Originally published in Planet Magazine No. 19 (September 1998).
Of all the unlikely places in the known universe, Oasis-C is where it began. Oasis-C is a planet so-named because, according to the travel literature, it is “an island of entertainment on the edge of the void.” What that translates into is a barely habitable rock in the middle of nowhere that used to be a mineral mill. Over the years a tourist industry sprang up which catered to mostly freighters, haulers, and other people who frequently find themselves floating around in deep space, or deep shit, and need a place to hide out for awhile. I was there because I had no alternative. I was returning from a job and my transport needed some repairs.
By the time we landed on Oasis, I was feeling as tense as a tightrope stuck in event-horizon orbit. The job I’d just completed for Inter-Sol Mining had started out as a quick two-week trouble-shooting stint and turned into a six-week nightmare — 18 hour days, really bad food, and repeated attempts by HelixCorp., a rival mining company, to undermine the mission. On top of all that, they were having problems with the atmospheric pumps on Oasis-C and there was an excessive amount of methane in the air, which gave me a horrible headache. Of course, the excessive amount of methane could have been a result of the local cuisine, but I didn’t want to find out. I just wanted to find some place to sit and slowly drink away my fatigue.
I ended up in a strip joint called Eros Inc., which was located on the fourth level of a giant underground entertainment complex. The gimmick at Eros was that some of the girls were human and some were bio-synthetic, and the management “challenged you to tell the difference.” The whole thing sounded like a pretty sad and sordid affair. When I walked in, I half-expected to see a bunch of drunken slugs ripping the synthetic flesh off outdated sexdroids and poking their fingers up poor girls’ skirts to test their human-ness.
What I found surprised me. Arched stone entranceways framed either end of a large Great Hall, which resembled the medieval-style architecture of Sirius-C that had been so popular on Earth a few decades back. Six stone pillars rose from the gray slab floor, dividing the space into even, square sections. Each pillar supported two huge stone replicas of some ancient amphibian-looking god frozen in mid-croak, which was reminiscent of a gargoyle with Medusa’s hair-do. The heads of the frog monsters merged with the ceiling in a mass of tangled snake-like appendages. Massive stone steps led down to the club floor, where about fifty black Nischean-crystal tables floated above the rough slab surface with green orb-lights hovering over them. It was impressive for Oasis-C, but I wasn’t really concerned with the décor. I was just happy the place didn’t smell.
I made my way through the crowd, stopping occasionally when I neared one of the many tables that supported a gyrating beauty of questionable origin, and found a spot by the wall. The place was full of girls. There were probably forty on the floor, working the crowd and prancing around, and most of them were relatively easy on the eyes. From a distance, they all looked human. If there were any bio-synthetics on the floor, they had to be SexThetic Ultima Model B’s, the latest in bio-synthetic technology.
I’d heard about the Model B’s but I’d never seen one. My line of work requires me to keep up with the latest developments in micro-electronic technology. I am a certified M.E.F., micro-elecro-facillitator. I perform micro-surgery on the tiny, capillary-sized connections which allow huge systems, like the ones on the Inter-Sol Mining Extractor, to function. From what I’d read, the Phoeneus Corporation, manufacturer of the Ultima Model B and countless other bio-synthetics, had recently been under tremendous pressure from stockholders to roll out a better model of sexdroid. Industry analysts and critics didn’t think it was yet possible, given the current technology. But they’d done it. And the claims Phoeneus was making about the new Model B were phenomenal.
The Model B’s were touted as being “more human than humans.” They were supposed to be equipped with a new type of cognitive processor that mimics human thought patterns. The new processor was patterned after a human brain, and was even divided into hemispheres. Phoeneus bragged that the Model B could process external stimuli and base its reaction to the stimuli on a response which was an amalgam of data received from separate parts of the cognitive processor, which all simulated the functioning of different areas of the human brain. The response was automatically aligned with whatever pre-programmed personality the Model B had been given. The personalities modeled those of real human subjects and were piped into the Model B’s, enabling them to have memories of actual events which occurred before they were activated. The only thing that prevented a Model B from creating and acting out its own agenda were the Action-Prohibitive Subroutines that Phoeneus had installed to prevent them from exhibiting free-will type behavior. Luckily, Phoeneus realized beforehand that an artificial intelligence of that magnitude requires an artificial conscience.
