She grabbed her jacket and headed for Gadi’s oyster shack. She bolted down the street, adrenaline coursing through her. At the corner where the hotel had stood was a gap between buildings, obvious as a missing front tooth. The ruin had been dismantled, the components re-used. She found herself stopped dead and staring at the space the hotel had occupied long before she had been born. The most powerful connections of her life seemed attached to that space. Avram had a grave, but Yod didn’t; that was his memorial, what he had left to them: a violent absence. She imagined she could still smell something burnt, perhaps the soil itself or small fragments of combusted wood or plaster. She walked slowly forward to the vacant lot, just beginning to sprout a growth of weeds. The old basement had been filled in to prevent accidents. She squatted and took a handful of the sandy soil between her hands. She was right; particles of burnt material lay gritty on her palm. Yod’s ashes, in a sense. The ashes of his act.
“I have died and taken with me Avram, my creator, and his lab, all the records of his experiment … I die knowing I destroy the capacity to replicate me. …” She could hear Yod speaking, but he hadn’t destroyed that capacity, not at all, because he had trusted her. He had taken care to save Malkah and herself from the explosion, never guessing she would undo his last act. She could see his face projected in her room. “Kaf must not come to be. … I have done one good thing with my death. I have made sure there will be no others like me.”
He died convinced he had accomplished a goal that made his death palatable to him. Thus had he salvaged something for himself out of Avram’s fatal orders. Could she wipe out that sacrifice? He thought he had ended the line of cyborgs. If he could know she planned to reverse his act, would he not feel betrayed? She imagined Yod’s eyes fixed on her. The new cyborg would look just like him, and she would always expect it to say, “Shira, why? Why did you recreate me against my dying wishes?”
And what was her reason for hurrying? So that she would be started beyond stopping by the time Malkah returned; because Malkah, too, would tell her that the choice to make another Yod was immoral. Would the cyborg really be Yod? Yod was the product of tensions between Avram and Malkah and their disparate aims as well as the product of their software and hardware. If a cyborg created as a soldier balked and wanted to be a lover, might not a cyborg created as a lover long to be a celibate or an assassin? She remembered all the cyborgs who had looked just like Yod; Chet, who had killed David; all the autistic or violent offspring of Avram’s experiments.
She could not be Avram. She could not manufacture a being to serve her, even in love. Very slowly she walked back along the block to the house built around the courtyard. There in Malkah’s office she loaded the crystals into a backpack. She took all the records of Yod’s hardware and software, and she walked to the recycling plant.
Outside, she paused again. She stood in the old road, turning one way and then the other. These crystals are his real body. But if I do not destroy the capability, I will succumb. When I am especially lonely and I miss him even more strongly than usual, the temptation will recur. Another afternoon like this one, I will talk myself into the Tightness of the attempt. First I will just look at him, watch him. Then I will want him. Then I will decide I cannot do without him. Like Avram, I will feel empowered to make a living being who belongs to me as a child never does and never should.
She carried her backpack into the recycling plant and emptied the crystals into the proper chute. The little cubes that were all that was left of Yod slid away into the fusion chamber and became energy. She had set him free.
