The Mad Scientist's Daughter (28 page)

  "Don't you worry about its…
rights
?"

  "The Sunshine AI has no consciousness," said Cat.

  The investor leaned back and stared at Cat with a dark, appraising expression. Cat stared back at him. She knew this was a man who'd made his fortune off the sorrow of others. Then he laughed, short and barking.

  "Yeah," he said. "No consciousness."

  "That's how we avoid the legality issues, of course." Richard said quickly. "But, I assure you, we've found the sweet spot between–"

  "But don't you think the lack of consciousness takes away what makes these things so exciting?" the investor asked. "I always like my AIs to have a personality, myself."

  "That's the sacrifice," Richard said. "They work much better. Personalities in a household bot are overrated." His eyes flicked over to Cat. "They get insolent. They form activist groups. You know George, on the lunar station?"

  Cat's fork dropped from her hand. Her calmness solidified in the pit of her stomach.

  
Stop
, she thought.

  "The creator was Cat's father."

  
Stop.

  "The thing was like an obnoxious grad student, I swear to God."

  
Stop stop stop stop–

  And then Cat realized that Richard had stopped, and moreover that he was glaring at her, and that the investor and his wife both watched her from across the table, the wife looking engaged with her surroundings for the first time that night.

  Cat had been saying it out loud.
Stop. Stop. Stop.

  She wanted to dissolve into the darkness. Instead, she picked up her fork.

  "You don't understand what you're talking about," she said to Richard.

  "Of course I don't," Richard said. "How could I? I just run an AI company. I'm just an evil corporate shill trying to enslave a bunch of poor automatons. Right?"

  Cat didn't answer. Her cheeks burned. From across the table, the investor smiled.

  "She was a little too attached," said Richard. "If you know what I mean."

  "Not something I want to think about," the investor said.

  Cat picked up her glass of wine and drank it down without tasting anything. Richard's eyes seared straight into her.

  "A little too attached," he said.

• • • •

After dinner ended, the investor and his wife breezed down the sidewalk into the gleaming lights of downtown. Cat and Richard stood outside the restaurant waiting for the valet to bring their car.

  "That was a fucking disaster," he said.

  Cat dug her nails into the side of her clutch purse.

  "Do you have any idea how much money was riding on that dinner? How much you just lost me?"

  "It's all true," Cat whispered. "I wasn't joking."

  The valet pulled the car up to the curb. Richard paid without speaking, then stalked around to the driver's side. Cat stepped in carefully, thanked the valet in his red suit, laid her head back against the seat.

  "No fucking shit. I've seen the goddamned bank statements." Richard jabbed his fingers into the auto-programming screen. "Although why you felt the need to tell the goddamn investor is beyond me."

  The car pulled away from the curb, and Richard sucked in his breath through his teeth. He kept his eyes on the road ahead of them. The city threw off sparks of light. Cat pulled a tissue out of her purse and wiped off her lipstick.

  They rode the rest of the way home in silence, Richard simmering beside Cat. She could smell him, the acrid tang of his sweat. She turned on the air conditioner. She could tell he was making a concentrated effort not to look at her, not to see her. Cat slipped off her shoes and kicked her feet up on the dashboard, pushed her seat back, stared at him.

  He said nothing.

  When they arrived home, Richard slammed the car door and stomped into the house before Cat had a chance to put on her shoes. She walked languidly across the moonlit yard, through the front door. All the lights were off. Everything was in black and white from the moon. Cat couldn't bear the thought of the moon tonight.

  "Computer," she said. "Why's it so dark in here?"

  The light by the door flickered on. Cat walked across the living room, the house's illumination following her. Wherever she went, light followed, brightening her steps. She threw her shoes down next to the couch. She found Richard in the dining room, pouring a glass of whiskey. When the lights switched on, he barked: "I said keep all the lights off!"

  The lights switched off.

  "You're a fucking slut."

  Cat stood there barefoot in the darkness and the moonlight.

  "Why do you say that?" she asked.

  Richard looked up at her, slowly. "Don't act like you don't–" He stopped, drained his glass. "Did you fuck him?"

  "Who, the investor?"

  Richard hurled his glass at Cat, so quickly she didn't have time to react. He missed. The glass shattered on the wall beside her head. Her muscles tensed but otherwise she didn't move.

  "You know what I'm talking about."

  The moonlight spilling in through the roof was everywhere, and Cat had been anticipating this conversation since the day she first said yes to that glint of diamond in the black velvet box.

  "I really don't. And I don't appreciate you throwing things at me."

  Richard jumped to his feet and drew back his arm. The bottle went flying, whiskey arcing out of its neck. This time Cat dropped to her hands and knees. The bottle exploded where her head had been. The glass wall cracked. Whiskey splattered across her back and seeped through the fabric of her dress. The smell of it reminded her of the old dive bar where she went drinking in college. It made her head spin.

  Now her heart was pounding.

  "You are a fucking deceitful bitch," he said. "And I'm sick of your ice queen bullshit."

  He stepped toward her. Cat looked up at him through the curtain of hair that had fallen across her eyes. When she stood up, she stepped on a piece of broken glass. She bit down on her tongue to keep from crying out.

  "There's something wrong with you," said Richard. "Something not right. Growing up out there in the woods all alone with nothing but a madman for a father and a goddamn
robot
." He lunged at her. Cat jumped away, slipping on the blood from her foot. Richard grabbed her by the arm and pulled her close to him.

  "What was it like?" His nails dug into her arm. His breath was hot and damp on the side of her neck. "Look at me." He grabbed her by the chin and jerked her face toward him. "You think I'm stupid? You think I didn't figure it out? Baby, this isn't about the ADL. I mean… I saw the way you looked at him. The way you
defended
him."

  "Please let me go."

  He slapped her.

  Everything in the house froze. Cat. Richard. She felt the imprint of his hand across her cheek, the individual lines of his fingers, hot and stinging. She tried to step away from him, but he didn't let go of her arm. For a moment of moonlit lucidity Cat wondered what sort of violence the man she married had repressed all these years. She felt it coming to the surface. She felt it in herself, reflecting back at him. And fear, too, shot through it all. But none of it belonged to her. It was all his.

  "Richard," she said.

  His face contorted: sneering, angry. The scent of whiskey. The moon reflecting off the glass walls. Cat tried to steady her breathing.

  At the edge of her vision, she saw his hand balling into a fist.

  
Get away. You have to get away.
She reached up and began to pry his fingers away from her arm and then he swung at her and she ducked down, hit him in the stomach. He grunted, doubled over, grabbed at her hair. She turned and ran as best she could with her bleeding foot through the living room. He caught her at the waist and pulled her around and when his fist slammed across her right cheek she screamed. She couldn't help herself.

  A sickening crack. A blossom of pain. The room went bright and then dark. Cat slithered away from him. He caught her by the wrist and hit her again, in the nose. Warmth slid over her face, down over her clavicle. She swung at him, knocked him in the side of the head. Not even hard enough to hurt her own hand. She was too shaken, too confused.

  "Computer!" Cat shrieked. She tasted something slick and metallic. "Turn on the lights!"

  The house flooded with illumination, bright and clean. The light showed a trail of impossibly red blood snaking out of the dining room. Richard froze. His eyes went from furious to terrified. His jaw dropped. He backed away from her.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I drank too much. I'm sorry…"

  Blood welled up in Cat's mouth, and she turned her head and spat a comet's tail of red that splattered across the glass walls. She turned to look at Richard.

  "Get out," she said.

  Her voice was dark and deep. She wiped her hand across her mouth. More blood. Her right eye felt heavy and swollen.

