Pygmalion Unbound (8 page)

Kelly froze, her hand pausing in mid-stroke of the soft tortoiseshell kitten, her delicate features going hard and defensive, the lips pursing and the eyebrows furrowing the pointed chin setting, swallowing hard.

“What makes you ask that, Maria?” Her voice quivered, with an edge of forced calm.

“I was searching my memory last night, thinking about what we talked about. Thinking about these two,” she said, stroking Tigger. “And I thought it was odd that I couldn’t remember anything clearly about my life before this week. None of the normal causes fit. I came across some files that talked about Laws of Robotics.”

“I don’t know how to answer that question, Maria.”

“Try, Alannah. You’re very smart.” She said it genuinely, with the childlike pride of a parent who seemed endlessly wise. “And you wouldn’t convey false information — ”

“Lie,” Kelly said, her eyes misting up. “It’s called a lie, Maria. When people don’t tell the truth.”

“Why do they do that?”

Kelly laughed, sniffling, rubbing her eyes with the non-cat hand. Tallulah sucked contentedly on her pinkie finger. “Oh, Maria, there are all sorts of reasons why people do that. I can’t tell you all of them now.”

“Is it because there’s something they don’t want the other person to know?”

Kelly sobered up. “Yes.”

“Because they don’t…respect or value the other person?”

“Yes, that too,” Kelly felt herself misting up again. She put Tallulah down, and Maria set down Tigger, and they watched as the two began tussling and tumbling and chasing each other through the hostas by the bench.

Kelly turned, straddled the bench, took Maria’s hands in hers. Maria turned to face her.
Fuck it
, she thought.
If Des is watching, and listening, let him. I owe her this
.

“You’re an android, though you’re made of the same things were are. DNA, tissue, all of it, we’re alike in that way.” And she told Maria about her creation, what she had learned from Crane himself, and from reading the project reports and abstracts. Maria took it all in impassively, listening to her and looking in her eyes, her hands squeezing Kelly’s when it became difficult to talk.

When Kelly finished talking, Maria moved closer. “Am I going to be
treated
like a person, Alannah?”

“You should be,” Kelly answered.

“I should be,” Maria echoed. “But
will I
be?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said, a lump in her throat. “But I guess that’s my job now, too.”

9

A month in, and Kelly decided it was time to let Maria see the world.

The two of them ended up at a shopping mall near the edge of town. Though it was a controlled environment, Crane had been placated only by Kelly allowing a couple of plainclothes AC security along. A man and a woman, dressed in dark freshly-pressed casual clothes and sporting nearly identical builds and close-cropped hair, their eyes perpetually shielded by mirrored aviator sunglasses tailed them at a distance.

By mid-morning on a weekday, the shops hummed with activity with transactions for clothing and electronics and kitsch. Maria gazed wide-eyed at the trendy fashions, off-the-shoulder dresses and sweaters and high-waisted denims happily recalling the 1980s. “Can I buy one of them?” she asked Kelly, pointing to a white knee-length dress with a wide belt and shoulder pads.

“I think I can afford it,” Kelly said. Crane hadn’t authorized a charge account for this, but Kelly decided she was buying today. “Why that one?”

“I don’t know,” Maria said, puzzled. “I can remember wearing something like it. Or maybe I think I remember it.”

She tried on the dress in a size six, threw in some low flat sandals (
spare the girl the ordeal of learning to balance in fuck-me pumps
, Kelly mused), and wore it out of the boutique. Kelly noticed heads turning as Maria lazily meandered down the storefronts with a liquid swaying of her hips. She picked out a couple more outfits, loose peasant-style dresses and skirts, all of which (she claimed) jogged some wispy memory.

Kelly let Maria go off on her own for a time, pleading a lack of sleep and a gamy ankle twisted while jogging the day before. Both were true enough, but she wanted to see Maria on her own. She got a timid, frightened look in her eyes at first, but meandered off, the two grim AC security following; the woman peeled off and approached Kelly.

“You should be with her, Doctor,” she said sternly.

“Do you have children?” Kelly asked pleasantly.

“No.”

Not surprising; Kelly couldn’t imagine this fireplug Amazon cooing over a pink-swaddled infant.

“Being a parent means always letting go. Maria’s ready. I trust her.” Kelly had no children, but her mother had passed this bit of childrearing wisdom along when it seemed there was a chance she would marry and breed.

The Amazon pursed her lips, turned to rejoin her partner, leaving Kelly alone.

She saw Maria saunter over by the food court, about twenty yards away, near a large loud gathering of children around an overworked, sunburned woman in a bulging dress. The children, pale and freckled, from two to eight, capered noisily among the tables. One boy, about six, was busily harassing his younger sister by poking and prodding her, and she began to cry. The woman saw this, yelled in a cigarette voice at the child, who promptly stuck his tongue out at her. She dropped her purse, covered the distance to the boy in three jiggling steps, and reared her arm back to deliver a star-inducing blow.

Maria, ten yards away, had observed all of this quietly, but the second the woman’s arm cocked back, she bounded over like a cheetah after a gazelle, and caught the woman’s arm in a viselike grip, throwing her off balance. The woman, startled, turned and narrowed her eyes at Maria. “Git your hands off me, lady. I’m keepin my boy in line,” in forty-grit sandpaper voice.

“There are better methods,” Maria said calmly, releasing the woman’s arm. The children were suddenly quiet, staring at her. “That’s not how you treat those weaker than you are.” The two security escorts were approaching to defuse the situation and appear invisible, and failing miserably.

