started off. Gordon caught Alina’s arm and said, frowning, "Don’t be foolish. You’ll die out here, just because your friend is stubborn." He seemed sincere, but his presumptions were wrong.

"I won’t die," she said. "Please release my arm."

"Idiot women," he muttered, and let her go.

As she walked after Coren she listened for any sounds that the men were following. That was a lesson that Professor Sauter had impressed upon her. As the physically weaker sex, women had to always be prepared that a stranger could be a threat, and that even familiar men could suddenly turn violent. But no footsteps followed them, no hands grabbed out. When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that Gordon and Lewis had continued up the road.

"Why didn’t you trust them?" Alina said when she caught up to Coren.

Coren snorted. "Never trust anyone. Their ‘town’ might turn out to be nothing more than a shack, and we’d be dead or worse by sundown. They might keep you around, all pretty and indestructible, but me? Slit my throat, if I’m lucky."

By early afternoon, however, it was clear that the men had not lied about the weather. The temperature dropped fast as the promised storm rolled in. Coren stopped their hike early. They had just finished setting up the tent when the first fat flakes of snow started spitting down. Dinner was hurried, more tinned meat and hard biscuits, and when Coren crawled into the tent per said, "You better get in here with me. Don’t want the wind blowing you away."

Once inside, the only practical thing to do was for Alina to crawl into a nest of blankets with per. They both kept their coats and boots on, and Coren used a thermal blanket to make a protective peak over their faces. It was still daylight, though the light had dimmed with the steadily increasing snow. The temperature dropped rapidly, like invisible ice water flooding over them. Alina felt Coren shiver.

"Are you okay?" Coren asked.

"My womb is keeping Con Leche comfortably warm. How are you?"

Coren’s gaze went beyond Alina’s shoulder to the wall of the tent. "You could have gone with those men. I couldn’t have stopped you. Maybe they did mean well, maybe you could have more food for the baby."

"I know. But you are taking me to Dan and Mark, and that is an important priority."

"I’m not—" Coren didn’t finish the sentence. Per shivered again. "It’s like ice in here."

Alina studied per thin eyebrows and pointed chin. In all the days they’d been hiking, Coren had not needed to shave per chin or lip line. Alina said, "They inferred you were female. You didn’t correct them."

"Doesn’t matter what I am," Coren said.

Clumps of snow began to weigh down the roof of the tent. Alina took it upon herself to periodically thump it free. She was careful to not nudge the blankets and let the below-freezing air into Coren’s cocoon. The wind started howling, a long ceaseless wail, and Coren broke open one of their remaining chemical packs. The heat didn’t last long. As full darkness came on, Alina calculated the outside temperature and Coren’s chances of survival given the resources they had. The odds were not in per favor.

"You should know where we’re going," Coren said, just when Alina thought per had fallen asleep. "In case we get separated or something."

"Separated how?" Alina asked.

Coren ignored the question. "Follow the old I-80 into Pennsylvania to Scranton. From there, south to Schuylkill. My community’s there, living underground in an old coal mine. We still mine the coal, trade it for food down south where they still get some summer. The boss there, he’s the one I got you for. He talked about you, how he always wanted to meet you, but he figured you were dead in the Freeze and never would ask anyone to go north for you. I wanted to prove I could do it. That I could get you for him." Alina didn’t like how Coren’s words were slurring. Slurring was a sign of hypothermia, and the bitter, bitter air wasn’t going to get warmer anytime soon. She contemplated several decision trees. More than one path led her to prioritize Coren’s survival. She said, "I believe I should consume some food and generate heat for you."

"Ain’t you curious?" Coren asked, per eyes closed. "Who wanted to meet you?"

"When you’re warmer, I will be curious."

She crawled out from under the blankets to the supplies they’d dragged inside, switched on the lantern, and started eating the hard biscuits, salted jerky, cold stew, uncooked rice, and canned meat and vegetables. She ate as fast her as her throat could pass the food. Two thousand and seven hundred calories total. Her womb stayed steady at ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit as she began to raise her shell temperature. Back in the blanket nest, she put her hand flat against Coren’s face. Coren moaned a little but didn’t wake fully. Alina took off her coat and blouse and put them on the pile of blankets.

"I have to remove your clothes now," Alina announced.

Working carefully, she got Coren nearly naked and sidled close to per. Coren moved instinctively toward the warmth of Alina’s skin. Alina could feel all the details of per’s curves and weight. Coren’s breasts, soft and round, pressed against Alina’s chest. Coren’s penis, also soft, lay between them without a twitch. Alina didn’t doze off but she did channel more energy into heat than cognition, and was startled some time later when Coren said, "What the hell?" and pushed her away.

