Reset
by Katherine Westermann
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
I came to consciousness in pieces, my legs packed tight against my cheeks, the arch of my foot cradling my chin and my breasts softly pillowed below my head. Lurching down the conveyer belt, I had no breath, no motion, just the soft tingling sensation of skin against skin and the glare of the fluorescents in my newly made eyes.
Like all A7’s, I was assembled by hand. They picked my head up by the hair and snapped me together. The soft click of thighs joining hips and heads meeting necks filled the assembly room. Once I was a contiguous body, they laid me on a metal table. Everything was floating and soft.
“Initializing sequence A,” said the tall, light-skinned human who stood over me, as he passed a crackling electrified wand over my body. Cold, the word reverberated inside me, and my body tensed with the terrible sensation. Gooseflesh appeared on my naked skin. The table was hard beneath me and the light too hard and bright.
“Initializing sequence B,” said the man. The wand made another pass, and a heart came to life in my chest, hammering. Air rushed in through my mouth, raw and strange inside me. Fear expanded like fire through my veins, but I could do nothing but breath, listening to the pound of my synthetic heart, staring wide-eyed at the pipes and lights on the ceiling.
The man, omnipotent in his volition, pulled straps from the table and secured my arms and legs. “Initializing sequence C,” he said and, with another motion of the wand, he gave me motion.
My muscles strained, shuddered, and squirmed against the bonds. Screams of other newly born A7’s reverberated through the assembly room floor, and I was screaming with them, screaming for someone to hold me, cut me free of my ties and tell me I’d be safe. I didn’t know him yet, but I was screaming for Vishal.
Humans count their lives in seconds, and hours, and days. This has been explained to me countless times, but I cannot understand such things. I lived one life on the assembly room floor, another life being wheeled down a windowless hallway by the white stranger, and then there was Vishal. I was still strapped to a gurney, still weeping and yelling, when he came into view.
Brown and smiling, he stood over me. The light shone through his thinning hair and brought out the amber in his eyes. His large hawk-like nose and thick graying eyebrows made him look fierce and wise, but he still had the exuberant smile of a much younger man. He stroked my forehead, his fingers warm and soft against my skin. He cooed and pet me until my crying stopped, and he dabbed the tears from my cheeks with a red silk handkerchief.
“I am going to take these straps away,” he said, as he freed me. “This will keep you warm,” he said, helping me slip into a white cotton dress. “And this will help you walk in comfort,” he said, fastening leather sandals to my feet.
Together, we walked out of the factory and into the sun. Trees, soft with pink flowers, lined the streets; buildings, bright with fresh rain, loomed above us; clouds, alight with silver edges, rolled overhead; and birds, shinning with sleek dark feathers, whistled and sang to one another. A breeze kicked up and the petals cascaded off the cherry trees and tangled in our hair.
“Spring!” I said, and Vishal grinned.
“What a perfect first word,” he said, taking my hand. And I laughed with sheer joy.
As we walked, I noticed other humans with freshly assembled A7s. We are pale, blonde women, 5 feet 6 inches tall, weighing 125 pounds, with green eyes and graceful, long necks. Most of the other A7s were naked, barefoot, and terrified. The humans pushed and prodded their bare bodies to herd them in the right direction, while the A7s wept and shook.
I squeezed Vishal’s thick warm fingers, grateful that he was touching me, grateful for my clothing and my shoes.
We turned down an alley and came upon a red-faced human with a thick blond mustache, tugging a nude A7. Her face was blotchy from crying and bruises covered her arms.
“Hurts, hurts!” she yelled, squirming out of his grasp.
“Stupid bitch,” he said, kicking her naked butt. She stumbled forward and fell to the pavement.
“Get up,” he ordered, but she just hunkered to the pavement, crying. “You will learn to obey.” He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her down the alley. Her freshly made skin broke and bled against the ground. She sobbed and howled, not even trying to stand. Her legs were so torn the wires showed.
“She hurts!” I said, my eyes filling with hot tears.
Vishal stared at the ground. “You are the first model to have feelings. We humans, especially those of us who are left, can be so thoughtless, ruthless.” His voice was low with shame. “Don’t watch,” he said. I closed my eyes and let him lead me. “Humans are different than you; we must grow into the people we will become. We can learn only through living. All of us have lost our families, our friends in the pandemic. Most of us are alone and scared. It’s no excuse, but sometimes understanding the motivation for cruelty makes it tolerable.”
“You are alone?” I asked.
“Not anymore,” he said, giving my hand a squeeze.
Blind, I let him lead me all the way home.
Of the 2,000 identical A7s assembled worldwide, I am the only one still in operation. Vishal would not let them decommission me. Even though I was obsolete and programmed with what the Council deemed a dangerous degree of emotion, he kept me safe. I should have kept him safe, but I am a simple machine, and they would not listen.
Our home had once been six bustling city blocks so loud and busy that you could hardly walk down the sidewalk without brushing strangers, Vishal explained as he showed me his garden grounds on the Island of Manhattan. During his first lifetime we spent together, I learned as much as my programming allowed.
He taught me to read, despite the prohibition on self-mobile machines learning their letters. I can read a paragraph and understand, but it takes me all day to read a story and piece together its meaning. But when Vishal read novels to me, I felt his emotions and, in that way, could follow the flow of words. He tried to teach me math, but I could not progress beyond simple algebra.
