Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (13 page)

“You know, Emma? You’re just as I had hoped
you’d be.”

But, what could a gynoid hope for? Was that a stock
sentence prepared by the programming they’d installed in the hard
drive that served as her brain? And even so, don’t we
real
humans keep similar sentences in our mental archives to say
in compromising situations, when we think it’s convenient to do so?
I caressed Deirdre’s hair (did she feel anything in that caress?),
hair as real as my own, and I felt myself relax, and I fell
asleep.

The next weeks were a new period in my life. Deirdre
and I did many things together. In the mornings, she had to connect
to the Kapek Corporation central computer via the internet for a
few hours, so that the company’s technicians could monitor her
status and send her the information she still needed, at least
during these first weeks. Later, Deirdre would run on pure
pleasure, reading books from my library (of all sorts: fiction,
essays, poetry... I had asked that she like reading) and even the
newspapers or daily digital media (as long as I was asking, I’d
requested that her ideas be on the same wavelength as my own so
that they didn’t become a motive for arguments or distance between
us).

I tried to arrive home from work early and almost
every afternoon we went out for a walk; on the weekends, we left
Madrid and went to the Sierra. I liked to hike and climb, and
Deirdre learned quickly, and of course she soon surpassed me. She
also far surpassed me in other areas, for example, chess: I never
managed to beat her or even stalemate her. Or playing cards, or
even Parcheesi, a game which she didn’t have archived in her memory
and which I taught her, only to find myself utterly defeated from
the third or fourth time we played. She could drive better than me,
repair any kind of electrical apparatus, and she was able to repeat
from memory entire texts she had read, something that was very
useful for me for my work in the publishing house. Every night,
before bed, we did a few tai chi forms together.

What’s important is that we got along well. Deirdre
was very affectionate with me and I could act the same way with
her, and she seemed delighted to receive my care and affection. We
never got mad or argued because of those little, absurd things
which humans frequently fight about. Of course, she had no past,
with its baggage of happy memories but also of unpleasantnesses,
wounds, frustrations and fears, so she had not accumulated that
rage that we carry, we beings of flesh and blood, to discharge at
whoever we have closest and say we love, or to cause each new
relationship to founder.

Her way of listening to me was curious: more than
being programmed to do so, it seemed that she wanted to learn about
everything I talked to her about. She herself explained to me that
they had designed her not as an automata able to only give one or
pre-determined answers, but instead with the ability to learn, to
search for and discover new possibilities of answers to the same
questions or stimuli. That process would be slow; Deirdre could
store many things in her memory, but it was much more difficult for
her to draw relationships between them and above all to interpret
them.

More than teaching a machine, my task seemed
to be educating a child, as Myriam had explained to me. I did not
understand at all how it was possible for Deirdre to learn new
answers, which entailed an incipient thinking of her own, beyond
her programming. Did she know that she was an gynoid? She knew it,
but didn’t seem to give it much importance. And, did she really
have emotions, did she really feel for me that love she showed me?
At first this doubt tormented me, later I didn’t want think about
it any further. Her attitude seemed spontaneous. And I behaved with
her as if she were completely human; I never gave her orders and I
asked for her opinion in all matters.

Sometimes she asked me: “Are you happy to
have me here, with you?” And how could I answer anything but yes?
The truth is that I had never felt as comfortable with anyone as I
was with this gynoid that I allowed myself to consider, even
knowing I was fooling myself, more woman than machine.

A few days after coming home with me, we
made love for the first time. I was surprised to be so relaxed,
just like that first night when I fell asleep by her side. I
explained to her that I liked to touch her, caress her, kiss her,
even though she couldn’t feel the same way as I did. She told me
that I must, of course. She had no shame nor prejudice regarding
any suggestions of mine as to what we could do, so I really enjoyed
myself, and day after day and night after night we tried different
possibilities. While her skin was just like a human’s, and had a
smell that was very pleasing to me, something like incense and
rockrose, it’s true that neither her mouth nor her sex could have
that taste of a woman with a heart, entrails, and humors. To
compensate, her fingers and tongue could be extremely expert and at
the same time delicate. I liked making love with Deirdre, and I
began to wonder if she couldn’t have an orgasm as well, even if it
were just an electronic one; after all, what is ours, if not a
shock, a current that needs to reach the brain?