It was still dark out, the wind shrieking and flapping the sides of the tent. Coren sat upright and fumbled with the lantern. The flash of light made per wince, and the icy air had per quickly wrapping perself in the blankets.

"Are you feeling better?" Alina asked.

"What are you doing? Molesting me in my sleep?" Coren demanded.

"You were hypothermic. I am generating heat for you."

"You’re generating…" Coren looked bewildered. Then per saw the discarded debris of Alina’s dinner. "You ate everything?"

"You needed heat," Alina said.

"You stupid…" Coren rubbed the side of per head. "Damn it, it’s too cold to argue with you."

Per abruptly crawled back down into the blankets and pressed against Alina, seeking out every inch of warmth. Miserably per said, "You’re too good to pass up. I haven’t been this warm in months."

"There is no shame in needing heat," Alina replied, her chin atop Coren’s head. "I’m only a machine."

"But it’s gross," Coren muttered. ‘You could have at least kept your shirt on. Or my shirt on. What’d you have to take everything off for?"

"More effective heat transfer. Are you anxious because I am now aware of your physiology? You obviously have an XXY or XXYY chromosome arrangement."

Coren sighed. "I don’t care what you think of my chromosomes. It’s gross because you’re topless and those are your naked breasts I’m up against and my full name is Coren Crowther and you’re my damned grandmother, how’s that?"

"I’m not your grandmother," Alina said the next morning, as they packed up the tent under the clear blue sky. A thin layer of ice covered everything, but the storm was well past. "I’m a toaster oven who happened to carry your father’s fetus to full term."

Coren was back in per own clothes, disgruntled because there was no food left for breakfast. "You keep saying that. But my dad, he’s the one who calls you his robot mom. He told us about you for the first time last year, on his birthday. Who would have guessed it?"

"He runs the community you live in," Alina surmised. "In the coal mine."

"The Crowthers made their money in coal," Coren replied. Per tied down the last strap on the sled. "If the weather’s okay, we should be there in about five or six days. Is the baby going to be okay if you don’t get any food? You ate everything we had." Alina had already calculated her nutrient levels. "It is not optimal, but I can sustain Con Leche, yes."

"I might not be in such good shape. You might be dragging me on this sled by the time we get there. But it’ll be worth it just to see my dad’s face."

"Is his gratitude important to you?"

"It’s not about gratitude." Coren took up the sled straps. "I’ve got three older brothers. Big macho men. Everyone looks up to them, all the girls want to—well, you know. Me? Not so much. No one expects me to be as strong or fast or smart. So this way, I could prove myself. I could do something no one else did."

Alina nodded. "I don’t have wishes, but if I did, I would wish to see your father. To help you prove your worth, regardless of the size of your testicles or breasts."

Coren winced. "We don’t have to talk about that, okay?" Then per face clouded up. "What do you mean, you would wish it?"

"1721 Peach Tree Lane," Alina said. "I must find Con Leche’s parents."

"But you—" Coren started. "You can’t make it to Georgia on your own. That’s weeks away in this terrain and weather. The baby won’t last."

"I will find food," Alina told per. "I can trade or barter, I can perform sexual acts with strangers, I can dig up frozen corpses—"

Coren held up both hands. "Stop talking!"

Alina went silent. Coren took a deep breath and said, "The mine is a sure thing. We’ve got food and we can figure out a way to get your womb open; we’ve got some men who used to know a lot about computers—"

"Good luck to you, Coren, and thank you for rescuing me." Alina started walking across the snow.

Coren caught up to her and snagged her sleeve. "No, wait! I’m serious. You can’t just wander around looking for two men who probably died a long time ago."

"I’m aware there is risk," Alina said. "But I can’t change my programming. I must seek the parents and deliver their child."

She resumed walking. The fresh snow was thick and wet, hard on her snowshoes. The icy air made the slightest sound carry clear and wide. She was one tenth of a mile along the road before she heard Coren come after her with the sled. Alina stopped and waited.

"No digging up corpses," Coren said firmly. "No more naked in the middle of the night. If I say run, you say how far. And after the baby’s done, you come back to the mine with me. Agree to all that, and I’ll go with you. Stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ll go with you."

Alina smiled. "Thank you. Together we can make Dan and Mark very happy."

"We’ll see about that," Coren said, not sounding entirely hopeful, and together they trudged toward the blinding white horizon.

I AM CRYING ALL INSIDE Clifford D. Simak

I do my job, which is hoeing corn. But I am disturbed by what I hear last night from this Janglefoot. Me and lot of other people hear him. But none of the folk would hear. He careful not to say what he say to us where any folk would hear. It would hurt their feeling.

