Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (12 page)

Now it turned out that there were lots of
people with android companions and I was totally unaware of it.
After my conversation with Silvia, while I was preparing dinner, I
called another friend, Mercedes, who likewise knew about my
decision to go to the Kapek Corp.

“How did it all go?” she asked me, after ordering
her two children to quiet down and study, under the thread of a
severe punishment. “It’s normal that you have second thoughts now,
but since they guarantee that they’ll give you your money back if
the android isn’t what you wanted... Well, you’ll keep me up to
date, maybe I’ll decide to order to android children in place of
these monsters. I hope that everything works out well, although if
I were in your place I’d feel so happy to be alone that I wouldn’t
even want an android at my side. Sometimes I imagine myself in a
house as pretty and comfortable as your own, sitting on the terrace
in the afternoon, with all my time to myself, and I envy you. And
yet, you’re not satisfied. That’s how life is.”

Yes, I sat on the terrace in the afternoon,
in summer. The views from there were magnificent: a horizon of
rooftops and air, and in the distance, the mountains of the Sierra
Norte. I read or listened to music while night arrived, alone and
often happy. It was just that at times the freedom of my time
became too vast a territory; all the possibilities around me, but
no desire to do any of them.

I turned my attention back to Mercedes. “In
any case, this... girl, let’s call her that, will be good for you,
so that you forget about Karol once and for all. At least with this
one, you won’t fight so much or understand one another so poorly,
and if any problems come up, well then, just do what your friend
Silvia told you and disconnect her.”

“Don’t be crude,” I had to answer. “It’s not
like that, I don’t want a robot, to put its batteries in or take
them out, whenever it suits me. Precisely what I want is someone
with whom I don’t need to fight for foolish reasons because they
consider that that’s normal behavior for a couple: arguments, lack
of respect and treating one another like crap.”

An analysis that Karol, my ex, no doubt
wouldn’t share. We never agreed on almost anything, not even on
what the problems in our relationship were. Of course, I thought
she was the problem, and she thought it was me.

“You’ve done the right thing, Emma,”
Mercedes concluded. “We humans are horrible and an android is
better. And I’ve got to go, these two are up to their tricks again.
Let’s get together. Call me.”

I was finishing my dinner when the door
rang. Suddenly I remembered (I’d been so agitated all day that I’d
completely forgotten) that Elisa had told me that she was going to
come by without fail to pick up some books for her school’s
library. Elisa worked as a volunteer at a neighborhood school in
the afternoons, where she taught adult immigrants, victims of
poverty, etc. She was a secular nun or something like that, which I
never understood fully. She belonged to a very progressive
religious community, although she was subject to certain rules,
among them celibacy. At fifty-something she was still a very
attractive woman, starting to go gray, tall, with an excellent
figure, very energetic and able to undertake any project. So,
fifteen years ago, when I met her, I had enough reasons to fall in
love with her, a state that lasted almost five years without any
sort of reciprocation, or perhaps precisely because of that. In the
end, Elisa said she didn’t need sex to live contentedly, and in
fact she devoted herself completely to her social work. Only when I
understood that no matter how much I wanted it she wasn’t going to
change her interests (that is to say, to prefer me), I started to
pull away, although we talk on the phone often and I offered her
books for her school whenever I cleaned up my house, as I was doing
now, making room for Deirdre.

“Do you want a drink? A cup of tea? A beer?
Whisky?” I began to joke, because I knew she was a teetotaler.

“A glass of water, please,” she told me, and
she began to leaf through the books I was donating, and just at
that moment I realized that beside those, on the table, was the
informational brochure from the Kapek Corp.

