Leaving them in silence.
Ilsa cleared her throat. She got up. Her thighs were sticky from Hal’s semen. Because he’d been coming inside her not five minutes ago. And now she couldn’t look at him or think of anything to say.
“I’ll just, um, have a wash.” She hurried to the en suite and shut the door behind her.
She tried her best not to think as she washed herself. Not about what they’d just done, not about how she felt or how Hal was feeling or what she was going to do with him.
She stopped, towel in hand, staring at her flushed and frantic face in the mirror.
What
was
she going to do with him? She couldn’t keep him in the house, could she? Not after this. But she couldn’t let him go either. He knew even more now.
She’d have to ask Blue and Cally. Though she thought she knew what they’d say— let him go.
Let him go.
Desolation rose in her. She tried to swallow it down but it was too huge. And she couldn’t stay in this bathroom forever, so she splashed her face with water.
“The quicker it’s over the better,” she told herself. It was the same thing she’d told herself when she sent the email to Hal, breaking up with him.
It was for the best. She closed her eyes and recited
pi
to fifty places and got dressed.
When she came out into the bedroom, Hal was sitting in the chair by the window, tying his bootlace. He glanced at her and stood. His face was cold and pale.
The passion she’d seen on it, had felt in him, was gone.
“I won’t tell,” he said.
She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting him to say but that wasn’t it. “What?”
“I won’t tell anyone what I’ve learned about the robots,” he said. “You’re right. I agree with you. They’re extraordinary beings and they deserve our respect. They should make their own fate.”
She could hardly believe it. Hal was making her choice, the choice she’d already made, for her.
It was only then she realized that down deep, she’d been hoping he’d refuse to go.
“What made you change your mind?” she asked.
“I like Dallas. He’s surprising. I know what he’s made up of—his construction, his programming, everything—and yet he surpasses the limitations of technology, as it’s currently understood, on nearly every level. He’s got enormous capacity and he should be able to explore it and become as human as he wants to be. Or something else, if he prefers.”
“Yes. He’s… I think he was happy, don’t you? Afterward.”
Hal nodded briskly. “I give you my promise that I won’t sell the information I’ve stolen from you. I won’t share it or use it in any way. And if someone else does discover it, I will, to the best of my ability, defend the robots’ rights to own and use this information themselves.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you need me to write it down and sign it or will you take my word?”
“I’ll…I’ll take your word. It’s good enough.” She thought about holding out her hand for him to shake, to seal the agreement, but that would involve touching him. She shoved her hands in her pockets.
“You’ll tell the robots not to stop me when I go?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Good.” Hal walked across the room, right up to her. She fought the instinct to step backward or throw herself forward into his arms.
“I want to make one thing completely clear,” he said to her in a low voice. He held her gaze steadily with his. “I won’t come back to this house. I won’t bother you again. I’ve made the promise I’ve made out of respect for Dallas and Blue and their kind.”
“I understand.” She could barely breathe, let alone talk.
“I haven’t done it for your sake. Because you’ve given these creatures an amazing gift, Ilsa. You’ve given them emotion. But you’ve destroyed it in yourself.”
She clenched her fists, hard, in her pockets. Hal held her gaze for a final, long moment and then he walked to the door. He opened it.
“You were right to leave me,” he said. “I wondered for a long time why you did. But I understand now.”
And then he was gone.
Dallas wasn’t in the computer room or the workshop the next day. Eventually, she found him in the library, whistling. For all she knew, he’d been whistling constantly since he’d left her and Hal last night. It was the theme tune to
Happy Days
.
“You’ve been listening to some new music,” she remarked.
Her voice sounded hoarse to her ears. She hadn’t spoken since yesterday when Hal walked out of the mansion, free and out of her life forever.
She hadn’t slept either. Or eaten. Or cried.
She would, she supposed, eventually do the former two of these things. As Hal had pointed out, sleeping and eating were fundamental human necessities. Crying wasn’t though. Crying wasn’t necessary at all.
In fact, the closest she’d come to crying in the past three years and eleven months—since the day her father had told her he was dying and she had immediately split up with her boyfriend to rush to his side—was last night. When Hal had been inside her and she’d felt more fulfilled and less lonely than she had in years.
If that wasn’t proof human emotions made absolutely no sense, she didn’t know what was.
“Yes,” Dallas agreed absently. “Do you like Wordsworth, baby?”
“I find him a little sentimental. Dancing daffodils, isn’t it?”
“‘And then my heart with rapture thrills.’” Dallas put one book back on the shelf and took down another. “I’ve never seen a daffodil.”
“They should be coming up soon. We’ll go have a look.”
“That would be smokin’ hot.”
“I’m always sort of surprised that robots like to read real books. Blue likes it in here too. But it seems to me you could access almost anything you wanted to know online.”
“Sometimes you need to experience the physical to understand the sentimental.” Dallas flipped through the yellowed pages. “I like primitive technology. There’s something reassuring about experiencing thoughts as manifested in space.”
She sank into one of the leather-upholstered armchairs. She’d spent hours in here as a little girl, curled up in one of these chairs reading her book as her father read his. She’d loved the dusty, musky scent of old paper and leather, the soft feathering of pages. She remembered Hal telling her his childhood home had been full of thick, well-thumbed paperbacks. They’d had more books than furniture.
Ilsa curled her legs up and wrapped her arms around them.
Stop thinking about Hal.
And about what he’d said.
