The Raft: A Novel (14 page)

No care had been taken with aesthetics—my father was more concerned with functionality than beauty. This mother was a metallic skeleton bursting with plugs and wires. No voice. No expressions. No heartbeat. Through the cold, mechanical effigy of a human being, however, my mother was once again able to prepare my lunch, to tend to the house and to walk with me through the park.

In my mind, she had been made into a monster.

I did try for a short while, mostly for my mother’s sake, but holding those hard metal claws never came close to holding my mother’s soft hands. Looking into its two milky, globular “eyeballs,” I saw none of her familiar warmth—just the mirrored reflections of the environment bouncing off its polished body. It had no colours or textures of its own. Each movement it made was the will of my mother, and that offered a slight consolation, but I’m sure you can understand when I say it was impossible to accept it as any form of replacement.

I’d enter the kitchen and it would be standing over the counter, either chopping onions, preparing sandwiches, or doing something else one might call “motherly.” The head would pivot mechanically to its side and tip to position me in its line of sight. It would edge towards me, one heavy foot in front of another, and I would take a fearful step or two back. Picking up on my apprehension, the robot would return to the counter to continue its chore, as if I had never entered the kitchen at all.

We’d go to the park, but as soon as the doors of the tube slid open, I would hurtle ahead. I’d turn to wave, a tight smile screwed on my face. When I had run far enough, I’d duck behind a bush and sit sobbing softly, all the while peeking through the leaves as the robot walked through the park by itself, cranking its head from left to right to find me.

In the evenings, while the machine was being recharged in its customised wall-unit, I would disappear into my mother’s room and embrace the real her—throw my arms around her limp arms, burrow into her bony shoulder—and cry myself to sleep.

This went on for a few weeks.

One morning, on one of the days selected for a flushing (when the park was shut down for a session of light-dimming and programmed rainfall), I sat on my bed and observed what I could through the tiny square window in my room. I could see only the faintest outline of a distant mountain range, cloaked in mist. The two and a half peaks (all I had ever been able to see of the range) were at the end of a long horizontal stretch of land. My concept of travel was based mostly upon going up and down, and I had little understanding of exactly how far those mountains extended. I didn’t know whether it would take a few hours or a few days to get to them.

A knock at my bedroom door drew me away from the window.

The expressionless robot was standing there, holding up a yellow dress. The dress had a white frill along the neckline and tiny blue flowers printed along the hem. It had been my mother’s favourite (
was
my mother’s favourite, I should probably say) and she wanted me to wear it that day. The robot left the dress on the edge of my bed and went out.

After showering and getting dressed, I walked into the kitchen. For the first time, I did not see the robot preparing my breakfast. I moved through the kitchen and entered the living room.

The robot was sitting at our dinner table, doing nothing. It was simply staring at the wall.

As I approached, the head revolved in my direction. It stood quickly from the chair and stiffened.

It walked towards me slowly, each of its heavy feet thumping on the floor, and its right arm extended out. It opened its hand. I stared at the hand for a moment and, sensing that the action was no simple plea for affection, rested my soft hand in the rippled rubber palm. The cold metal fingers closed gently over mine. Then it turned and led me towards the door.

I was being taken out of the house, although I had no idea where we could be going. I hadn’t yet eaten breakfast. The park was closed. It was still early in the morning and nothing was open. Once out of the house, we walked along the smooth black walkway under the light of the low sunlight orb. It moved slowly from one end of the curved blue ceiling to the other. I looked down. With the orb low and behind, our shadows stretched out ahead of us, reducing the two of us to stick-shaped characters of similar appearance. No skin. No steel. Just two long, black stick people walking hand-in-hand.

We waited outside the glass doors at the tube stop among a small crowd of early commuters. I was the only child in the group and the adults towered around me, each looking lifeless and disgruntled, the sort of expression you’d expect at the end of a long day, not the start of one.