If it was true, it was amazing. It meant that these new synthetics could perform complex mental exercises like free association and even appear to display emotion. They could have fooled Freud. But of course, Freud wouldn’t have had time to psychoanalyze them. He would have been too busy plooking them. Physically, the Phoeneus Corporation’s Ultima Model B’s were indistinguishable from humans. The level of technology applied in the production of synthetic skin, tissue, and organs on the Model Bs was astounding.
But I had my doubts about the Phoeneus Corporation. They had pushed out a new product that utilized unheard-of, groundbreaking technology in such a short time that it just didn’t seem possible. The fact that there had been no press on the invention of the new cognitive processor prior to the release of the Model B, and that the technological model for the processor hadn’t even been posited in theory in any of the science journals, seemed to me highly suspicious.
A waitress floated near me in the gravity-free zone overhead and I ordered the closest thing they had to single-malt Scotch and fell into my chair, telling myself to relax and enjoy the view. I had a habit of fixating on things and over-analyzing them to the point of madness — call it an occupational hazard — but I was exhausted, and I convinced myself it was not healthy to be theorizing about possible inter-planetary corporate conspiracies, especially on Oasis-C.
I was on my third Scotch-substitute when I saw her. She had her eyes on me from across the room, inspecting me curiously. As soon as I noticed her, she started sliding my way, maneuvering through the noisy, roaming clusters of drunken men, but always re-establishing eye contact. I watched her move. It’d been a long time since I’d seen something so beautiful. She was wearing a white see-through blouse and matching G-string with invisible Magdelarian-alloy heels, which made her seem as if she were walking on air. As she approached my table, she slowed her stride and seamlessly segued her movements into the rhythm of the music, hypnotizing me in an erotic trance. My eyes playfully followed the shape of her as she moved, studying the perfection of her seductively tapered curves and the angle of her dark hair as it fell across her olive skin.
After she finished her dance, she gracefully placed herself in the seat across from me, rested her pretty chin on her hands, and locked into me again with her luminescent green eyes. I matched her gaze, admiring her intricately crafted, ergonomically correct sales pitch. She spoke first.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No, are any of your patrons from around here?”
She smiled. “No, I guess not. But they always seem like they belong.” Her voice was pleasant, but raspy, probably from chronic exposure to the artificial atmosphere.
“And I don’t?”
“No. You seem like someone who hopped on the wrong flight from Cydonia City or some other upscale town and ended up someplace you don’t want to be.”
“It’s that obvious, is it?”
“I’m pretty good at picking up signals.”
I studied her as she crossed her legs seductively. She was incredibly beautiful, too beautiful, I thought, to be human, and her movements seemed a little jerky. If there really were synthetics on the floor, she had to be one of them. “So, I take it you’re one of the non-human employees?” I said, trying to determine what I was dealing with.
“Why do you say that?” she shot back.
“Well, you said ‘picking up signals’. I thought you were making a joke about your wiring.”
“My wiring? You think I’m a circuit-head?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, I can’t tell. But I didn’t mean to offend you either way.”
She leaned in closer to the table, intensified her stare, and made a play for control of the conversation. “Tell me, how are you wired?” She seemed tense, charged with anxiety. Her gaze made the silence after her question seem melodramatic. I smiled at her and tried not to efface the moment. I noticed her teeth were slightly clenched and her left jaw muscle was twitching involuntarily.
“Pretty well, I guess. No major bugs. Are you all right,… What was your name?”
“Kali. And I’m fine,” she said, loosening her jaw. “One of those drunken leptons over there bought me a shot of SeraTonic, but I’m on top of it.” The SeraTonic explained her nervousness. SeraTonic was a cheap mix of mood elevators that did a little two-step on the neurotransmitters; the only problem was that the cadence of the biochemical jig varied from person to person, depending on individual brain chemistry. She’d dodged the question of her humanity, but I assumed that her reaction to the SeraTonic had to make her human. Unless Ultima B’s could model the response of human neurons. I looked back at Kali and smiled. She fidgeted in her seat again.
“And you are…?”
“Denton.”
“And what do you do, Denton? No, let me guess.” She paused and tapped her fingers on the table to the beat of the music. “I’m thinking you are… a professor.”
“Do I look like a professor?”
“It’s your eyes. You have very astute eyes.”
“I’m an M.E.F,” I said with pride.
“Oooh. I like a man who pays attention to detail.”
“That I can do. But when it comes to woman, it’s usually the wrong details.”
“Divorced?”
“Five years. You are pretty good at picking up signals.”