He was wrong about one thing—she hadn’t destroyed emotion in herself. She only wished she had. The whole point in trying to sidestep emotion was to avoid feeling how she felt now. Desolate and lonely.
Breathing hurt. Moving hurt. Thinking hurt.
She felt too much and she wanted to feel nothing.
It would be so much easier.
She watched Dallas. He was wearing jeans and a plaid Western-style shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Where’d you get the shirt?”
“I ordered it yesterday and it was delivered this morning. There are some things the internet is very good for. What about
Wuthering Heights
? Do you like that book?”
“No.”
What was wrong with her? Dallas’ humanity was advancing in leaps and bounds. He was internet shopping and discussing classic literature, for God’s sake. She should be pleased.
“I didn’t like it when Heathcliff hanged the dog,” she clarified.
“That makes sense, baby. Does Hal like it?”
Even though she’d been thinking of him more or less constantly, the sound of his name still made her wince. “I don’t know. We’ve never discussed that book.”
“I’ll ask him,” said Dallas. “Will he be joining us later?”
“Dallas, didn’t you know he’s left?”
Dallas paused, checking the mansion’s electronic logs. “Oh. I see. I hadn’t noticed—I’ve been preoccupied since last night. Lots of data to sift through. Is he coming back soon?”
“No,” she said, keeping her voice steady. Steady. “No, he’s not ever coming back.”
She had never seen a robot look surprised before. “But why not?”
“Because—oh, it’s complicated, Dallas.”
“No, it isn’t.”
She ran her hands through her hair. “It’s like I was trying to tell you yesterday. There’s a lot of water under the bridge.”
“But everything seemed all right yesterday. It was good, wasn’t it? I don’t understand why he would leave.”
“Good sex doesn’t solve everything, Dallas. Sometimes it makes things worse.” She got up out of the chair to pretend to search for a book. “If you need any other physical data, you’ll just have to depend on me, I’m afraid.”
“But I wasn’t collecting physical data yesterday.”
Ilsa frowned. “You said you needed more data about pleasure and orgasms.”
“Yes. I needed more information about the connection between physical and emotional pleasure. So I could understand love.”
She turned away from the bookshelf and stared at him. “So you could
what
?”
“Love. It seems to be the most fundamental human emotion. Blue and I have spent a lot of time talking about it. He feels love and he’s uploaded some statistics and parameters for me but it seemed to me the more data I could collect, the better. That’s why I asked you and Hal to help me out by having a hot, steamy
ménage à trois
.”
“You had a threesome with me and Hal so you could understand love? Not sex but love?”
“I learned a great deal. The two of you love each other very much.”
Ilsa sank back into the chair. “How…can you tell?”
“The way you interact with each other. The way you look at each other and touch each other—or avoid touching each other. The way you talk about each other even when the other one isn’t present in the room.”
“For…for example?”
“There are some logical indications. When I was getting it on with Hal he was more interested in gauging your reaction than provoking mine. He only touched me because I was your creation.”
She remembered.
“And although you will kiss me, you won’t kiss him. As we are both equally accomplished kissers, it must be because he has a significance to you that I don’t. The readings from the sensors went haywire when he fucked you. Both yours and his. I’ve been trying to analyze them in detail ever since but some of the data defies classification. Blue says human emotions are, in many way, unquantifiable. It can only be love.”
“Hal still loves me,” she murmured.
Yes. Yes, of course Hal still loved her. It explained so much. That kiss he’d tried to give her but also his anger, his sarcasm and coldness when she rejected him. His desire. The way he’d left and maybe even the reason why he’d come to the mansion in the first place. His interest in the robots, who were her work.
“How much—I mean, according to your calculations, does one of us love the other one more?”
“It’s entirely reciprocal, baby.”
If Hal loved her even a tenth as much as she loved him, she’d caused him pain. Because she’d been trying to be more like a robot—emotionless, impermeable, immune to loss.
Except it turned out this robot she’d created wasn’t like that at all.
“Why do you want to understand love, Dallas?”
“Because I want to feel it.”
“For me?” She bit her lip. Please, no. Don’t make her have created someone else she would hurt.
Even though that was why she’d created Dallas. For her own selfish needs.
“No. You love Hal. But I want to love someone, someday. With all of my heart, like you and Hal love each other.”
Ilsa and Dallas gazed at each other. His calm, perfect face and his glowing orange eyes seemed impossibly wise. She’d been foolish and selfish to have created him but it didn’t seem to matter much to him. He was getting on with life. Learning to be happy.
He was much more human than she’d been for the past few years.
Ilsa jumped up. “I need to go find Hal.”
“I’ve sent his current address to your car’s satnav. I think you should go right now. And baby?”
She paused on her way to the door.
“When you see him again, fuck his brains out.”
But when she pulled up outside his house, she wasn’t so sure.
Hal lived in a tall brownstone in Boston’s Back Bay. It wasn’t so far from MIT. He could still row on the Charles. From the look and feel of Hal’s torso, Ilsa thought he probably did.
Thanks to Dallas, who’d sent all the information to her phone, she knew he owned the building, lived there and ran two businesses from it. She knew how many millions the brownstone had cost and how many millions he declared on his tax return. She knew his telephone numbers, his website and email addresses and the address of the flat he owned in London, what social media platforms he used and what kind of car he drove and that he’d been interviewed for
Time
and
Forbes
magazines. All of this had been easily available on the internet without any hacking required. She could have looked it up anytime.