The Mad Scientist's Daughter (24 page)

  The man continued his speech, running through recent legal victories – another rights law passed on the west coast, an increase in vocal support for full mandatory emancipation. Cat closed her eyes, his voice running over her like a river, like the river that slipped past her childhood home, where she swam with Finn in the cold green water.

  Cat liked robots but being in this room with them, all free of their duties, all free to program themselves into whomever they wanted to be, twisted her stomach. It was like being a child again, like she'd broken one of her mother's inscrutable rules. She couldn't quite place where the feeling came from.

  "…thanks to the donations of Mrs Caterina Feversham. Let's give her a round of applause."

  Cat opened her eyes. The applause sounded like raindrops pattering across the roof of the glass house. Miguel nudged her, and Cat stood up and turned around so that she could look out over the members of the Automaton Defense League, chapter number 4938. She waved. Smiled. The five robots sat scattered among the rows of chairs, and she felt as though she had let them down somehow. She felt like a fraud.

  The applause died away.

  "Thank you all," she said. "Very much." She paused. Miguel nodded at her, encouraging her to go on. Strange to think the Miguel she knew from college was so involved with the rights of robots. Or maybe not. He had always been conscientious. Not like her. "It's very important to me that robots are granted the rights of human beings." She smiled waveringly. "We're all people."

  More applause. Cat sat back down.

  "You did good, lady," whispered Miguel. But knots still tied up the inside of Cat's stomach.

  Forty-five minutes later, when the meeting ended and the humans filled up paper plates with piles of fruit salad and French onion dip, Cat sat at her seat and transferred a thousand dollars to the ADL donation account. She did not tell anyone that she did it. Not Miguel, not Alastair, not the chapter's president. It was that haze again, only this time it was thick with unplaceable guilt. She had felt it every time Alastair smiled.

 

One morning, Cat woke up early, the sky above the ceiling a pale pinkish-gray. The space of bed beside her was empty and unrumpled, just as it had been when she fell asleep the night before, Richardless.

  This had been happening a lot lately.

  Cat crawled out of bed, the heat of the day already pooling around the glass. She didn't bother putting on her robe, just shuffled into the hallway in her panties and tank top, running her fingers through her sleep-mussed hair. When she came into the kitchen, Richard was sitting at the breakfast table, his eyes rimmed with red, his skin the color of old dishwater. His computer was sitting in front of him but he didn't look at it. Instead, he stared at the back yard, where birds squabbled in the patchy grass. The grass, planted a month after they moved in, had never taken to the thin soil.

  Cat poured a cup of coffee, squinted at the bright sunlight reflecting off the counter tops.

  "Looks like somebody stayed out all night," she said.

  Richard lifted his head but didn't turn his eyes away from the birds out in the yard. "I've been here since midnight." He looked over at her then, twisted his entire body around, the chair scraping against the tile. "Not that I expect you to notice. You live in this house and suck up all my money, but you don't give a shit about where it comes from."

  He jerked away from her.

  Cat stirred her coffee slowly, not sure if she should acknowledge his outburst or creep back into her bed. She sipped at her coffee. It was lukewarm, burnt, old-tasting.

  "What are you talking about?" she said.

  "Forget it." Richard slammed his computer shut. "You don't care."

  "I do care." It sounded insincere even to her. She knew she should try harder. "Tell me what's wrong. Did something happen?"

  "Did something happen?" Richard tipped back in the chair and laughed. Cat stared at the back of his head. "Did something
happen
? Do you pay any attention at all to what goes on outside of your fucking art studio?" When Cat didn't respond, he shook his head. "This is what I'm talking about. You just–" He pushed his hands through his unwashed hair. "SynLodge is losing money. All those goddamned robot-rights protests. They want rights for all AI, sentient or not. So of course the investors are pulling out." His hands dropped to the table. "Noratech doesn't want to buy us anymore."

  "Oh." The air in the kitchen was too thick to breathe. "I'm… I'm sorry."