“It comes with the territory.” Kali wrinkled her nose and then flashed me a lusty smile. “Denton, do you want another dance?” Again, she coated the question in melodrama.
“No. I’d rather talk. Is that all right? I’ve been talking to computers for the past six weeks; it’s nice to finally have a conversation with a real person.”
“Thanks for the compliment. I know what you mean. Most of the guys I talk to here are dumber than deck droids. And the girls aren’t much better.”
“Do they ever let you off this rock?”
“I was in Vega System last week. Great trip. I hopped a transport with this crazy guy named Joey Domino, who claimed he was originally from Old Earth. Ended up spending three blind days at some low-rate beach fantasy resort with a bunch of whacked-out strippers. The whole way over, Joey was pumping me full of shit, telling me how much he loved me and how we were gonna have such a romantic time. As soon as we landed he put me to work. Drove me straight from the terminal to his club. When I finally made it back to his condo, I walked in on him and some guy playing tongue tag with a Bootean. I went in his room and crashed on the bed, only to wake up a couple of hours later next to another Bootean, who was trying to separate me from my pants. Have you ever met a Bootean? The smell alone will put you in a coma. I ended up getting really saturated on cheap cognac and telling him and all his genetically challenged friends what, where, and how to go. Then the Booteans got pissed and tried to convince everyone else to pull a Gtzrople!, which is basically a very brutal gang rape. If they hadn’t all been drunk or altered to the Nth, I would have never made it out of there.”
“Sounds like you could write a book.”
“It’d be an epic tragedy.”
“Why’d you go off with a guy like that in the first place?”
“Oh, you know, sometimes its fun to believe the lies. I knew a guy with a last name like Domino was a long shot, but one has to try.”
“So you don’t like it here?”
She looked around at the drunken men crowding around the naked dancing girls, all ridiculously playing up to their stereotypes, and smiled sarcastically, as if attempting to expose the pure insanity of her shallow, commerce-driven environment. “Would you?”
“I guess not.” Now I was certain Kali was human. She had an awareness that was too unique, too oddly perceptive to be synthetic.
“So why not get out? There are plenty of other planets. I hate to preach, but if you want to change your environment, you need to define what you want and then implement a plan.”
Kali sighed, stared down at the stone floor, and shook her head. “You must be an M.E.F.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound condescending.”
“No, it’s just that it’s not that simple. You see, the management here has me half-convinced I’m an Ultima Model B. AndŠ.”
“Wait, you mean you’re a SexThetic?”
She looked up quickly and captured my attention. I watched as a mixture of emotion slowly eclipsed her delicate features. Huge tears welled up in her eyes. I knew I had just cut at the very core of her pain with my impetuous response. In one brief expression, all of her fears, insecurities, and desires surfaced, as if the diverse landscape of her heart was momentarily transposed over the beauty of her face. I looked away, embarrassed, expecting her to leave. But the wave of emotion subsided as quickly as it had come, and she regained her composure.
“Denton, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told a customer before. I’m telling you because I feel I can trust you. Your eyes tell me I can trust you. Can I?” The melodrama was gone from her voice, replaced by an endearing quality. She seemed to be letting down her guard.
“You can trust me.”
“Good.” Kali scooted her chair beside mine and leaned her body close to me. She spoke in low, conspiratorial tones. “Do you see the girl over there with the abstract body-paint mural on her back? The one dry-humping that fat guy’s leg?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Silica.”
“Silica?”
“Sil-eeka. Actually it’s ‘Sexy Silica’. That’s her stage name. Pretty sad, huh? Mine’s ‘Robotica Erotica’. We don’t pick them. Our rusty slag of a house-mom does.
She’s the ancient synthetic female standing over there by the entrance with the vile Draconian smirk on her face. Anyway, Silica is my closest friend. She’s been here about five months longer than I have. A couple months ago, she let me in on some research she’s been doing on the initial design of the Model B. Everybody knows what a break through the cognitive processor was, but what made Silica suspicious is how fast the Model B was mass produced.”
“Sounds like a smart girl,” I said, wondering if she was a “girl.”
“So, she got her hands on some bootleg documentation, and she says she discovered redundancies within the core code of the processor which would make the Model B’s high-level functioning impossible.”
“Interesting.”
“Very.” Kali lowered her voice to a whisper. “Silica believes it’s all a huge cover-up.”
“Then how does she account for her own existence?”
“We think Phoeneus abducted real human females, did some back-tapping on their brains, implanted memory tracks, brainwashed their psyches, and prestoŠthe Model B was born.”
Though I tried to hide my expression, Kali saw the doubt on my face.
“Denton, if you think about it, it’s the only scenario that really makes sense. Do you know what a huge gap there is between the Model B and the last line of sexdroid? The Model A’s couldn’t do much more than giggle at a guy’s jokes and bob their heads up and down.”
“Breakthroughs of that magnitude aren’t unheard of. Look at the invention of the gravity drive, or the chemical-chip.”
“That’s true, but it still doesn’t explain why I dream. I have incredible dreams.”
“You dream?”
“All the time. Recurring dreams. I think there about my former life.”
I scratched my head and glanced around the room, holding my response until she finished speaking, so I wouldn’t sound too cynical. “That’s still not completely outside the scope of your capabilities. Maybe you only think you’re human because you’re programmed to. It could be a pre-programmed feature which makes you seem more human.”
Kali took my hand in hers and faced me. “It’s not. I know it’s not, because I feel. I have emotions. Something inside me knows I’m more than machinery.”
I looked into Kali’s deep green eyes and wondered what I was staring at. Logically, I was still convinced she was a Model B SexThetic. But she looked and acted so human. And I was beginning to wonder if it was possible for a synthetic, a computer, to be programmed in a way that forced it to question the nature of its own origins. The idea seemed unimaginably complex.
“C’mon.” Kali stood up and gave my hand a tug. “I’m due for a break. I want to show you something back at my quarters.”
I resisted. It had always been a personal conviction of mine to never sleep with a sexdroid. To me, it was nothing more than engaging in an act of elaborate masturbation with a talking sex doll. And the truth was, even though Kali seemed human, more than likely she wasn’t. I had to draw the line somewhere. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Kali didn’t reply. She simply turned around, arched her lower back, slowly bent to just the right angle and began grinding her hips erotically to the back-beat. Smart doll.
***
Kali’s apartment was on the top floor of the same entertainment complex the club was in. The place was small and antiseptically clean. There was a modest kitchen to the left of the door with a bar separating it from the main living/sleeping room. The ceiling over the main room was clear, and I could see an almost starless sky above, marred only by the four ugly red moons of Oasis.
“Sorry about the mess. I haven’t been home in awhile.” Kali tossed her purse on the couch and slipped out of her invisible heels. “If I’m not human, then why do my feet hurt every night?” She sat down and began rubbing her left foot.
It was a good question. I also didn’t understand why a walking computer would be plagued with a human cleaning compulsion. I was doing my best to convince myself her crazy story was true. If all of these odd characteristics were part of the Model B’s programming, they were doing their job. The more I looked at Kali, the more I wanted her to be human.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“No. I ‘m fine.”
“Can I get you something to drink?” she said again, in the same tone of voice. Her expression remained unchanged.
“No.” I watched her. Her head was tilted slightly to the right and she hadn’t moved a muscle since the first time she asked the question.
“Can I get you something to drink?” This time the question came slightly slower in cadence, matching perfectly the pattern of a voice response module glitch that had plagued a significant percentage of the Model A sexdroid line. I stared at her, unable to breathe, but happy to have finally gotten the answer to my question.
“I had you thinking, didn’t I?” she said, as her face came back to life with laughter.
“Don’t do that.”
“Just having a little fun. What kind of music do you like?”
I sat down on the couch and stretched. “You don’t have any mid-20th blues, do you? T-Bone, Howlin Wolf, Robert Johnson?”
“The closest I’ve got is Morrison.”
“Van or Jim?”
“Van.”
“Perfect.”
Kali addressed her music unit with the proper keywords, and within seconds we were enjoying the silly doint-doinya-doints of Van Morrison’s 200-year-old version of “Blue Money.”
“Okay, we need to talk. But first, we need to get elevated.” Kali skipped over to the bar and pressed a round button. In a few seconds, I could feel the gravity slipping out of the room. She paused by the bar, waiting for the right moment, and then began striding back toward me, moving higher into the air with each practiced step. The effect was stimulating. As I watched, I felt myself begin to rise.
Kali met me over the couch. She put her hands on my shoulders and began caressing the back of my neck. I picked up on her cue and met her lips passionately. She reciprocated with a sense of urgency and then pulled away. I leaned back and glanced up at the ugly moons.