I think I blushed. How
could I explain to this woman that I had so admired for her ideas,
her commitment, her strength, her assurance, which I had also so
detested because she seemed to be above common human emotions like
the desire to have a partner, that I had decided to live with a
gynoid? “This means that you wish the company of someone who
completely lacks freedom, free will,” she would tell me, “and that
is because you want your partner to obey you in everything and not
cause you any problems, a position that I fear echoes unfortunate
past periods of patriarchal domination.” (Elisa was a feminist like
me.) “Or perhaps the question lies in the fact that you feel so
unsure of yourself and you hold yourself in such low esteem that
you don’t consider it possible to have a good relationship with a
human woman,” and when I would respond that the question was,
precisely, that my past human relationships had gone wrong for very
different reasons, she would add: “But the solution is not in
looking for a slave, but in reflecting on the cause of the
malfunctioning relationships between real people. And in any
event,” she would surely conclude, for I had already heard her say
so on other occasions, “the goal of life is not to have a partner
at any cost. We’re still not free of that historical baggage by
which we suppose that a person who lives alone, without a stable
sexual relationship, is somehow
lesser
than other people. And on top
of that, we want to not just have a partner, but instead to find
the ideal person, as if this existed and weren’t an illusion that
society has imposed upon us with the candy of romanticism. In
short, if the right person appears, great; if not, what happens? I,
for example, have decided not to live as part of a relationship,
following a period in my life during which, with better or worse
fortune, I did do so. When we accept all that, we’ll be freer and
we’ll feel better.”

“Is something wrong, Emma? You seem
distracted,” I heard Elisa say to me, in reality and not in my
imagination.

“No, nothing, I’m just tired, sorry,” I
lied, feeling like a coward in doing so.

“No, it’s you who must excuse me. I’ll go
now. You should have said something, and many thanks for the
books.” Always so kind, and fortunately without having seen the
Kapek brochure, Elisa took her donated books and left.

I remained alone, exhausted by everything
that had happened during the day, by the conversations and my
thoughts, so I told myself that the best thing to do would be to
take a shower, go to bed, and not worry about this business any
further during the three months of waiting that remained until
Deirdre’s arrival.

It was warm, although we were at the
beginning of March, the afternoon I went to get Deirdre. I had
dressed with greater care than usual, and I’d taken a tranquilizer,
though not a strong one since I had to drive. In fact, I’d thought
of going in the aerobus that stopped near the chalet where Kapek
had its offices, but it didn’t seem to offer the right image for
the return trip, when I came back with Deirdre.

I arrived ten minutes before my scheduled
appointment, parked, walked toward the door, and rang. The sensors
identified me and immediately let me inside. A robot that looked
like a robot (that is to say, all metal) emerged to accompany me to
the waiting room.

“Someone will come soon,” it said; this was
the worst thing I could have encountered on that day, that machine
with its clumsy movements and tinny voice. In a single minute, all
the anxieties I’d had to overcome during the past three months all
came back. I shouted at the television in the little room to turn
itself on, the poor thing obeyed, although it began to do strange
things when I continued shouting at it to change channels. It was
five-twenty and I was starting to be very nervous when the door
opened and Myriam appeared. She wore a very elegant suit with a
flower-hologram on the lapel and old-fashioned high-heeled shoes.
As beautiful as the other time, this time her face seemed to show
great exhaustion. Nonetheless, she immediately recovered her best
and most professional smile.

“I’m glad to see you again, Emma. So, today
is the day.”

“Yes. How are you, a lot of work?”

“Always more,” and for a moment she stopped
smiling and sighed. “And now, let’s go find Deirdre. I only want to
make a final recommendation to you, and also a warning, and it’s
not exactly with regard to Deirdre. I recommend that you don’t say
anything for now, save to people very close, and only if you wish,
of course, that Deirdre is an gynoid. We’re having certain problems
with the anti-technites. I don’t know if you’ve heard talk of them.
They’re a group that opposes the existence of androids who look and
behave like humans and other technological advances. They’ve
attacked us with computer viruses and graffiti on the walls of our
offices. In some countries they’ve even held demonstrations in
front of our offices, and they’ve publicly denounced people who’ve
acquired a companion android. We still haven’t seen these sorts of
activities here, but the anti-technite group is growing, which is
why we warn our clients. I don’t want you to be concerned, just to
keep this warning in mind.”