One of the long white vertical tubes raced towards us—thrust down by the water pressure that powered each of them through the building—coming to an almost soundless halt in front of the silent group. The doors opened and four people entered. They sat. Their seats were raised and the next four available seats rose in their place. Eventually the robot and I were able to enter and take a seat.

Sitting in the tube as it raced downwards from floor to floor, watching and waiting as people stepped on and off, I still had no idea where we were going. The park raced past. Then the floor with the restaurants and entertainment facilities. I looked at the robot sitting beside me, but there were no clues to be read off its empty metal face.

The tube cleared out until only the robot and I were left. Finally it stopped on the first floor of the scraper. I thought we would be getting out there, but the robot stayed in its seat. The nose of the vertical tube extended below ground, a space I had always assumed to be reserved for leftover track. This, as I was about to discover, was incorrect.

The robot stood, pushed a red button beside the door, and the carousel of seats began to move. We were lifted up, across the top of the tube, and began our descent on the opposite side. The chair-lift stopped and the bottom doors opened, revealing a floor I had not known existed until then.

A floor below ground level.

A thrill rushed through me.

My mother willed the robot to stand up and I did the same. We stepped off the tube and into a long white corridor. The door closed behind us and the tube raced upwards.

The robot walked and I followed. The lights above the corridor were warm and yellow. On both walls of the long corridor were rows of framed pictures: photographs of my father shaking the hands of suited men (looking as if they’d like to suck the powers out of each other), schematics of unknown machinery and devices, certificates, a map of some kind, as well as what I now reckon must have been architectural floor plans. At the time I had no clue about any of those sorts of things.

At the end of the corridor, a door came into view. My mother lifted the robot’s arm to punch a code into a keypad. The door opened and we stepped inside. The lights inside buzzed to life, revealing one part of the large space at a time.

It was a house.

A living room with three chocolate coloured sofas, various ornaments, paintings and paraphernalia—even a piano in the corner. There was a kitchen with all the accessories and amenities, as well as a fully stocked pantry-hall with enough food to feed a family for years. At the top of a spiralling steel staircase, I could see a number of bedrooms. We wasted no time, bee-lining through it all, making our way to the large steel door behind the staircase. The robot opened it by punching the same code into a keypad, and we went into a new room. It was large and filled with things I had never seen before. Things that, quite frankly, scared me. Strange weapons hung on racks attached to the walls. Three sets of body armour were on exhibit behind three glass cubicles. There were oxygen tanks. Gas masks.

I’ve since realised that the entire house was a protective bunker of some sort. My father was either more paranoid than I had imagined, or expecting some war or catastrophe to occur—one that would force the three of us to vacate the city-scraper and take up residence in that large, furnished, underground house.

My mother’s robot offered no tour of the house. We had come for a specific reason and she went straight to it. She opened a large drawer and pulled out a brown cardboard folder. She turned and held it out and I took it from her slowly. I was about to open it but my mother’s robot extended its hand and shook its head. I was not supposed to open it straight away.

After that, the robot closed up the room, switched off the lights, and we left the house. The tube returned to our underground floor and took us back home.

There, my mother’s robot prepared lunch and dinner and marched back to the recharge unit for the rest of the day. It was not like her to shut down so early, but I felt guiltily relieved that I would have a break from our increasingly awkward interactions.

The rest of the day proceeded normally. I received private instruction from my regular old tutor, as boring as ever. I had my lunch, and I managed to push thoughts of that unsettling morning trip from my mind until the evening.

As usual, my father and I ate dinner in silence. Afterwards, he mentioned he’d go for a swim upstairs and, once he’d left, I went to my bedroom.

I sat on the bed for a long time holding the dossier. Should I open it? Something inside me said I should wait, and I decided to heed the instinct. I put the dossier in my bottom dresser drawer and went to sleep.