  "Caterina…" Richard backed away from her. "God, Caterina, let me call an ambulance. I'm so sorry, there's so much…"

  Cat ignored him. She stumbled away, toward the bedroom. Her head was ringing. She had told him to get out but she knew she couldn't stay here. She knew she couldn't ever come back to the glass house. She hobbled into the bedroom and told the computer to lock the door. She dragged the suitcase out of the closet and threw in clothes, not paying attention to what she packed. A cocktail dress. A pair of ratty old shorts. She dumped in a pile of underwear and clicked the suitcase shut. She avoided looking at herself in the wall's reflection. She didn't want to see that she needed to stay and clean up the blood.

  She had to get out.

  Richard still stood in the living room, cradling his bloodied hand to his chest. When Cat walked in, he looked at her and started crying. She stepped into her white pumps and bit back a scream at the sudden burst of pain in her foot.

  "Don't leave," he said, his voice broken and wet. "Cat, I'm so sorry. You know I'd never do anything like–"

  "You just did." Cat dragged the suitcase to the front door and stopped. Picked up her purse, the keys to her car. She didn't look at him. Her foot burned and her face ached and her heart was worn out from all the sorrow of her life.

  "Please–" he said.

  Cat walked out the door.

 

She drove all night. She stopped once, on the side of the highway, and used the napkins in the glove compartment to wipe at the blood crusted on the bottom of her foot. Most of the blood on her face had flaked away and spilled into her lap, and she stood up, dusting off the front of her dress like sweeping the dirt off the patio of her old apartment. The pine trees lining the road rattled with the dryness of autumn heat. Cat leaned against the side of the car and looked up at the sky, the stars, the moon.
Finn.

  She got back in the car.

  Cat watched the sun come up through the front window shield. Strata of pink and orange and pearly gray. The sun rose higher in the sky. The car warmed up. Cat turned on the A/C. The woods grew thicker. Cars lay abandoned on the side of the road. She turned off the main highway and drove along the rough Farm-to-Market road that passed through the town where she had gone to high school. Nothing sparked in her memory. Nothing made her gasp with nostalgia. There was only the steady, aching throb in her foot, in her face, in her fingers.

  And then she arrived at her childhood home. She parked the car behind her father's. She stepped out. Pain shot through her foot and up her leg. Her ankles wobbled in her shoes. The yard seemed made of dust. The garden was a pile of dried-up vines and spindly tree trunks and curling dead leaves. The paint on the house flaked and peeled. Cat pulled her suitcase out of the trunk and dragged it up to the porch. The door was unlocked. She went inside. She didn't think about anything. Her heels clicked unevenly against the floorboard, and the wheels of her suitcase rattled and echoed through the hall. She limped down to the laboratory and stood in the doorway.

  Her father looked up from his workstation. Computers blinked all around him like lights on a Christmas tree. For a second Cat thought he might scream. She wondered what the bruising was like. The blood. She wondered what he saw of her.

  And then Cat let go of her suitcase. It slammed against the floor. Her entire body shook. All those computers. The whole world was made of light. She could pass right through it like a ghost.

  "Daddy," she said.

  Her voice cracked.

 
 

 
 

 
 
 

Cat combed down the warp thread, pushing it gently into place. She worked slowly but methodically, focusing only on the tapestry stretched out in front of her. It would be finished soon. She didn't know what she would do with herself then, because she had discovered, in these months since she'd come home, that the times she worked were the only times she didn't think.

  She turned the warp thread. Blue thread now, a deep rich blue, the color of the sky at twilight, right before the stars come out.

  It was strange working from her father's house, without the familiar sounds of the studio ricocheting around her. None of Felix's laughter, none of Lucy's chatter, none of the wild twangy music they let loose through the cheap speakers. Just the creaks of the old house settling into its foundation, the wind rustling the pine trees, and silence. She had set up the loom in the upstairs guest room – the room where Finn had tutored her, so long ago – so she rarely heard her father puttering around in his laboratory or the kitchen.

  Sometimes it made her lonely, but mostly she found the isolation soothing.