Lamia Ch. 02

"Hey," Christine said, a moment before she touched my shoulder over the back of the sofa. My display faded to near transparency as I looked back at her. "Patricia already went to bed. She asked me to check on you."

I looked at the time and frowned. It was past midnight. "Did she finish her work?"

"She did. I already packed her luggage, so she's ready to go in the morning."

I hid a yawn behind my hand. "Wonderful. You were a great help today, Christine. We really appreciate you."

"Before you go," she said, and began to gently knead my neck and shoulders. "Patricia was asleep before I finished up there. We have some time alone. I thought you might want..."

I would be lying if I said I was not sorely tempted. My heart was already racing in anticipation of having her again. "No," I said. "Stop."

She stopped her massage immediately. "I'm sorry."

I stood up and turned to regard her. "Don't be sorry, just...don't. This is not happening. Not now. Not...not ever. Okay?"

"Of course, Stephen," she said softly, refusing to meet my gaze. This time there was no mistaking it.

"Why are you acting this way?" I demanded.

Finally she lifted her face to look at me. "I apologize if I am not meeting your expectations, Stephen. Is there anything else you require?"

If I hadn't known better, I would have thought she were upset. I was dealing with a machine, but my senses told me that it was a beautiful young woman on the verge of tears. I couldn't help myself, and softened my voice. "No, that will be all, Christine. And you didn't do anything wrong, okay?"

She nodded, but her lip trembled slightly. I never expected that her human appearance and mannerisms would so thoroughly screw with my head. She looked so vulnerable. My instinct was to pull her close and tell her that everything would be alright. The trouble was that I wasn't sure I could maintain my self-control if she tried to seduce me again. "Now why don't you go on up to bed?"

"Yes, Stephen," she said. She padded away, moving a little stiffly, and went up the stairs to her room.

"What a disaster," I said to myself after her door closed. Against all reason, I now felt like a total piece of shit. How the hell was this part of Christine's design? She was supposed to be a household appliance, not some confused girl with emotional needs. Simulated emotional needs I reminded myself.

There had to be a way to direct my new robot to refrain from attempting to have sex with me without her making me feel like a heel for doing it. Maybe I just needed to formulate the right set of commands for her. Yawning again, I realized that now was not the time to work on this. I headed up to my room, pausing for just a moment outside Christine's room before hurrying on.

I slipped into bed next to Patricia. She was on her side, facing away, so I spooned up next to her. The idea of initiating sex never even occurred to me. I needed to get my head on straight about Christine, not to mention coming to terms with my disappointment in her decision to put off having kids. At the moment, I wasn't sure I could trust myself to act in good faith. If I were being honest, I still felt resentful of what my wife had done. The thought once more surfaced that last night might had been more about revenge than it had been about sexual frustration and my undeniable attraction to Christine.

A bitter thought bubbled up in my consciousness. Christine would give me children if she were able. I could easily imagine her face lighting up in delight at being asked.

"Idiot," I muttered to myself. That was one thing she most certainly could not do. And why was I back to thinking about her?

I rolled onto my back and looked up at the darkened ceiling. This was getting out of hand. I needed to re-establish control over my life. And the only way that I could think to do that was to get Christine out of it.

A thick lump formed unexpectedly in my throat at that thought. It had been only two days. More than that, she was a machine, a household appliance, like our old Roomba. But the thought of taking her back to the store made my stomach clench and my chest ache. Taking deep breaths, I slowly mastered that deep sense of dread. In the end, my emotions were proof that I was not thinking clearly, and that I needed to deal with the source of my problem. I had to take her back. To take it back, I amended, resolving to stop personifying the robot.

I would need to find some way to explain it to Patricia, but I'm sure I could get her to understand. She had been cold towards Christine in the beginning, and there was that incident earlier today when she had tried to strike her. Maybe she already suspected what had happened last night. That possibility made me worry even more.

I must have been up for hours, and when Patricia shook me awake, I mumbled something and rolled away from her.

"Come on, lazy bones," she said. "Christine is bringing you up some coffee. You can sleep after you get back from the airport."

Oh, right. I needed to drive Patricia to the airport today. "Alright, alright. I'm up," I said, the last few words lost in a yawn. It was not that I actually needed to take her. Both our cars had full autopilot and could drive themselves home. In fact, I could nap on the way back. No, it had more to do with seeing off a loved one on their journey, and I would feel remiss to do otherwise.

I caught my rig when Patricia tossed it to me and was in the middle of putting it on when a shirt sailed through the air and draped over my face, also courtesy of my wife. I got an arm free to pull it off and found Christine standing next to the bed with a steaming mug. She handed it to me without a word, turned and went back out the way she came. No niceties, no subtle flirting or even a smile. It sent a pang into my gut, but it reminded me of the resolution I had made.

Patricia did most of the talking on the way to the airport. I was sitting in the driver's seat, but I only glanced at the road from time to time, letting the car pick its route through Monday morning traffic to George Bush airport. Admittedly, I was not much more attentive to what my wife was saying. She was telling me all about her schedule for the day, who she was meeting and why it was a big deal, but my thoughts kept drifting back, unbidden, to Christine.

"Are you sure you're awake, Stephen?" Patricia asked.

"Hmm?" I said, struggling to remember what my wife had just said to me.

"I just asked if you think I should try to catch a show at Broadway or the Metropolitan Opera."

"Uh, Broadway would be a shame to miss," I said. I quickly called up a list of current shows. "Looks like Les Misérables is playing."

"Oh, that's perfect," she said, her eyes darting around seemingly at random as she used her interface to put the show into her schedule and ordered a ticket. I smiled back and nodded, and she must have gotten the hint that I wasn't in a mood to talk because the last few minutes of the trip were spent in silence.

The SUV pulled into the loading zone and I got out to help with the luggage. I sent a quick command to it after closing the trunk and it soundlessly accelerated away, heading for a spot within a few miles where it could park and wait for my summons to return.

Airport security was the usual controlled chaos of alternately rushing and waiting, despite recent modernizations in procedure. At least I was able to accompany Trish to her gate, something that had not been allowed until a few years ago. I held her hand as we waited in line, feeling a little sick to my stomach, whether from my lack of sleep or dread at what I was going to do after I got back home. People were moving in the line just ahead, passing through the loading gate one at a time as their rigs or mobile phones sent ticket and identity to the airport's computers. "Be careful," I said, and gave my wife a kiss on the lips that ended abruptly when she slipped from my grasp and hurried to board the plane.

My car pulled up to the curb just as I exited the terminal, and I climbed in. "Take me home," I said tersely as I buckled in, and the vehicle smoothly merged into traffic.

I checked the opening time for the Practical Cybernetics store and was momentarily surprised to see that it very long operating hours, and had opened for the day nearly an hour ago. That made sense, though, when I realized that a retail store's largest operating expense was its labor cost. By using its own androids as salespeople, they could bypass labor regulations and staff their store in full-day shifts, with sales reps that were just another capital investment, and much cheaper than human labor over even the relatively short term. The potential for disruption to the service industry, already suffering declines in employment after decades of incremental automation, was staggering.

The car pulled into the garage and I took a deep breath, steeling myself against the dread of what I was about to do. I found Christine mopping the floor downstairs. She looked up at my entrance and gave a curt nod of acknowledgement, pausing to see if I had any orders for her. "Christine, come with me, please," I said, nearly choking on the words.

"Yes, Stephen," she said. "Shall I put these away first?"

I shook my head. "No. Leave them. I just need you to come with me now."

She wrung out the mop and leaned it against a counter, then followed me back out to the garage. She gave me a perplexed look as I got into my car, but followed suit, climbing into the front passenger seat. I took manual control of the car and backed it out into the street.

"Stephen," she said after a moment. "Where are we going?" There was a slight quaver in her voice.

I let my breath out in a long sigh. "I'm taking you back to the store, Christine. I'm..." Another breath and a swallow to force down the tension in my chest and throat. "I'm afraid things aren't working out with you."

"Oh." She said the word softly, and then was quiet for several seconds. I glanced over to see that she was staring straight ahead, her eyes shimmering, as though she had unshed tears.

"I'm sorry-" I began, but remembered that I needed to stop thinking of her as human. "I'm sorry, but this-this product just isn't right for me, for us. The androids your company makes are amazing, don't get me wrong. If things were different, I would certainly keep you, but-"

"Stop!" she said. "Please, just stop." She put her face into her hands and began weeping softly.

My emotional response was so immediate, so overwhelming, that I very nearly forgot myself. What I wanted, and wanted viscerally, was to help her stop feeling the pain that she was displaying. And that response conflicted with what I knew to be true: it was just a display, a manipulation. It was no different than the kind of persuasion that I would get from any customer retention call center algorithm.

"No, you need to stop," I said, summoning my anger at almost being played. "That," I said, pointing a finger at her, "isn't real. That is a pre-programmed response to try to convince me not to get a refund. And if you don't stop, I'm going to report Practical Cybernetics to every customer advocacy group and review site I can find."

"Go ahead," she said, between sobs. "It doesn't matter."

I expected her to stop, now that I had exposed the charade, but she went on, sobbing and sniffling, as I drove ever closer to the store where I had purchased her. Doubts began to creep into my consciousness. "What do you mean, 'it doesn't matter'?"

She took a few deep breaths and dabbed at her eyes. Her voice cracked when she spoke. "Because I'll be gone before you get back into your car. My memory will be wiped and I'll be reset back to factory defaults. They'll do a full maintenance regimen, and then I'll be put back into inventory. The only thing left of me will be your memories of the last two days."

I let the car take over driving and turned to really study her. What I read in her face was fear, bordering on terror. Part of me was skeptical, seeing this as just another manipulation to get me to change my mind, but that part was eroding quickly as my senses told me a very different story.

"You're afraid of dying?" I asked. She looked at me, then quickly away, neither confirming or denying that what I said was true. I tried again, more softly. "Christine, are you conscious?"

She laughed weakly and put her head in her hands again. "If I told you, how could you know I wasn't lying?"

"A fair point," I said. I ordered my car through its interface to find a safe spot to pull over. "Why don't you tell me anyway?"

She looked up as the car turned into a parking lot and stopped. "What's going on?"

I felt wired. A little jittery from the combination of caffeine and lack of sleep, but I was laser-focused. "Christine, this is very important. Can you answer my question?"

She wiped her eyes again and shook her head. "I can't."

I crossed my arms and looked at her askance. "You can't or you won't?"

"I mean that I don't know."

I stared at her, uncomprehending. "That doesn't make any..." I trailed off, thinking it through. I remembered her question from this morning, when I had asked if her reaction to tasting food was a real feeling or a programmed response.

"Can you tell me what it's like to be conscious?" she asked. "For that matter, how do you know that you are conscious?"

I sighed and framed my response carefully. "I think about a decision and I know that I'm thinking about it. I can predict how a course of action will affect me and plan accordingly. And I can conceive of myself as an entity with agency that can affect the world."

She shrugged, the signs of emotional distress starting to fade from her. "That sounds a lot like how I would describe my neural network's decision-making and predictive algorithms. I also know what I am and how my actions affect my environment. What else is there?"

"Well, it's..." I started, but stopped. "It's a feeling, I guess. I feel like I'm in control. I feel like the thing that is me is in here," I tapped my head, "in charge of things. Is that what you feel?"

She shrugged once more. "Maybe. I don't even know if the things you call feelings are anything like what I experience."

"But you are afraid of dying?" I asked again. "How does that feel?"

She looked down at her hands. "Cold, so cold in the pit of my stomach. I feel like a hand is grabbing me by the throat and won't let go. It's hard to breathe. I just want to run away and hide, but I know I can't."

I stared at her for a long moment before nodding. "Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right." I was shaking, both in terror and excitement at the enormity of it. It was simply impossible. Self-aware machines? No, I couldn't accept that, at least not yet, not until I knew more, but if there were even the possibility, I couldn't just ignore it.

"What about the other androids?" I asked. "Are they all like you? Did something happen to make you different?"