The next morning, I awoke as usual, but the robot did not come by with anything particular for me to wear. I showered and dressed. I remembered the dossier, but a growing sense of unease had surpassed my curiosity. I was afraid of what I’d discover inside. There was no reason to believe it would be bad news, but I felt it. The moment I opened it, horrible things would be set free. They’d fly out into the world and I’d never be able to put them back in.

The robot wasn’t in the kitchen, nor was it in the living room. Perhaps it was standing like a palace guard in its recharge unit? But when I opened the door, the unit stood empty. Finally, I entered my mother’s bedroom.

The machine was standing beside my mother as she sat in her chair. The plasma-window behind them showed the wide digital image of a mist-draped lake in the valley of two green cliffs. Both the robot and my mother were standing on the rippling surface of the lake; they appeared to be part of the image. Then the image changed and they were on a grassy, wind-flattened plain beneath a cloudy blue sky.

At first I thought the robot was assisting my mother in some way. Feeding or cleaning her. But it wasn’t doing anything. It was bent over her with its arms out. My mind ticked over slowly and the horrific truth of the situation became apparent. The robot wasn’t helping her. It was stooped over her body and its metal claws were clasped firmly around her floppy neck.

My mother was dead, her face inert and blue. She had used her robot to strangle herself, and the robot, having disconnected as soon as my mother’s brain had ceased to function, was still frozen in its final, merciful act.

I could do nothing but stand and gawk. I was in a strange and surreal place and I couldn’t register anything. I remembered seeing my mother in the bed more than three months earlier, but this time there was no running for help. No scream.

Instead, a kind of strange thoughtlessness was promptly followed by grief. The grief entered and settled in my gut like a dark and slippery creature, living off my pain. For two days, I refused to leave my room. I hardly ate. I moved in and out of understanding her final act, feeling furious and broken-hearted at the same time. And underlying that, in the deepest part of me, guilt simmered steadily.

Perhaps I had created too great a divide between the machine and my mother. That’s why she’d killed herself. I’d treated her avatar like an intruder and had grown to despise it. All she had wanted was to walk and explore the tower—to spend as much time with me as she could. I had never considered that. I had never adapted, as hard as she had tried for me. I had never truly considered her feelings. I had been a selfish child. She had taken her life because of me … Once I allowed these thoughts to surface, I couldn’t escape them.

It was not long afterwards that I entertained my first serious thoughts about life outside. I was only able to see a fraction of the world through any of the windows in the tower—mostly the thick ribbons of mist partially cloaking the mountains—but still, I dreamed of faraway places. These thoughts were the only thing that could distract me from my grief.

As time passed, the dreams grew stronger. The need to be out in the world intensified. My heart ached for freedom. I tried to tell myself none of these dreams really mattered since I lacked the most important ingredient for such an escape: courage. Only later did I realise that it wasn’t courage I needed. It was
hatred.

Hatred of the life I had been given, as well as the one I had been denied. A hatred strong enough to strip me of my fears and insecurities. A hatred that filled me two weeks after her death—the morning I remembered the dossier still tucked in my dresser drawer.

I took it out of my drawer, sat on my bed, and cautiously flipped it open. I looked towards the bedroom door, knowing nobody would be coming anytime soon. I reached into the brown dossier and pulled out a thin stack of senso-sheets. Flipping through each page, I could not work out the gist of the subject matter, but tried to pick up what I could. There were walls of printed text and signatures on the bottom corners of each sheet. An application form had been filled in, by either my father or my mother; their names were scrawled all over it. From the letterhead I determined it had been issued by the hospital.

I laid the documents on the bed and looked inside the dossier again. There were a few other items I had missed: pages with letters and codes, the moving image of what appeared to be a brain, and a handwritten note on a folded scrap of digital paper.

My name was on it: Jai-Li.

I unfolded it hurriedly, leaned against the wall, and began to read my letter.

I have read my mother’s letter so many times since that moment that the memory of each word is etched into my mind. It went as follows: