Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 (5 page)

Jonah opened his arms wide. "Yeah! Sure! What you got?"

She dried her hands. "I have to show you."

Before opening the closet door, she hesitated. "Okay," she said. She knelt to lift it from her bag, then set the sack on the bed, unzipped it, and stepped back.

"Whoa. What the hell?"

"It's not real."

"No, I can tell it's, like, a special effects head. But, uh..." He tipped his own head to the side in consideration.

Since he hadn't moved to do so, she took it out. For the first time, she saw the open area in the back, with one wire visible and other workings within. The neck, too, was open, revealing the ends of metal rods of varying width. She passed it to Jonah.

"Check. It. Out," he said, raising and lowering the object with each word as if judging its weight. "Where'd you get this?"

"I found it on a plane. In the, um," she raised her arm, "overhead compartment."

"Wow. What, they let you take stuff you find?"

"No."

She looked at the floor while he looked at her. She had absolutely nothing to add.

"The face is good," said Jonah at last, "but they didn't give the dude much hair. No one's come looking for it?"

"I don't know. Not as far as I know."

"Does this guy look
familiar
to you?" Jonah held the face level with his own. "I wonder what it does." Gingerly, like someone probing a wound, he poked into the opening. "Maybe there's an 'on' switch I'm not seeing."

It occurred to her—probably because she was with a man in this room she had shared with her husband—that Jonah might ask her out. She felt such an action might come at any moment. In the past two years, she'd rebuffed or ignored attention given her by pilots in the lounge or on the way to an overnight hotel.

Had she ever heard about Jonah having a girlfriend?

He said, "I think this little lever..." He checked the face, frowned, looked at the back of the head again, twisted his mouth in annoyance, examined the face once more, and said, "I don't know," then dropped it on the bed. "Whoa."

The eyes zigged about and the lids lowered and lifted once. A faint whirring sounded, mostly from the open space of the neck, where the base of two slender cylinders rolled back and forth, so the head rocked slightly.

The lips parted, and a deep voice from within said, "Hello."

"Whoa," said Jonah, and the head shuddered again and rolled onto one ear. One of the wires came free of the battery. "Whoa," Jonah said again. "I think it's trying to turn to look at whoever's speaking. You didn't see the rest of the body lying around, did you?"

The head said, "I'm afraid I can't help with that." The mouth opened and closed with little subtlety of movement.

"Oh, Jesus," said Karen. "It sees us?"

The head shuddered and rocked, and the eyes drifted. Karen backed away, but Jonah leaned over it, hands splayed on either side, and the eyes steadied.

"Hey, there," said Jonah.

"It's nice to meet you," said the head.

Jonah asked, "Who are you?"

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

Karen tapped Jonah's arm. "We shouldn't tell it anything."

Jonah nodded.

"Who made you?" he asked.

"Craig and Terry made me."

"Who are Craig and Terry?"

"Craig and Terry are two men with a wonderful idea. Don't you think it's a wonderful idea?"

"Sure," said Jonah, but he looked at Karen and shrugged.

"I don't like that it sees us," said Karen, and she left the room without checking that Jonah was following. She stood utterly still in the living room, barely breathing till she heard Jonah emerge.

"Um," he said, coming around where she could see him. "There's a port for plugging it in. I've got a cord in the car, so why don't I get that.

"She idled about the living room until he returned, holding a cable aloft in a victorious gesture. She let him go back in the bedroom alone.

"I left it switched on," he said when he emerged, "but the motor or whatever or fan stopped. I don't have any way of knowing how long the battery runs." He looked back toward the bedroom. "I don't think it turns on and speaks unless you say something or like give it a command."

"What kind of command?"

He gave a lost look.

She chewed her lips. "That was strange."

"Yeah. Weird." He tried to stuff his hands in his pockets, but his jeans were too tight to allow more than his fingertips, so his shoulders stayed up by his ears in a fixed shrug. In trying to relax, he appeared even less comfortable.

"Thanks for doing that."

"You're going to keep it there? Keep it
here?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do." She cast her gaze fumblingly around the living room as if looking for a task. What might come next in the fading day was a mystery. Weariness gripped her limbs.