“Git your bodyguards away from me, or I’ll call the cops, bitch,” the woman said.

Maria backed away, clasped her hands in front of her. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” The woman twisted her mouth to speak, but turned angrily on her heel and stalked off, the children in tow all looking back at Maria.

The trip lasted the entire afternoon, and Kelly judged it a success. Three more followed, and Maria became more adept at navigating her way through the consumer maze. She reported back to Crane, who took it all in with intense interest. The first time he saw her in one of the new dresses, in her room, out of the corner of her eye Kelly saw Crane halt, freeze, and heard his breath rush out, as if in recognition, seeing someone after a long absence.

The next day, she asked Maria about the incident in the mall. “You’re learning your lessons well, thanks to Tallulah here.” Maria held Tallullah to her breast, felt the vibrations of a rumbling purr. Tallulah relaxed, closed her eyes.

“Yes,” Maria replied. “It comes from the Book of Jeremiah, chapter twenty-three. But I also remember it from Before.”

“Before? Before when?”

“I’m not sure.”

10

“Fifty on one,” the leathery sergeant major said. “Doesn’t seem quite an even match.” He eyed Maria, in form-hugging set of camouflage BDU shorts, an olive t-shirt and tac boots, with her long curly dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“It will be, trust me,” Danner said.

She was in camouflage BDUs, the trousers and arms with a knife-edge crease, her colonel’s eagles shining in the summer sun. The sergeant major looked at Danner, then at Maria, and shook his head. There were a few confident smirks from the young soldiers in full combat gear standing behind him, taken from the 4th ID stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado.

“You say so, ma’am.” He shot a glare at the soldiers, who immediately fell quiet.

Several Humvees sat off to the side; one of them had a canvas tent attached to the rear, with communications equipment and laptop computers set up on a table underneath it. Several soldiers were busy setting up the small intelligence center.

The plan was fairly simple, as it went. Maria would start from one location, having been given instructions to reach another point ten miles away, through some rough terrain. The two platoons of soldiers would start after her from a different point and try to intercept her. It was a variation of the old capture-the-flag exercise.

Kelly watched from a distance, fuming. Six weeks after their first shopping expedition, and after several other outings around Denver, Crane had announced the test to Kelly and Maria. Kelly had taken to having Maria read books, and discussing them with her, on the theory that actually reading printed words made for better absorption of the material than a simple download. They were in the middle of
Watership Down
, one of Kelly’s childhood favorites, when Crane interrupted them.

Crane had explained to Maria it as a big game, like hide-and-seek or kick the can. Maria didn’t ask why, but accepted it as part of her growing experiences. Kelly had the feeling that Maria knew and suspected far more than she was letting on.

The soldiers piled into Humvees and sped off to their rally points in a cloud of dust. Crane talked with Danner and two other officers with black stars sewn onto their BDUs. A vulpine intelligence nestled behind that blonde hair and blue eyes, a cold mind that saw only numbers on an after-action report, not broken bodies pouring lifeblood onto the slick floor of a Humvee.

“I don’t trust her,” Kelly said to Franklin, nodding to indicate Danner. “She’s a stone cold bitch.”

Franklin looked at her, surprised. “You were expecting maybe Glinda the Good Witch? A woman doesn’t get those oak leaves on her collar
unless
she’s a stone cold bitch.”

“I should have fucking known this,” Kelly spat out the words. “How could you not turn something like this over to the military?”
And how did you miss it?
She let the accusation hang in the dry air.

“That all assumes the exercise goes as planned,” Franklin said out of the side of his mouth. Kelly looked at him for an answer, but got none.

After fifteen minutes, radios crackled and the soldiers reported they were in position. All eyes turned to Maria, still holding Kelly’s hand.

“Are you ready?” Kelly asked. Maria nodded. “Be careful,” she said and gave her a hug.

“I will,” said Maria, and was off, hesitating and stutter-stepping at first, but then jogging away from the clearing, and heading into a stand of piñon trees.

“She’s created from human tissues,” Crane explained to the officers clustered around Danner. “The nanos took the tissues and replicated them, gave her perfect muscle tone, world-class athlete. No lactic acid to cause cramps, and her respiration is engineered to be low. Reflexes are human-plus.”

“She’s programmed only to evade and elude?” one of the generals, a tall hawk-faced man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair asked.

“Right,” Crane said confidently.

“The BDUs she’s wearing have sensors on them,” Danner said. “Same with Alpha Company. The M4s are modified. They don’t use the 7.62 NATO rounds; they’re equipped with a small laser. When it strikes a sensor, the information is relayed back here, and we determine the nature of the hit — minor, major or lethal.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Kelly caught a ghost of a smile on Franklin’s face.

Running set her free, Maria thought, the ghost of a memory licking at her (
somewhere with a crowd along a road cheering her on
), legs effortlessly pistoning, picking up speed as she sprinted across the rocky terrain, hopping over rocks and bounding over fallen trees. Her breaths — she needed oxygen-nitrogen to fuel herself — were slow, deep and deliberate; her ponytailed hair flew behind her as she ran. The sky overhead was clear azure, no clouds, the land beginning to bloom from its winter slumber. Birdsong around her —
pretty
. Goal ten miles away, with the fifty men in wait for her —
hunting me
, she thought. She headed into the tree line, ducking and weaving among the piñons, startling small animals as her boots crunched the underbrush —