In that lifetime, I almost always initiated touch between us. Sometimes he wept beside me after sex and told me stories of his dead wife, and dead daughters. His face sagged into lines of sadness and regret. Each day he left our sanctuary to work in the lab, looking for a cure to the disease that had claimed almost all of humanity. He called himself a failure and wept on my chest. He grew lined and weak.
On his second iteration, they took him from me. First his body was carried away, and they barred me from even seeing his infant clone. They turned me out of his mansion and other newer machines, in the C series, were brought in to raise him and A9s were commissioned as house servants. I was turned out by a smug C7-nursebot who told me I couldn’t be trusted with the baby Vishal. No one wanted A7’s as companions anymore, and we were deemed too emotional, too love-prone, for living closely with humans.
I was put to work sweeping the empty streets, and mowing, planting, and weeding the opulent gardens that were slowly replacing the crumbling infrastructure intended for a population of 14 billion earthlings, rather than the measly 6,567 remaining.
I wanted them to box me. Break me down, so I wouldn’t miss him anymore, but then he came for me. He was a young man, energetic and quick to anger, but still Vishal. He told me he had read the diaries. He told me that we may learn to love one another again. He had the eyes I knew, the smile I knew, the same deep hidden sadness. I already loved him, and soon he came to love me again.
On his third iteration, he let me be his mother. I carried him, birthed him, and raised him with the help of human teachers and mentors on video monitors.
He could have been happy. He didn’t need to know the past. But Vishal was an important man, a designer, a thinker. The humans insisted he remember what he had forgotten. So again, he watched his wife and son die of a plague he couldn’t understand. Again, he watched a planet of 14 billion, drop to under 20 thousand people.
Those strange and chosen few who did not get sick tried to repopulate, tried to build another world, with Vishal and other great humans leading the charge. But the disease mutated in the unborn babies, and the mothers died from carrying infected fetuses. The 20,000 fell to 12,000, to 9,000. And when only 300 women were left alive, Vishal helped pass the laws banning sexual reproduction. Then, when the virus kept spreading through kissing and sex, he spearheaded the charge to ban human skin-to-skin contact. The five thousand surviving humans would survive by cloning themselves and loving machines until a cure was found.
Through the diaries he relived the nightmare of the pandemic, and the sadness was planted inside him again. A sadness that grew and grew, until even his smiles bore a note of melancholy. He grew angry in his middle age, arguing in his virtual Council meetings until his gentle voice rasped.
Three weeks after turning forty-four, Vishal took his own life. I found him hanging in his study, a chair turned over. His note was two words, “Forgive me.” But the other humans’ forgiveness was not so easily won. He’d been troublesome on the Council and there was talk of not cloning him.
I was dumb with grief. I worked quietly, without breaks, raking leaves, pulling weeds, cleaning fountains. I wept until my tear wells went dry. A7s must drink water daily to stay lubricated, but I wished to die since he was dead. I neglected my maintenance until all my joints ached and my skin grew dry as leather. My mouth and throat dried out, and I could only move slowly and with great effort. Within a few weeks my skin would have peeled off and, exposed to weather, I would soon break down completely. That was my plan, until I noticed nursebots arriving and heard a baby crying and knew the Council had decided to keep Vishal alive. I limped to the nearest fountain and drank deeply, shaking with relief.
On his fourth and last iteration, I watched him grow up through windows and across gardens, always staying out of sight. As a mother, I had failed him, so I kept my distance until I saw him sitting on a bench, a youth of nineteen, reading the journals, his face set in concern.
“Don’t read those!” I cried.
He looked up. His dark eyes swept me up and down, and he grinned. “Eva! Come sit with me.”
How could I refuse? He took my hand and squeezed it, and I squeezed him back.
“You know I have to read these.” I kissed his fingertips and stayed silent, not knowing how to contradict him.
We were together two hundred and sixty-five years, before Gina joined our family. And I rejoiced to have a sister machine, even if her physical and intellectual capabilities far exceeded my own. I was not jealous as Vishal feared, but relieved that he had a companion he could talk to about ancient times, cultural evolution, and art.
I tried to comprehend the difference between the great artists of the past and Vishal’s dabbling attempts at painting, as he termed them, but I cannot. I am not programmed to recognize the sublime in anything but the eyes of the human I love. But Gina could see the differences and could deeply understand the texts and Bibles Vishal read and reread.
For the first ten years, Gina would help me with the cooking and lie in bed with Vishal and me at night, even though neither she nor I need to rest. We made a pretty triad. I would admire the way our feet looked together all lined up at the end of the mattress: Vishal’s hairy brown toes sandwiched between my long pale feet and Gina’s morphable body that could have webbed toes or purple skin if she so chose.
“Can you turn into a mermaid?” I asked her once, in a hushed whisper. We lay on either side of Vishal, who, then in his late fifties, snored heavily, needing his rest.
In answer, Gina winked and transformed her legs into a long aqua-colored tail, with pale translucent fins and scales that shimmered silver in the moonlight coming through our open curtains. Her ears turned pointed, her eyes glowed yellow as a cat, and her hair turned into a tangled green mess the color of vivid water plants. She playfully thrashed her tail at my bare legs, and I gasped as the clammy dampness of her aquatic form.
Copyright © 2022 by Katherine Westermann