“I agree,” I answered.

“And now, let’s go.”

I stood up and followed her along a very
long hallway to a door marked PRIVATE. Before placing her hand on
the sensor that would grant me access, she turned toward me for a
moment and smiled broadly: “I’ll leave you with her. All my best
wishes, Emma. I’m glad to have met you.”

The door opened. I went in. There was a
dark-skinned woman with short hair, seated in the middle of the
room with her back to me. On hearing me, she turned.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you Emma?”

I was only able to nod my head.

“I’m Deirdre. Shall we go?”

Her voice was smooth and didn’t have the
slightest metallic echo. On seeing her walk, I was also surprised
that her movements had nothing rigid or robotic to them; on the
contrary, they were surprisingly graceful, with that harmonious
slowness of tai chi.

Once in the car, I drove toward home,
without stopping; it was a short trip. It was Friday, so we had the
whole weekend before us.

“Tomorrow, we can go out shopping,” I told
her, at home. “You need clothes, right?” She wore some jeans and a
sleeveless t-shirt. “And food.”

“I don’t eat. I’m not built for that.”

“That’s right.” I
remembered that I’d read that in the brochure. Deirdre didn’t need
to consume sustenance; in fact, it was bad for her inner
mechanisms. She could drink liquids, because later she eliminated
them in a way resembling what flesh and blood people did. Once a
month, she’d have to
retire
to recharge her battery: a sort of sleep that
lasted 24 hours, the brochure explained. Although it wasn’t
necessary for her to sleep as humans did (for us it is a real,
unavoidable physiological need) it was convenient for her to join
her partner in a daily sleep, something like a disconnection or a
rest that benefited her as well.

“Then we could get out of Madrid, go to the
sierra, for example. We’ll take an aerobus. I think we’ll have good
weather. You’ll like it. And now,” I cleared my throat, “I don’t
know what we could do. I’m so used to living alone that it’s hard
for me to think in plural.”

“You’ve never lived with anyone?”

“Oh, yes, with my family, with other people
as roommates... but with the partners that I’ve had, I’ve never
spent more than a few days together.”

“And what do you normally do when you’re
alone?”

“I read, listen to music, watch a film,
work.”

“You can continue to do so, if you so
desire.”

“Oh, no, not now.”

She looked at me with her blue-green eyes,
so lovely (her face was also sweet, but she wasn’t too beautiful,
just as I’d requested) and said, “Do you have a photo album? You
can show it to me and that way I’ll get to know you better.”

It seemed like a good idea to me. I got out
my scrapbook of printed photos, then put the digital photos on the
television and finally took out the cylindrical visor for the
holophotos... I spoke to her of my family (with whom I didn’t have
a very good relationship, I explained to her, so I wasn’t sure if
Deirdre would even meet them), my friends, my travels... In any
event, I tried not to be tiresome. It was boring to look at photos
of people or places that have nothing to do with you. She listened
very attentively, seated on the sofa, with her back firmly
erect.

Then, I ate something and it was time to go
to bed.

“Do you want me to join you tonight? Would
you like us to make love?” she asked me then.

I laughed, rather embarrassed.

“I think it would be better if we sleep
together, yes, but... nothing more. For now, that’s how I prefer
things.”

She undressed. She had a lovely body,
perfectly designed to match my tastes, that was only logical: her
breasts were like little golden dunes, rounded like a rainbow; the
line of her hips, delicate. Of course, I needed something more than
a body that was pleasant to look at to feel desire. I undressed as
well and got into bed, a little worried by how my own figure might
seem, not exactly as ideal as her own. She copied me. We spent a
good while lying there on our backs, without even touching. Then
she approached, and put her head on my shoulder and her hand in
mine. The touch, the heat, were just like that of any human woman:
a smooth skin; the fingers of her hand long and slender. Then she
wrapped one arm around my waist.