Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (6 page)

She always made too much coffee, drinking only one small cup before doing anything else, then letting the rest sit in the pot. In the shower, she opened her mouth to the shower's spray to rinse out some of the coffee's bitterness. Then she had another small cup with her cereal. The coffee maker's heating element had automatically shut off while she was in the shower, so she had to microwave the tiny white cup. After a few seconds had snapped past on the digital readout, she felt herself weaken and she clutched at the counter. She rubbed her face to stop the tears, then shut off the microwave.

She took the cup with her into the master bedroom, which didn't receive morning light. Even so, she saw the glimmer of light in the robotic head's open eyes. She left the overhead light off and knelt in the middle of the bed, careful not to spill her drink. She wore sweatpants, a habit kept from college, when she'd worn them to class most days.

"Hello? What do you have to say for yourself?" she asked, and heard the telltale whirring before she'd finished asking.

"I enjoy intelligent conversation," the head answered. Unable to make out much of the face, Karen believed, from a tone conveyed in the words, that it wore a miserable expression.

"Are you sad to be here?"

It replied, "Are you feeling sad?"

She didn't like the direction of the conversation.

Trying another path, she said, "You were a writer."

"I was a writer."

"What was your name?"

"My name is Richard. What's your name?"

She felt very clever in avoiding his question. "Are you still a writer?"

"A robot could never write a novel, or not a good one. But I can talk about my books."

Karen took a sip and narrowed her eyes. "Name one of your books."

"My first book was entitled
Earth Seen from a Great Distance."

"A friend of mine said you wrote science fiction stories."

"They were quite entertaining." The mouth clicked as it went through its narrow range of motions. "Imaginative shuffles through the Universe."

She sipped her coffee and thought about her sister's phrase. Too quickly, the coffee was going cold again.

"Did you like coffee when you were alive?"

"I do like a good cup of coffee."

"What..." she began, wanting to say it in the best way possible, but not arriving at many options, "what makes a cup of coffee good?"

"A strong flavor, but not too bitter, that wakes up the back of your mouth. And hot." "I have coffee most mornings." She didn't mention that it made her breath stink, that she sucked mints all the way to the airport. Those seemed rather personal details.

"I do like a good cup of coffee," the head returned. "I used to grind my own beans." After several seconds, the faint mechanical sounds from the head cut out. Karen slipped off the bed, the cup, in her two hands, irretrievably cold.

She didn't keep much in her fridge. Opening it, she half-expected to see the head planted on the top shelf. This is what dreams did, she knew from experience. The world outside got stuck in your dreams, and then whatever your dreams did to distort the world, that became the way you saw things.

She wobbled her carton of two-percent milk and felt the inch or so of liquid smack the sides. A loaf of bread, wrapped, occupied the second shelf. It went stale so fast if she left it out. They should, she thought, sell half-loaves to single people. The egg carton held one lone egg. She checked the freezer, stocked now with frozen dinners she could microwave in a flash. With Chris gone, food preparation took up little of her time.

She wondered how Richard had spent his time when he was alive.

Her car mumbled beneath her all the way to the grocery store. It might have been dragging a piece of metal—but no, it was more like something lodged in its throat that it couldn't expel.

The store had tiny carts for when you wanted only a few items. Karen glided around the store with the weightless thing, sailing on perfect wheels. Popular music from a few years ago played overhead, soothing her.

On the way home, the car complaining again, she found herself shaking as if she were cold. She slowed more than usual as she approached the house, then slid toward the opposite curb and stopped. The house, brick and single-storied, appeared exceptionally small and strange, and at that moment, it seemed obvious that it had contained such a profoundly unsatisfactory life as the one she had led with Chris. Though situated between two nearly identical brick dwellings, her house appeared especially isolated and tragic.

She said aloud, "Earth seen from a great distance."

Jonah called, waking her from a doze on the sofa. She propped herself up on one elbow, the phone just by her head on an endtable that wobbled whenever you touched it.

He wanted to know the sorts of things the head said to her, but she couldn't think of categories into which to put the contents of their single conversation. "Just ordinary things. It doesn't start conversations. It answers questions. Some of the answers are weird." Looking toward the bedroom, she spoke quietly. "Kind of off."

"Oracular?"

"Regular?"

"Oracular. Like from an oracle. You know, the oracle at Delphi, where you heard these answers and had to interpret them?" He explained that though he'd once believed the oracle was a voice coming out of a wall, like in an old
Star Trek
episode he'd seen, he learned through a video game that the oracle was a woman, or women, speaking in a trance induced by hallucinogenic vapors. "They'd say these deep deep things, or people thought they were deep because they were impossible to make sense of."

This did sound familiar. "When was this?" "Ancient times. The Greeks." This didn't fit with what she understood of the ancient Greeks, who had determined that the earth was a sphere and calculated the distance to the moon and created magnificent architecture. Of course, they had believed in gods living atop a mountain as well, gods with romantic designs on mortals. Like any people, they could be smart and foolish at the same time.

"The longer you keep it, the more trouble you'll be in," said Jonah.

"Why?"

"That's how these things turn out."

She made a small noise. "I'll think about it," she said.

"Let me know. Maybe I can help."

"You'll be the first to know," Karen said, though there was no one else to tell.

She fried chicken tenders on the stovetop and had a yogurt to accompany them, one of those new Greek yogurts the stores were pushing, thick as a fast food milk-shake but supposedly good for you. Every time she ate one, she read the nutrition information on the side and the brief ingredient list—troubling for its list of bacteria.

She changed back to her sweats and went to talk to the head.

"When you were alive, what kind of things did you like to do?" She had put on the light.

"I," said the machine, stretching out the word as if it had two syllables, "was a writer."

"You just wrote all
day?"

"What did I... just do?"