Was I in love with her?
It’s difficult to say yes. I began to love her, but without that
passion that is on the other hand an altered mental state —that
passion I had felt for Karol, even though we argued so much; the
passion I maintained, for so long and so uselessly, for Elisa; that
passionate tie full of pain that had joined Manuela and me until
her death. I loved Deirdre with an affection that was sweeter,
calmer, quieter.

The first problem arose on the afternoon
when my friend Silvia (who had already met Deirdre) wanted us to
have an encounter with that other acquaintances of hers, Leticia,
who lived with an gynoid before I did. The couple lived in a small
town near Madrid.

I didn’t like Leticia from
the beginning. Her gynoid, Karen, was gorgeous —dark-skinned, with
long hair, very tall, a model’s body— but the way Leticia treated
her thoroughly disgusted me. She was very authoritarian, and her
behavior was just like the masculine machismo of yore and not so
long ago. The gynoid seemed frightened and was silent almost the
entire time, which did nothing but increase Leticia’s bad behavior.
We’d been together some two hours and Leticia had already drunk
more than she should have when she proposed that we exchange
partners for that night. I answered that of course it wasn’t just
my own decision and she’d have to ask Deirdre. She
laughed.

“Come on now, what are you playing at? Are
you trying to get me to believe that you behave as if your gynoid
were a real woman? Perhaps you think that you’re better than me
because you ask that sort of absurd question to a machine that’s
programmed to obey you in everything? That’s why you bought it,
otherwise you’d have hooked up with a real girl. So don’t lecture
me.”

Her comment wounded me with its grain of
truth, but I wasn’t ready to let myself be cornered and blamed so
easily.

“I play the same game you’re playing, dear,”
I said. “You play at being the macho despot with someone who can’t
defend herself. Perhaps many human women have passed you by because
of how vulgar and brutal you are. Karen can’t do that. But if that
scratches your itch...”

The situation began to get so heated that
Silvia hurried to intervene. “Well, look how late it is, I think we
should go now.”

We left hurriedly and, once in the car,
Silvia apologized, “I’m sorry, I didn’t imagine that Leticia would
act like that. She’d drunk too much. In any event, I know she
doesn’t treat Karen well, but she wouldn’t be any different if
Karen were a human girl. Anyway, I’ve even thought of speaking with
my friend Hugo, who is an anti-technite but not a fanatic, because
he had mentioned to me that in these cases, when someone doesn’t
treat their droid well, his group has even liberated them by force.
I’ll let you two know what he tells me.”

We left Silvia at her house and I proposed
to Deirdre that we go to the park where we often went in the
afternoons. We took a silent stroll.

“Why are you so quiet?” I finally asked
her.

“Leticia is evil. I don’t like how she
treats Karen.”

“Me either, but Silvia already told us: she
wouldn’t act any differently if Karen were a human girl.”

“You would never treat me that way,
right?”

“I hope to never treat anyone that way.”

She was silent for another long time, then
asked, “Did it bother you, what Leticia said about you?”

It’s true, I had done nothing but turn those
words over and over again in my head. Was I a hypocrite who thought
herself better than Leticia because I treated my gynoid well, when
I had bought someone forced to love me in the first place? That
would be fooling everyone else, and even myself. But what if I
really tried to convince myself that Deirdre could be like a real
flesh and blood woman? The first would have been hypocrisy, the
second a lie that was just as blind and dangerous. All that, I
thought, and my error, my enormous error at that moment, was to
speak it aloud to Deidre. Or perhaps, I’ve told myself later, it
wasn’t an error.