  Richard stood up and faced her. Cat pressed the small of her back into the countertop. Richard's hands had curled into two tight fists. Cat pulled her coffee mug against her chest like a shield and waited for him to say something about the ADL donations. He had to know.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. "And you're wrong – I do care. About what happens to you."

  Richard leaned close enough to her that Cat could see the spider web of pink veins crawling across the whites of his eyes, smell the smoky alcohol he'd drunk last night.

  "You don't care about anything," he said.

  Cat looked away from him, down at her sludgy coffee.

  Richard exhaled, pushed his hands up into his hair. "See?" He took a long step back from her, toward the picture window. "You don't even try to deny it. I married the fucking ice queen." One backward step. Another. He passed the refrigerator; he passed the kitchen island. The house was silent, frozen in the white-hot sunlight.

  "Richard," Cat said carefully. But she didn't know what to say to him. She suspected his accusation was true. Why else did she feel like a fraud at the ADL meeting? Why else did she let herself be preserved like an experiment subject beneath the house's glass ceiling?

  "Don't even try."

  "Richard, I'm sorry for…"

  Cat didn't know how to finish the sentence, but it didn't matter. Richard lunged across the room and picked up one of the metal chairs from the kitchen table, hoisted it above his head, and flung it into the window. For a moment, the million shards of glass hung silent in the sunlit air, throwing off miniature rays of light. Then the chair landed in the grass outside, and the room filled with an unmistakable ringing chorus as the window showered across the kitchen tile. Cat dropped her coffee mug. It broke into four pieces. Coffee oozed across the floor.

  Richard stalked out of the room, his head down, his eyes on the floor.

 

A week or two went by. It might have been longer. The days, all so sunny and hot and clear, blended together too seamlessly now. Cat couldn't keep track.

  Almost all evidence of Richard's violence that morning had been eliminated by the house's automation. The bots even carted in the chair from outside while Cat was tucked away in one of the back bedrooms. The only thing the house couldn't repair was the missing glass in the window. Cat left it uncovered despite the sweltering heat and the computer's hourly complaints.
The cold air is escaping. Dust is accumulating in the kitchen
. The computer had filed a work request, but the contractors hadn't shown up to fix it.

  "Richard broke the window," Cat said. "It's his fault. Let him deal with it." She wanted to believe this; she didn't want to believe that what he told her was true, that she didn't care about anything, that she was soulless, empty, like the shell of a cicada.

  Cat began to notice the natural world making its way into the sterile, sun-dried house: disintegrating pine needles and rotting flower petals, swirls of dirt, butterfly wings, tiny black beetles. One morning Cat came down to the kitchen and found a line of ants marching across the gleaming counters, onto the floor, out into the backyard. They had, in the night, found the place where she'd spilled a teaspoon of sugar while fixing a plate of strawberries, and now they carried off her messiness, granule by granule. She stood in the opening in the glass and watched them work.

  The computer chimed. "It is predicted to rain tomorrow. It would be advisable to cover the empty pane. The contractors are still delayed."

  "I know." Cat sighed. "I'll find a tarp or something this afternoon."

  Then she went upstairs and showered and dressed and went about her long empty day.

  A little after 4 o'clock, someone rang the doorbell.

  "No one is at the door," announced the computer.

  "What are you talking about?" asked Cat. "It just rang."

  "No one is at the door."

  Cat tossed her reading tablet aside and walked to the door. For a moment, in her fugue, she didn't understand what she was looking at. Finn. She saw Finn through the glass, his hair falling across his eyes.

  Maybe it didn't matter anymore that she was married. Maybe she had completed enough unspoken penance to earn back his affection.

  "Finn!" she cried. "You stupid machine," she said to the computer. "Somebody is there! It's Finn."

  "No one is at the door."

  Cat laughed and slid open the door. Finn blinked. "Cat," he said, and the way he said her name made her breath catch in her throat. Had it always sounded like that? Her name in his voice?