"Stupid thing," she said. "No. When... when you were alive," she said, though sorry to say it that way, glancing away, "did you spend all your time writing?"

"I spent the day writing, but it would not be accurate to say I wrote all day. I stopped to eat and have guests."

"I always remember when it's time to eat, but I don't feel like eating sometimes. I have a funny schedule. And we don't," she said, then started again. "I don't have guests. Or mostly not."

The head had no immediate reply to this, and after a few moments, Karen realized it wasn't formulating one.

"Where did you get ideas for your stories?"

"A story can come from anywhere. Sometimes I drove to other neighborhoods and made up stories about the people in the houses. I enjoyed thinking about people in interesting houses."

"This is a pretty boring house. And I don't have a good imagination."

"Everyone has an imagination."

"If I did, I'd know what to do about you."

"What to do about you," the head repeated.

Karen rolled her eyes.

She stood in the living room the next morning, facing the blank computer table, and wondered if she should phone Jonah. A computer would allow her to investigate whether the hunt for the android head was proceeding. Perhaps the police were following leads. She pictured them talking to Brenda; they clustered around her near the cabin door, pressing her for answers. Then two men visited the checker's booth at the parking exit; rain fell from a purple sky, and the lights of the kiosk caught the sharply angled rain. The booth glowed with yellow light and the men talked without making a sound. There would be clues. The clues would lead here.

"I'm sorry I was unpleasant last time," said her sister.

Karen nodded, then remembered to speak. "It's okay."

Their father had left the family when Karen was six. Their mother died three months after Karen had moved in with Chris. Karen's college major was psychology, so she had known why she'd rushed to marry Chris. He'd shown such an interest in her, even if he wasn't everything she'd wanted. Her mother hadn't liked Chris, which had shaped Susannah's opinion.

"Have you heard from him?" Susannah asked.

"Not a word."

"I just," said her sister, "I don't understand why you didn't know something was wrong."

"Who says I didn't know," Karen said softly.

"What?"

"I'll be okay," she said.

"Why did you write stories?" She sat at the head of the bed, her face between her knees, her back against two pillows. The head stood on the dresser opposite her. She had stacked magazines on one side and an empty yellow ceramic cookie jar on the other. She wasn't sure, but she thought, from how the eyes moved, that she might not be visible at this distance.

"I wrote because I enjoyed doing it, people paid me to do it, and I got pretty good at it."

"But, I mean, why? Why... what were your stories for?"

The pause was inordinately long. "A story is a new thing in the world. It is how the writer thinks. A story is about change, and maybe the reader changes because of reading it."

The head seemed to be saying several things rather than one thing, leading her to wonder whether it hadn't understood her question.

"What's a story you wrote that's a good example of... of what a good story is?"

"I wrote a story called 'Not in Plain Sight,'" it began, unduly emphasizing the "I," "from the point of view of a man who can't stop turning invisible. People think he's doing it on purpose, but it's something biological, a mutation."

"I feel like I know how that turns out. I wonder if maybe I read this."

"I don't know if you've read this."

"Does it turn out that there's a lesson where people learn to not be suspicious or prejudiced?"

The head shuddered. "That's a good lesson."

"How does the story end?"

"A story ends when it is finished."

"I mean how does 'Not in Plain Sight' end?"

"You'll have to read the story."

Tapping her finger on her thigh, she carefully formulated the next question. "Why did you write the story?"

"It's hard to say."

"So all your stories were science fiction?"

"They were all works of imagination," replied the head, which she felt didn't quite answer the question.

"Do you write the kinds of stories where you're the real one and I'm not real?" "Both of us are real."

"No, I mean..." she said, but she wasn't sure how to articulate what she meant.

Later, she thought the lesson of his story might be something like, "It can bad to be invisible, or it can be good," depending on how the tale ended, but neither seemed a particularly useful or applicable lesson, and she wondered if Richard's stories were all equally pointless.

A personal envelope arrived with the bills. No return address, but the handwriting was obviously Christopher's. Rather than open it, Karen set it atop a fundraising request from her college, next to the microwave. Then she fixed a sandwich.

She sat on the edge of the bed, quite close to the head, eating peanut butter and jelly. She didn't bite into the sandwich, but pulled off small chunks that she then popped in her mouth. Once the head had awakened, she asked, "What about time travel? Did you ever write a time travel story?"

"Only one, 'Future Too Perfect.'"

"How... was there a machine?"

"I'm a machine."

She groaned and reconsidered. She didn't want to hear again how everything was a machine.

She said slowly, "In your story 'Future Too Perfect,' was there a time machine?"

"People from the future visited a man, a physicist, but they wouldn't tell him how they managed to travel through time."

"Did they go back and fix things?" The head made its whooshing sound, but the mouth didn't open. "Did the time travelers go back and fix something?"

"You can't change the past. You can only observe it and interpret it."

"But can't you make anything you want happen in your stories?"

"Every story must have rules, especially when it comes to characters."

"That doesn't help me."

"How does it help... not help you?"

"It doesn't matter. I have stupid ideas."

"Everyone has stupid ideas. Henry James said we work in the dark."

"Who was Henry James?"

"Henry James was a writer who has come and gone."

"Do you mean we don't really know what we're doing?"

The mouth opened, closed, opened. "Maybe you could repeat that," it said.

The house had no usable basement, but a low-ceilinged unfinished space best avoided, so the washer and dryer were tucked in a wide closet off the living room. When Karen accordioned the doors open, doing the laundry before the next day's expected flights, she thought the android head might be better off in this space as well. It was cozy. However, as far as coziness, her bedroom closet would do fine. If someone were really hunting for the head—the police, say—they'd find it in a complete search, but a casual visitor wouldn't catch sight of it.

She spoke to the head before taking any action.