Janglefoot he is travelling people. He go up and down the land. But he don’t go very far. He often back again to orate to us again. Although why he say it more than once I do not understand. He always say the same.

He is Janglefoot because one foot jangle when he walk and he won’t let no one fix it. It make him limp but he won’t let no one fix it. It is humility he has. As long as he limp and jangle he is humble people and he like humility. He think it is a virtue. He think that it become him.

Smith, who is blacksmith, get impatient with him. Say he could fix the foot. Not as good as mechanic people, although better than not fixing it at all. There is a mechanic people not too far away. They impatient with him too. They think him putting on.

Pure charity of Smith to offer fix the foot. Him have other work. No need to beg for it like some poor people do. He hammer all the time on metal, making into sheet, then send on to mechanic people who use it for repair. Must be very careful keep in good repair. Must do it all ourself. No folk left who know how to do it. Folk left, of course, but too elegant to do it. All genteel who left. Never work at all.

I am hoeing corn and one of house people come down to tell me there is snakes. House people never work outdoors. Always come to us. I ask real snake or moonshine snake and they say real snake. So I lean my hoe on tree and go up hill to house.

Grandpa he is in hammock out on front lawn. Hammock is hung between two trees. Uncle John he is sitting on ground, leaning on one tree. Pa he is sitting on ground, leaning on other tree.

Sam, say Pa, there is snake in back.

So I go around house and there is timber rattler and I pick him up and he is mad at me and hammer me real good. I hunt around and find another rattler and a moccasin and two garter snake. Garter snakes sure don’t amount to nothing, but I take them along. I hunt some more but that is all the snakes.

I go down across cornfield and wade creek and way back into swamp. I turn snakes loose. Will take them long time to get back. Maybe not at all.

Then I go back to hoeing. Important to keep patch of corn in shape. No weeds. Carry water when it needs. Soil work up nice and soft. Scare off crows when plant. Scare off coon and deer when corn come into ear. Full time job, for which many thanks. Also is important. George use corn to make the moon. Other patches of corn for food. But mine is use for moon. Me and George is partners. We make real good moonshine. Grandpa and Pa and Uncle John consume it with great happy. Any left over boys can have. But not girls. Girls don’t use moonshine.

I do not understand use of food and booze. Grandpa say it taste good. I wonder what is taste. It make Uncle John see snakes. I do not understand that either.

I am hoeing corn when there is sound behind me. I look and there is Joshua. He is reading Bible. He always reading Bible. He make big job of it. Also, he is stepping on my hills of corn. I yell at him and run at him. I hit him with the hoe. He ran out of patch. He know why I hit him. I hit him before. He know better than stepping on the corn. He stand under tree and read. Standing in the shade. That is putting on. Only folk need to stand in shade. People don’t.

Hitting him, I break my hoe. I go to Smith to fix. Smith he glad to see me. Always glad to see each other. Smith and me are friend. He drop everything to fix hoe. Know how important corn is. Also do me favor.

We talk of Janglefoot. We agree is wrong the way he speak. He speak heresy. (Smith he tell me that word. Joshua, once he get unmad at me for hitting him, look up how to spell.) We agree, Smith and me, folk are genteel folk, not kind said by Janglefoot. Agree something should be done to Janglefoot. Don’t know what to do. We say we think more of it.

George come by. Say he need me. Folk out of drinking likker. So I go with him while Smith is fixing hoe. George he has nice still, real neat and clean. Good capacity. Also try hard to age moonshine but never able to. Folk use it up too fast. He have four five-gallon jugs. We each take two and walk to house.

We stop at hammock where three still are. Tell us leave one jug there, take three to woodshed, put away, bring back some glasses. We do. We pour out glasses of moonshine for Grandpa and Pa. Uncle John he says never mind no glass for him, just put jug beside him. We do, leaving it uncork. Uncle John reach in pocket and bring out little rubber hose. Put one end in jug, other end in mouth. He lean back against tree and start sucking.

They make elegant picture. Grandpa look peaceful. Rocking in hammock with big glass of moon balance on his chest. We happy to see them happy. We go back to work. Smith has hoe fix and very sharp. It handle good. I thank him.

He say he still confuse at Janglefoot. Janglefoot claim he read what he say. In old record. Found record in old city far away. Smith ask if I know what city is. I say I don’t. We more confuse than ever. For that matter, don’t know what record is. Sound important, though.

I am hoeing corn when the Preacher pass and stop. Joshua gone somewhere. I tell him should have come sooner, Joshua standing under tree, reading Bible. He say Joshua only reading Bible, he interpret it. I ask him what interpret is. He tell me. I ask him how to spell it. He tell me. He know I try to write. He is helpful people. But pompous.

Night come on and moon is late to rise. Can no longer hoe for lack of seeing. So lean hoe against tree. Go to still to help George now making moonshine. George is glad of help. He running far behind.

I wonder to him why Janglefoot say same thing over and over. He say is repetition. I ask him repetition. He not sure. Say he think you say thing often enough people will believe it. Say folk use it in olden day. Make other folk believe thing that isn’t so.

I ask him what he know of olden day. He say not very much. He say he should remember, but he doesn’t. I should remember too, but I can’t remember. Too long ago. Too much happen since. It is not important except for what Janglefoot is saying.

George has good fire burning under still and it shine on us. We stand around and watch. Make good feeling in the gizzard. Owl talk long way off in swamp. Do not know why fire feel good. No need of warm. Do not know why owl make one feel lonesome. I no lonesome. Got George right here beside me. There is so many things I do not know. What city is or record. What taste is. What olden day is like. Happy though. Do not need to understand for happy.

People come from house, running fast. Say Uncle John is sick. Say he need doctor. Say he no longer seeing snakes. Seeing now blue alligator. With bright pink spots. Uncle John must be awful sick. Is no blue alligator. Not with bright pink spots.

George say he go to house to help, me run for Doc. George and house people leave, going very fast. I leave for Doc, also going fast.

Finally find Doc in swamp. He has candle lantern and is digging root. He always digging root. Great one for root and bark. He make stuff out of them for repairing folk. He is folk mechanic.

He standing in muck, up to knee. He cover with mud. He is filthy people. But he feel bad, hearing Uncle John is sick. Do not like blue alligator. Next he say is purple elephant and that is worst of all.

We run, both of us. I hold lantern at alligator hole while Doc wash mud off him. Never do to let folk seeing him filthy. We go to hut where Doc keep root and bark. He get some of it and we run for house. Moon has come up now, but we keep lantern. It help moonlight some.

We come to foot of hill with house on top of hill. All lawn between foot of hill and house. All lawn except for trees that hold up hammock. Hammock still is there, but empty. It blow back and forth in breeze. House stand up high and white. Windows in it shining.

Grandpa sit on big long porch that is in front of house, with white pillars to hold up roof. He sit in rocking chair. He rock back and forth. Another rocking chair beside him. He is only one around. Can see no one else. Inside of house women folk is making cries. Through tall window I can see inside. Big thing house people call chandelier hang from ceiling. Made of glass. Many candles in it. Candles all are burning. Glass look pretty in light. Furniture in room gleam with light. All is clean and polish. House people work hard to keep it clean and polish. Take big pride.

We run up steps to porch.

Grandpa say, you come too late. My son John is dead.

I do not understand this dead. When folk dead put them into ground. Say words over them. Put big stone at their head. Back of house is special place for dead. Lot of big stones standing there. Some new. Some old. Some so old cannot read lettering that say who is under them.

Doc run into house. To make sure Grandpa say right, perhaps. I stay on porch, unknowing what to do. Feel terrible sad. Don’t know why I do. Except knowing dead is bad. Maybe because Grandpa seem so sad.

Grandpa say to me, Sam sit down and talk.

I do not sit, I tell him. People always stand.

It was outrage of him to ask it. He know custom. He know as well as I do people do not sit with folk.

God damn it to hell, he say, forget your stubborn pride. Sitting is not bad. I do it all the time. Bend yourself and sit.

In that chair, he say, pointing to one beside him.

I look at chair. I wonder will it hold me. It is built for folk. People heavier than folk. Have no wish to break a chair with weight. Take much time to make one. Carpenter people work for long to make one.

But I think no skin off my nose. Skin off Grandpa’s nose. He the one that tell me.

So I square around so I hit the chair and bend myself and sit. Chair creak, but hold. I settle into it. Sitting feel good. I rock a little. Rocking feel good. Grandpa and me sit, looking out on lawn. Lawn is real pretty. Moonlight on it. First lawn and then some trees and after trees cornfield and other fields. Far away owl talk in swamp. Coon whicker. Fox bark long way off.

It do beat hell, say Grandpa, how man can live out his life, doing nothing, then die of moonshine drinking.

You sure of moon, I ask. I hate to hear Grandpa blaming moonshine. George and me, we make real good moonshine.

Grandpa say, it couldn’t be nothing else. Only moonshine give blue alligator with bright pink spots.

No purple elephant, so say Grandpa.