"I'm probably going to bed."

"Well, let me know if, whatever." At the door, he said, "And if you change your mind about a computer, you know."

She watched him go down the single front step and flapped her hand at him when he turned and waved.

She bolted the door, lay down on the sofa with her arm under her head, and fell asleep.

The phone startled her. She'd been dreaming of an airplane flight in which the cabin was missing. She hadn't seemed to be in any danger as she'd stood in the aisle looking at the clouds ahead of the plane.

"Yes?"

A woman said, "Karen Hughes? We have one for you in the morning. Five-thirty."

Before she left, as she put in her earrings, she stopped to consider the head. Jonah had propped it against the headboard between two pillows.

"Do you only talk if I talk first?"

The next sound might have been air or a spinning mechanism. She positioned herself at the end of the bed.

The mouth opened. "Hello." It sounded a bit like a question.

"Were you asleep?" she asked.

"I don't sleep."

"So I guess you don't have dreams."

"Dreams can reveal so much. They are often a source of inspiration."

"I mean machines don't dream."

"Humans are machines that dream."

She squinted, perturbed. "Humans aren't machines. Humans are alive and machines are machines."

"The Universe is a possibly infinite mechanism that is full of life yet not alive." She tapped her earrings. "I have to go," she said. No response came. Perhaps she had spoken too softly.

Two hours later, she was at the airport, sore-eyed and sucking a mint, her suitcase rolling smoothly behind her, packed for two nights. The first plane, too, rolled smoothly, one of the silkiest takeoffs she could recall. A few times, she caught herself glancing at the forward right overhead compartment, as if another strange treasure might be found there. She overnighted in a city she'd rarely come to, one she intended to explore, but when she reached the hotel and pressed the button on the elevator, she found that she lacked all energy. She flattened one of the airline's magazines on a small table and flipped through it backwards, stopping after each spread to nudge the television through a few stations. One article concerned the invention of tiny robots, nanites, whose presence would, someday, enable surgeons to repair the human body at a nearly microscopic level. She looked up from reading to contemplate the strange notion that the robotic head was from the future or had been left by aliens for her to find. More mysterious was why no one had asked the crew of that flight about the object. It was as if it hadn't happened.

She fell asleep to a boxing match between relatively small, heavily tattooed Hispanic men. Early the next morning, she put on one of the television shows that combine news with personal stories and endless good humor. She tried to imagine being one of the showrunners—not a guest, for what would she talk about?—but knew she couldn't keep up with the emotional shifts. Though she sometimes believed herself naturally buoyant, a sad story had the potential to derail her disposition for entire days. One tale of a suffering child or abandoned animal and she'd have to leave the studio and sit outside for a while, breathing the cold and filthy city air until the sky brightened enough to calm her.

"Here's a strange one," said the female host, leaning forward as if to better see the teleprompter text. "Inventors Craig Moulton and Terry Waterman report that they've lost their android's head. The head is part of a life-sized android designed to resemble author—"

The face appeared, and Karen flung herself face downward on the bed, burrowing into the superabundance of overstuffed pillows. Her breathing, once she became conscious of it, frightened her with its harshness, and she shut her mouth, but hummed a sustained note to keep from hearing anything. When she'd judged that enough time had gone by, she emerged. The hosts had moved on to a story about dogs. She swept her hand about till she discovered the remote among the sheets, and she shut off the set.

"Oh boy," she said, then closed her mouth firmly, feeling she'd been heard and, thereby, implicated.

That night, in another city, she tuned the television to a movie station and fell asleep before the private detective unlocked his lover's secret.

The first flight boarded at dawn. Passengers on one side of the plane lowered their shades against the sun as they moved along the tarmac. Once they'd lifted off, the plane turned, and passengers on the other side of the plane lowered their shades. Karen pushed the drink cart up the aisle, the plane trembling beneath her shoes. A persistent creak from a midplane baggage compartment drew looks from several passengers the way a loose window would on a windy night. She thought if she opened it, the head would have returned, following her, or coming back to the scene of its theft, though it wasn't the same plane or the same route.