She listened to me without answering, but
later, at home, when we went to bed (she had insisted, as always,
on showering with me beforehand), in the darkness, with her head on
my shoulder and her body pressed against mine, she asked me, “Emma,
are you in love with me?”

I was speechless. My Deirdre, my sweet
Deirdre, so tender and affectionate, seemed to lose herself more
and more in the labyrinth of her own thoughts.

I had to be sincere.

“I don’t know, Deirdre. Perhaps not
yet.”

“Why did you want to live with me instead of a real
girl, a human?”

“Would you fall in love with me if I were a real
girl and not a machine?”

“You’re not a machine, Deirdre; that is to
say, you’re not like the washer, like the television, nor even like
the computer. You’re something else; not human, of course, but also
not artificial.”

We didn’t talk about this subject again;
nonetheless, from them on, Deirdre’s behavior changed. Sometimes
she was silent more than usual, and in her attitude, in her
gestures, there was something that I could only compare to human
sadness. I told myself that this melancholy was only logical, if
she were really beginning to think.

A month later, we met up
with Silvia again, and another friend of hers, this Laura. At the
beginning of my relationship with Deirdre, we had spent a lot of
time alone, just the two of us, to get to know one another better,
and because I wanted to enjoy life as a couple after so much time
without having a partner, and perhaps also because I didn’t know
how to introduce her to my friends. Little by little, I had worked
up the trust, and I proposed to Deirdre that we go out more with
other people. I thought that that would please her —until that
afternoon when we met up with Silvia and that Laura.

Silvia had invited us to have an afternoon
snack at her home. She had bought a virtual reality machine and
wanted to show it to us. She loved to travel, but couldn’t afford
long or expensive trips.

“Girls, this is a wonder. Yesterday I was in
Istanbul, the day before I was sailing off the Marquesas Islands,
and the day before that I climbed Kilimanjaro and the native guide
who accompanied me told me a lot of things about his country. This
afternoon, I’m taking you to see the pyramids in Egypt.”

Indeed, we saw the pyramids. In fact, we
also saw a red-gold dawn in the desert, we felt the first heat of
the day, and later the humidity of the pyramids’ claustrophobic
passages, and we reached the Pharaoh’s funeral chambers.

Laura was a charming and nice brunette, and
she and I got on well and laughed a lot, making jokes about the
virtual reality machine. That night, on reaching home, Deirdre
asked me, “Do you like Laura?”

“She’s a pleasant girl, of course, but if
what you’re asking is if I feel sexually attracted to her, I’d
answer that I haven’t considered it. Right now I’m with you and,
the truth is, I’ve always thought that one relationship is hard
enough to not want to have more than one at a time.”

It was a joke, but I was often not aware
that Deirdre still didn’t know how to interpret humor, to realize
that a sentence had a different meaning than the literal one. On
waking the next day, Saturday, Deirdre had left. On the living room
table there was a note from her, which said in perfect
handwriting:

I don’t want to be an obstacle for your
finding a real girl. Goodbye, I love you, Deirdre

I dressed quickly and went
out to the car to search for her, but I didn’t know when she had
left. She was able to move through the house in absolute silence,
and what’s more, she had night vision, so it was possible that
she’d left in the middle of the night. I took a few turns around
the neighborhood and then returned home to think. I checked that
all her clothes were there and no money was missing; Deirdre knew
that these were necessary to move through the world —in fact,
recently she’d gone out alone frequently to shop— but she hadn’t
dared to take any. I began to worry seriously, but what could I do?
Call the police, the Kapek Corp.? I was afraid that if I alerted
them, they’d go in search of Deirdre, capture her and in some way
inflict some punishment on her, or a
readjustment
. I went out in the car
again to go to the park where we usually went for walks; she wasn’t
there, either. When I returned home, now close to midday, I thought
it was best to tell someone I trusted. I called Silvia.