Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction (14 page)

“Deirdre is here,” she told me, when I began to
explain what had happened. “She showed up very early and told me
more or less what she’d told you in the note, and that she thought
you had liked Laura. I told her that the truth was that I was the
one who liked Laura, who in any event is heterosexual, and I said
that she ought to go back to your house and talk to you. Then she
told me that you must have awoken by then and read the note, and
that she was afraid you’d be very angry. She asked for my help
because she didn’t know where to go; she insisted that I drive her
to meet my friend Hugo, the anti-technite, because as I explained
to both of you the other day, his group offered refuge to droids
with problems.”

“Don’t let her leave there, I’m on my way.”

Silvia couldn’t stop laughing when I hurried into
her house. “I haven’t enjoyed myself this much in ages,” she said.
“I think that your relationship is guided by the solar winds.
You’re already beginning to act just like any other couple.”

“Deirdre,” I told her, as we returned home,
finally alone, “the next time you have a thought like the one that
led you to leave tonight, please, talk to me and we’ll discuss it,
because otherwise, instead of your partner I’ll feel like your
mother.”

Later, I held her. “And so, my little
brunette, later, when it’s nap time, I’ll be repaid for all the
worry you’ve caused me.”

Deirdre’s attitude changed again, now in a
very curious way. She seemed determined to prove that she was an
adult being, and even showed certain clear attitudes of seduction
toward me that she hadn’t had earlier. But what surprised me most
were that the qualities she tried to highlight weren’t precisely
human ones, but droid ones. For example, when we played chess she
defeated me in a humiliatingly short timespan, and if I managed
hold my own for a short while, she later repeated the match at a
dizzying speed, to show me the errors I had made; I had to beg her
not to go so fast, or I couldn’t grasp anything. When we went
mountain climbing she made movements and leaps that were so
impossible for any human that I warned her, “Deirdre, don’t do that
or you’re going to break your head open.”

She seemed delighted to show me that she was
capable of those leaps and of even more unreal stretches. She had
learned to use the navigator of my car from the house computer and
she forced me to return home even though I had a meeting somewhere
else. And when she connected to the internet she could get into
real mischief. Besides that, she learned all the news by heart so
she could tell me the things that she thought might interest me
most, or she read a book from my library every morning to discuss
it with me later, or to recite all the poems by some author that
she had liked a lot. She also started to read erotic books in order
to suggest new positions or experiments to me at night. Finally,
she wound up telling me, “I’d like you to tell everyone that I’m a
gynoid and not a human woman. Maybe you’re afraid of what they
might think or you’re embarrassed, and I don’t want you to feel
that way.”

I enjoyed all of that, but it didn’t cease
to worry me. Finally, one morning, I decided to call Myriam from my
office; I asked that the call be confidential. I explained, without
getting into certain details, what was going on.

“I told you that our more-evolved creations,
like your Deirdre, have reached the point when they’re able to
think for themselves, but that doesn’t mean that their thinking
will be like how we humans think. In reality, even we, at the Kapek
Corporation, don’t know how that way of thinking will be. What’s
certain is that Deirdre will never change her feelings for you. But
if you’d like us to make a readjustment, we’re willing to do
so.”

To me, that talk of
readjustment
sounded
like electroshock or a lobotomy. I didn’t want that. I had feared
that Deirdre would develop the desire to be human; that she might
prefer to develop as a gynoid-woman seemed admirable to
me.

In any event, I realized that she wasn’t
happy. Some days, when I got home, I found her in a state I could
only call depressive: silent, sad, not motivated to do anything,
and pensive. But, could a brain that is a computer be happy or
depressed? Yet she asked me very human questions: “If some day you
find a real girl who will love you the way I do, what will happen
to me?”

“Deirdre, humans are also not sure that love
will last forever. Some even prefer for it to not last. For others,
we have to learn to live with that uncertainty. Besides,” I added,
laughing, “have you seen many girls knocking down my door to court
me? There are none because I’m not interested, now that I’m with
you.”

Or she asked: “If one day I stop
functioning, what would happen to you? You say that now you’ve
gotten used to not living alone.”

“It’s not like I was used to solitude
before, Deirdre. At least, not always. But don’t think about that.
Come on, let me rest my head on your lap and let’s forget about
everything but you and me and this moment.”

I felt a great tenderness for her, and I
needed her by my side, but I was tormented by the idea that she
depended on me so completely, especially emotionally, perhaps
because that connection had been imposed on her. She could not
resign herself to the idea that love could fade away, she couldn’t
look for another love, because she was programmed so that I was her
only desire, her only purpose, her whole world.

Now I asked her, “Tell me, what do you feel
for me, Deirdre?”

“I love you.”

“Why do you love me?”

“Because I love you. And besides, you’re
good to me.”

I felt her love, it wrapped me up, it was a
joy and a gift, I valued it because I knew what it was like not to
have it. But I didn’t have to make the slightest effort to keep
having it, because she couldn’t stop loving me, and moreover the
price was paid by Deirdre, and that price was her full maturity and
her freedom.

After thinking about it a lot, I asked
Silvia to set up a meeting for me with her friend Hugo the
anti-technite, an interview which Deirdre must know nothing about.
A few days later, I called in to work with an excuse, and went at
breakfast time to the café where Hugo and I had arranged to
meet.

Hugo was an Argentine with curly reddish
hair and energetic gestures, who was much more friendly and
understanding than I had imagined.