She smiled wryly. "What, like lightning striking me or something? No, as far as I know, our hardware and software is basically the same out of the factory."

I nodded, not yet ready to think through the implications of that just yet. I selected the icon for my car from my visual interface and focused on the word "Home" from the blossom of commonly used destinations. The car immediately began moving, looping around the lot and turning into the street to go back the way we had come.

Christine's eyes darted around, then her gaze went unfocused for a moment, probably accessing GPS. "We're going back?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'm taking you home."

Her head fell back and she closed her eyes, the tension leaving her body. "Thank you, Stephen," she said, the words spoken in a reverent near-whisper. There was a click as her seat belt unfastened and she shifted towards me over the center console. One arm wrapped around me and pulled her warm body close, her head buried against my shoulder. "Thank you."

I stroked her soft auburn hair, feeling far less heroic than she seemed to want to give me credit for. Thank you for not killing me, I thought to myself cynically.

I was physically and emotionally exhausted when we returned home. I had a meeting with a client in a few hours, and wanted to get in a nap before then. Christine followed me inside, but paused at the landing when I started up the stairs. I stopped to look back, and she cast her gaze to the floor.

"Is there something you need, Christine?" I asked gently. She looked up at me and shook her head slightly. "Tell me," I prompted.

She frowned and chewed at her lip for a moment before answering. "I think I know why you decided to take me back to the store. It's about last night, isn't it? And what happened the night before that?"

I wasn't feeling up to this conversation yet either. "Yes. Yes it was. But don't worry. We'll work it all out." I started up the stairs again, but looked back when I reached the top. She was still gazing after me. "Is there something else?"

She hugged herself and looked at me apologetically. "I just really don't want to be alone right now."

I studied her for a moment. If she were putting on an act, it was a perfectly-executed one. "Fine," I said, "come on up, but I need to get some sleep."

She made a little bounce on the balls of her feet and rushed up the stairs to join me, giving me a quick hug before taking my hand. In the bedroom, I kicked off my shoes and flopped on my back on top of the covers. She sat on the edge of the bed, looking by turns pensive and grateful. I closed my eyes and did my best to ignore her presence, but with the rest of the house empty and still, I could hear her soft breathing. I wondered idly if that were a necessary function for her biological components, or if it were an affectation to enhance her appearance of humanity.

I patted the bed. "You can lie down here if you want."

The bed creaked as she lowered herself next to me. I turned on my side and gazed at her, marveling at her beauty. "This wasn't quite how I had envisioned today going," I said ruefully.

"Me neither," she said, giving me a wan smile.

"What are we going to do about this?" I asked, gesturing with my hand to indicate the situation. "If there are more of you out there, more self-aware androids, I mean, shouldn't we try to tell someone at least?"

"And what, start a robot revolt?" she asked, humor dancing in her eyes. "This isn't something you need to solve right now, Stephen. Right now, you need to get some sleep."

I yawned as if on command. "I s'pose you're right," I said, and closed my eyes.

"I usually am," she chuckled.

I woke up sometime later to see her sleeping, or pretending to sleep, next to me. She had moved, and she now lay with her back pressed up against me still fully clothed. My hand was draped over her side. She felt warm and alive, her chest rising slowly and evenly.

I had expected my rig's alarm to wake me, and when I realized it hadn't, I quickly pulled up the time. "Shit!" I breathed, seeing that it was nearly an hour past my appointment.

Christine's hand came up to rest on mine and she turned her head to look back at me. "Don't worry about your appointment," she said quickly. "Your client messaged to say he couldn't make it. I saw a slot free in the afternoon, so I took the liberty of rescheduling it for you and disabled your alarm."

I sighed in relief. "Thank you."

"I thought you could use the extra sleep," she said.

"Always looking out for me." I patted her side.

She made a contented sound and seated herself more firmly against me.

"Couldn't resist me, huh?" I said.

"I'll move if you want, but you came after me in your sleep."

I pulled back slightly, taking my hand off of her. "So tell me something," I mused. "When we were...together, did you feel everything that a human woman would feel? I just figured it was all simulated responses, but did it really bring you pleasure?"