I wonder what elephant might be. So much that I don’t know.

Sam, say Grandpa, we are a sorry lot. Never had no chance. Neither you nor us. Ain’t none of us no good. We folk sit around all day and never do a thing. Hunt a little, maybe. Fish a little. Play cards. Drink likker. Feel real energetic, maybe I’ll-play some horseshoe. Should be out doing something good and big. But we never are. While we live we don’t amount to nothing. When we die we don’t amount to nothing. We’re just no God damn good.

He went on rocking, bitter. I don’t like the way he talk. He feel bad, sure, but no excuse to talk the way he was. Elegant folk like him shouldn’t talk that way. Lay in hammock all day long, shouldn’t talk that way. Balance moonshine on his chest, shouldn’t talk that way. I uncomfortable. Wish to get away, but impolite to leave.

Down at bottom of hill, where lawn begin, I see many people. Standing, looking up at house. Pretty soon come slow up lawn and look closer at house. Saying nothing, just standing. Paying their respect. Letting folk know that they sorrow too.

We never was nothing but white trash, say Grandpa. I can see it now. Seen it for long, long time but could never say it. I can say it now. We live in swamp in houses falling down. Falling down because we got no gumption to take care of them. Hunt and fish a little. Trap a little. Farm a little. Sit around and cuss because we ain’t got nothing.

Grandpa, I say. I want him to stop. I don’t want to hear. Don’t want him to go on saying what Janglefoot been saying.

But he pay me no attention. He go on saying.

Then, long, long ago, he say, they learn to go in space very, very fast. Faster than the light. Much faster than the light. They find other worlds. Better than the Earth. Much better worlds than this. Lot of ships to go in. Take little time to go there. So everybody go. Everyone but us. Folk like us, all over the world, are left behind. Smart ones go. Rich ones go. Hard workers go. We are left behind. We aren’t worth the taking. No one want us on this world. Have no use for us on others. They leave us behind, the misfits, the loafers, the poor, the crippled, the stupid. All over the world these kind are left behind. So when they all are gone, we move from shacks to houses the rich and smart ones lived in. No one to stop us from doing it. All of them are gone. They don’t care what we do. Not any more they don’t. We live in better houses, but we do not change. There is no use to change even if we could. We got you to take care of us. We have got it made. We don’t do a God damn thing. We don’t even learn to read. When words are read over my son’s grave, one of you will read them, for we do not know how to read.

Grandpa, I say. Grandpa. Grandpa. Grandpa. I feel crying all inside. He had done it now. He had took away the elegant. Took away the pride. He do what Janglefoot never could.

Now, say Grandpa, don’t take on that way. You got no reason to be prideful either. You and us we are the same. Just no God damn good. There were others of you and they took them along. But you they left behind. Because you were out of date. Because you were slow and awkward. Because you were heaps of junk. Because they had no need of you. They wouldn’t give you room. They left both you and us because neither of us was worth the room we took.

Doc came out of the door fast and purposeful. He say to me I got work for you to do.

All the other people coming up the lawn, saying nothing, slow. I try to get out of chair. I can’t. For first time I can’t do what I want. My legs is turned to water.

Sam, say Grandpa, I am counting on you.

When he say that, I get up. I go down steps. I go out on lawn. No need for Doc tell me what to do. I done it all before.

I talk to other people. I give jobs to do. You and you dig grave. You and you make coffin. You and you and you and you run to other houses. Tell all the folk Uncle John is dead. Tell them come to funeral. Tell them funeral elegant. Much to cry, much to eat, much to drink. You get Preacher. Tell him fix sermon. You get Joshua to read the Bible. You and you and you go and help George make moonshine. Other folk be coming. Must be elegant.

All done. I walk down the lawn. I think on pride and loss. Elegant is gone. Shiny wonder gone. Pride is gone. Not all pride, however. Kind of pride remain. Hard and bitter pride. Grandpa say Sam sit down and talk. Grandpa say Sam I counting on you. That is pride. Hard pride. Not soft and easy pride like it was before. Grandpa need me.

No one else will know. Grandpa never bring himself again to tell what he tell me. Secret between us. Secret born of sad. Life of others need not change. Go on thinking same. Janglefoot no trouble. No one believe Janglefoot if he talk forever. No one ever know that he tell the truth. Truth is hard to take. No one care except for what we have right now. We go on same.

Except I who know. I never want to know. I never ask to know. I try not to know. But Grandpa won’t shut up. Grandpa have to talk. Time come man will die if he cannot talk. Must make clean breast of it. But why to me? Because he love me most, perhaps. That is prideful thing.

But going down the lawn, I crying deep inside.