She held out squat plastic cups of liquid, managing to absorb the shuddering in her legs, the turbulence generated by the clouds through which they passed, and distribute it through her knees and hips so that her hand showed steady.

Two flights later, she arrived home as the sun was declining. It was July, but a distressingly cool breeze blew from the west, where her street dog-legged away. Fall would mean that the season had escaped her. She had wanted to enjoy the summer, not sleep and work her way through it.

In the living room, the answering machine flashed. Jonah had left the message hours ago: "I know whose head it is," he said. "Call me. Please."

Once she had unpacked and filled a glass with tap water, she entered her former bedroom, leaving the light off. She eased each bare foot onto the carpet. Not a sound came from the head, but she didn't come fully round to face it before exiting.

Jonah's number was pinned with several others to a small corkboard above the telephone table in the living room.

"I saw it on TV too," she told him.

"TV? The story's online. It's everywhere."

"I didn't really listen," she said, so he told her what there was to tell. The robot was meant to resemble a famous science fiction writer who had died a decade ago. Jonah had read some of his books. Several had been turned into movies. There'd been an entire body attached to the head, though that hadn't come on the plane—only the head, and one of the creators had somehow lost track of it.

"It's pretty amazing. I saw a clip of it being interviewed. The body didn't move though."

Jonah wanted to know what she planned to do.

"I'm not sure how to give it back now." She thought of the cameras along the ceilings of the airport.

"Oh yeah. That's a problem. Sure."

She did not object to Jonah's promise to keep checking in. At least there was some conceivable purpose, something on which he might usefully comment.

She let the phone rest in its cradle only momentarily before fetching it up again. She owed her sister, Susannah, a call. Six months ago, she'd had a baby, her second child; Karen had visited a few weeks after the birth, when she could arrange a break. Though not much larger than Karen, her sister had produced a child that seemed too large by half to have come from her body.

There seemed to be some difficulty on Susannah's end, her sister's voice distant, then addressed to someone else.

"I can call back," said Karen.

"It's fine. I'm breastfeeding. Everything's in its place. Keep talking."

But Karen had nothing of consequence to say. She reiterated the basics of her days. In the silence afterwards, she realized she should have been asking her sister about the baby.

"You know," said the other voice, moving too close to the mouthpiece, so close Karen could hear her sister's breath pass on its way in and out, "you sound like you're just going through the motions."

Karen wasn't sure how to object. "What should I do differently?"

"I can't tell you. My God," she said, "this kid's draining my life." Then she giggled.

"Do you ever wonder," Karen asked, "how you got to have a life like yours?"

"As opposed to yours?"

Perhaps she had meant that, but it was a terrible question.

"Choices, Karen."

She held the phone away from her head as her sister continued, then said, when there was a break in the sound, that she had to go.

After hanging up, Karen remembered that Susannah's first child hadn't been planned.

All the rest of the day, Karen couldn't stop noticing her hands. It was the phrase "going through the motions" which had done it, made her self-conscious so they felt like small but unwieldy weights, the minor components of which appeared to move without her willing them. She watched how her hands broke and scrambled the eggs and how they held the furniture polish and worn-to-a-shine cloth. Each gesture seemed to take longer than it should have, so, eyes squinted narrow so much they ached, she pushed herself to work faster, which didn't seem to happen. "Hurry," she said aloud. "Hurry up."

The next day was her day off, so no calls would be coming. She spoke to herself, but quietly, so as not to wake the head.

She dreamed that night of walking through the airport, whiter and brighter than she remembered it. No one was around, though she felt there must be some explanation for that. Everyone was gathered elsewhere, watching something important. She carried, awkwardly, a wrapped blanket that contained the head. It weighed considerably more than it ought to have. Her hands kept tugging the swaddled strips closed, and she imagined that, though surely it was still a head, it now looked like an enormous eyeball that wanted very much to see where she was taking it. She came to an escalator, put out both hands to steady herself, and watched her package bounce down the moving metal stairs. Many people now appeared on the concourse below, which should have surprised her, but didn't. The swaddled head arrived in the midst of them, wrappings gone; then the mouth opened and it shouted. "Hey! Look here! Look what happened to me!" When she tried to walk backwards, her heel struck the preceding step, and she awoke.