“I don’t judge you for
having a droid,” he told me when I explained my case to him. “And I
don’t doubt your motives. Nor that you treat Deirdre well. But it’s
also true that there’s a very different world out there, aside from
the two of you. Did you know that right now there are more and more
droids working basically as prostitutes? They can give them any
look, from a child to an adult. They never get tired, they do
everything they’re asked to, they never rebel at all against their
owners or their clients and as an added benefit it’s practically
impossible for them to transmit sexual diseases. Likewise, more and
more often, droids are used as crewmembers for dangerous space
flights, in space colonization, especially on Mars. And here on
Earth they perform hard labor, for example in the mines and nuclear
reactors. And we have heard that the big powers are planning to
increase the manufacture of droids to use them in factories and
certain public and private services. Part of the left is worried
about what this could mean in terms of loss of jobs for humans. The
conservatives say it’s much better to use droids instead of humans
for prostitution and other jobs, since after all they don’t feel
anything, but you have seen for yourself that they are beginning to
think and to feel. And some of us, the so-called anti-technites
—not at all the name we’d use— say that whether with humans or
droids the problem is the same: slavery. Some humans want to have
slaves, whether for sex or other tasks. They want to hold absolute
power over them and to benefit from their services, without giving
anything in return. And my thought is that I don’t want to be a
slave or a slave-owner, just as I don’t want to be killed in a war
but neither do I want to kill. I don’t want a society and a world
like that. In your case, I think that the problem is not in the way
in which you treat Deirdre, but instead in that, no matter how you
treat her, you still have a slave. And possibly, that’s why you
never manage to lover her. You can feel affection and gratitude
toward her, but not love, because you know that her response isn’t
free!”

I nodded. He continued, “I offer to free
Deirdre of her dependence on you. We can erase the obligation to
love you from her memory; we’re already doing this in other cases.
We won’t touch anything more, so the evolution of her thought and
emotions that she’s achieved will barely suffer. At first, she’ll
find herself a bit disoriented, but we’ll help her.”

“And after that?”

“After that? It’s advisable that she remain
with us for a few months, until she can live on her own.”

That night, at home, as we watched
television, I asked Deirdre, “Tell me, would you like to be free,
to be able to do whatever you want and to love whoever you want as
well, the person you choose, not necessarily me?”

She thought for a long while.

“Then I would wind up alone,” she said at
last.

I had the impression in those days that she
guessed something of what I was trying to decide. She spent her
time making all sorts of artistic holograms, an activity she had
already begun to do earlier. Strange geometric figures of light in
movement, which as she told me were translations of bits of poems
she liked. She also gave me a cylinder visor so I could see all the
photographs we appeared in together, which she had ordered. We made
love more often than before.

But I knew what I should do, and here it
didn’t make sense to ask her if she agreed.

The night before Deidre
had to
retire
for
24 hours to recharge her battery, we went to bed as
usual.

“My dear Deirdre...” I began, while she held
me just like every night. But what more could I add? That I loved
her? It would’ve been a lie. That I appreciated her love? That I
had no choice but to do what I was going to do, for her own good?
If I said that, I seemed selfless and generous and in reality, if I
had loved Deirdre, I wouldn’t have permitted our separation; yes,
if I’d loved her as she loved me, even if we were pursued by all
the anti-technites of the world plus the Kapek Corporation, we
would have fled together, and I wouldn’t have cared whether our
history together ended in a politically correct way or not, as it
would end now, by my own choice.

The next morning, while she was recharging,
I called Hugo. He assured me that when I returned from work,
Deirdre wouldn’t be at home. From the doorway of our bedroom, I
looked at her for the last time.

Now, I spend many weekends at Silvia’s
house. Two months ago she had a car accident and broke a leg. When
she got out of the hospital, she still needed help. During the week
she has a (human) girl hired to help as a domestic aide, but on
Saturday and Sunday I go over. She hasn’t lost her good spirits,
and she tells me that when she can walk without problems the two of
us will go out in search of life; in other words, to find a
girlfriend. Of flesh and bone or with a heart of silicon.

Sometimes I see Deirdre.
She walks in front of Silvia’s house with Hugo or someone else from
the group; their headquarters is near her house. I know, via Hugo,
that everything is going well, and that Deirdre’s artistic
abilities surprise them, what they call
byte abstraction
, three dimensional
holofigures that translate poems and literary fragments into the
artificial language of bits, converting them into prisms of color,
arcs, spirals, facets, cusps, edges, irised polyhedrons, moving
lines of light, resplendently spinning bodies.

The other day, Friday, I was in Silvia’s
garden arranging some plants when Hugo came in with her. I’m sure
he didn’t expect to find me there. He was even a little nervous
about bumping into me. I was also nervous. I greeted both of them
while I cleaned the earth from my hands. Deirdre, of course, no
longer remembered me, I had been completely erased from her memory;
if that weren’t the case, she couldn’t have been free. Nonetheless,
she asked me what I was doing, and I gave her a white rose (I would
have preferred a red one). She was lovely, Deirdre, and seemed as
sweet as ever, but now she had a much stronger gaze than ever: she
knew who she was, where she had come from and from now on she’d
only have herself to rely on. She was no longer programmed to
depend on anyone. She continued asking me about the names of the
plants and how to take care of them, until Hugo told her that we
should go, since Silvia wasn’t home.

Since that Friday, I can’t get the image of
the new Deirdre out of my head. I think that soon we’ll meet again.
It won’t be difficult, perhaps a visit to some new art exhibit, her
byte abstractions. I don’t know what will happen then. Is it
possible that there is some tiny corner of her electronic memory
that still holds a memory of me? If she were designed to be my
companion, my complement, couldn’t it be that we would search each
other out? Would I be able to make this free Deirdre, who could
meet many other women who might interest her, fall in love with
me?

Silvia suspects that I’m beginning to fall
in love with Deirdre.

Original Title: Deirdre

Translated by Lawrence
Schimel