  "Finn," she said. "Oh my God, come in – I can't believe you finally showed up! Did you call? Sometimes I don't hear my comm slate, the house is too big."

  "I didn't call." He paused. "I wanted to surprise you."

  "Surprise me?" She laughed. "Well, you certainly did that."

  The corners of his mouth turned up in a sad, unusual way.

  Cat couldn't resist the urge to kiss him, even though he stood in the doorway, where the neighbors might see them together, so she brushed her lips against his cheek, pulled herself away before it went further. He stared at her.

  "Let me show you the house," she said.

  "That won't be necessary."

  "Oh, come on, it's made of glass. That's crazy, right?"

  "It's certainly… strange… to live in a glass house."

  "I think the neighbors spy on us."

  "That's unfortunate."

  Cat laughed. She felt transformed. Leavened. When she laughed she imagined a string of bubbles drifting up toward the transparent, sun-filled ceiling. She forgot about the hole in the kitchen and she forgot about Richard and she even forgot about the computer lurking silently in the circuitry of the house. She floated into the living room, and Finn followed her.

  "You seem well," said Finn.

  "I'm OK." Cat collapsed into the expansive folds of the couch. "It's good to see you."

  "Yes." Finn stayed standing. "It's good to see you as well."

  Cat crossed her legs and tugged on her skirt. Finn watched her. The weight of his eyes on her was heavier than she remembered. Maybe it had been too long since she'd seen him: in real life, not through the distortion of video chat. He looked the exact same. He would always look the exact same, until the end of time.

  But even so, something had changed.

  "What's wrong?" she said.

  "Nothing's wrong."

  "Something's happened." A pain in her heart. "Is it Daddy?"

  "Nothing has happened to Dr Novak." For a second, Finn didn't speak. "You shouldn't worry about him. He wouldn't like it."

  "Then what is it?"

  Finn looked out through the transparent wall, where the oleander bushes pressed against the glass. The sky was bleached white from the heat.

  "I'm no longer the property of your father," he said.

  "What?" Cat pushed herself forward on the couch. He still wouldn't look at her. "You were never anybody's property."

  "I am now." Said so softly it sounded like a disruption in the white noise of the air conditioner.

  Cat stared at him, a cold horror gnawing at the edges of her stomach. She wiped her palms against the couch. The light in the room was suddenly too bright. Finn turned his head toward her.

  "I believe it was on the news."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The auction. I auctioned myself off."

  Everything in the world went still. Cat could no longer feel her lungs contracting and expanding. She could no longer feel her heart beating.

  "What?" she whispered.

  "I decided," said Finn, "that I no longer wished to belong to your father. And so–"

  "You didn't belong to him!" Cat shrieked. She put one hand to her forehead.
Stay calm, stay calm
. Tears welled up at the base of her lashes, and she tried to blink them away. "You belong to yourself."

  Finn smiled in that same sad strange way. "That's what Dr Novak said. I contacted all the parties involved myself. Of course the money went to him, but… I have no need for money."

  A tear escaped the cage of Cat's eyelashes and slid down her cheek. She didn't bother to wipe it away. "Why?" she asked.

  Finn looked at her. Impassive.
Always so goddamned impassive
. "It's… difficult to explain." His eyes twitched away from her. That movement again. The sight of it made her sick to her stomach.

  "That's not fair," she said. "You can't just… do something like that. And not have a reason."

  "I have a reason." His gaze settled at a point above her head. "I just can't tell you." And then he moved across the living room floor and sat down beside her on the couch. He tilted his head and picked up her hand and she let him, because now more than ever his touch electrified her.

  "You can tell me anything," she said.

  "No," he said. "I can't."

  His words stung her. Cat looked down at their hands, at their fingers entwined together. For a moment, they sat unspeaking, the room hot and bright and still. Outside, the oleander scraped against the glass.

  "I was purchased by Selene Technologies," he said. "STL."