“Wait, Denton. We have to talk. I have to formulate a plan, remember?” She flipped her hair out of her face and crossed her curvy legs. “Now the first thing we have to figure out is how to mask my retinal stamp, so we can get past customs.”
“Right, but can’t we talk about that later?” I drifted closer to her and kissed her neck. “Let’s just relax now.”
Kali turned away from me and floated over by the bar. “I knew it.”
“You knew what?” I asked, pleading again to the four ugly moons.
“That you didn’t believe me.” She slammed her fist down on the button and brought the gravity back into the room.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know you didn’t say it. That’s the point.” When Kali’s feet reached the floor, she leaned over the bar and poured a shot of what looked like SeraTonic. She gulped it down with a spasm of disgust, and then reached under the bar and pulled out some paper books.
“I’m going to prove it to you.” She opened the first book and tossed it onto the couch next to me.
“That’s my dream journal. Ever meet a synthetic who kept a dream journal?” She threw the next one. The spine scratched my thigh through my pants as it landed in my lap. “That’s a collection of bad poetry. Read through it if you want. There’s no machine in the universe that can pen purple prose like that.” The next one hit me in the chest. “That’s a book of relief maps of every continent on Old Earth. The flagged page is where I think I used to live.”
I looked at the map. Apparently, she thought she used to live in a U.F.C Free Zone on the coast of Brazil. I sat staring at the map. A part of me wanted to stay, but I knew it was unhealthy. I’d been working non-stop for a month and a half. I needed rest. I needed to return home to Tucson and regroup, spend a few weeks soaking up the rays of my home sun. I definitely did not need to get involved in a scheme that included trying to extradite property, human or not, from a planet 3,873 light years from Earth with no alliance membership and a governing body that was barely a step above a bar-owners association. I placed the map book on the couch beside me and stood up.
“I think it’s time for me to go.”
Kali put her hands on her hips and exhaled. “I guess I misjudged you.”
“Maybe you did.”
“I thought you wanted more than cheap, mechanical sex.”
“Let’s just leave it alone,” I said, as I began towards the door.
“Go ahead, asshole. Leave. Get out.”
“Look,” I paused. “Even if I did believe you, you haven’t really shown me anything that can’t conceivably be explained by nuances of coding. Nothing.”
“I haven’t?”
“No.” I turned and headed for the door, determined to end the mess before it got really out of hand. Her obsession with the crazy Phoeneus conspiracy made me think she was probably a SexThetic Model B with some faulty Action-Prohibitive Subroutines. If that was the case, she could be dangerous.
About three steps before I reached the door, I heard Kali’s footsteps, and before I could swing around, she landed on my back — a jumbled mass of hair, tears and flailing limbs. She wrapped her legs around my waist, circled my neck with her left arm and began pounding my back hysterically. Ringlets of hair spilled over my face and I stumbled backwards.
“I have been waiting for youŠ forever.” Her words fell on my ears in a clipped, staccato rhythm. “I’ve been stuck in this hell for as long as I can rememberŠ waiting for someone to believe me. Someone who would listenŠ. Someone with half a brain. And now that I’ve found you, you won’t accept me?”
She leaned back and we both fell to the ground. I twisted around and landed facedown. Kali was still on my back. She put both hands on the side of my head and held me down with the strength of a wrestler. “You listen to me, before you get up mad and throw me away like a broken toy. I have something to say.” I nodded my compliance. “There is one thing I’ve shown you that can’t be explained by nuances of coding.”
“What’s that?”
Kali exhaled, attempting to control the quiver in her voice. “My faith. I have more faith than anybody I know, including you. How do you explain that, Mr. M.E.F.?”
I turned my head to look at her and she let her hands fall to the floor. For a brief moment, we locked into a semiotic stare, each judging the other in silence. Then she began to cry, and in her first awkward sob, as desperation chased the anger from her face, I saw that expression in her eyes I’d seen in the club. She was breaking inside. It was as if, at the moment of that precise, subtle gesture, her heart imploded within her like fireworks in reverse, and in that brief instant, I knew she was human.
Part 2
Two months later, on a cloudless afternoon on the outskirts of Tucson, I was sitting on my patio, contemplating my luck. The afternoon sun laid short, prickly shadows down beside the potted cactus plants that lined the deck and a warm comfortable breeze blew in off the foothills to the west. I had been relaxing on the sun deck for over an hour, sipping a margarita, and had managed to coalesce into a warm, womb-like contentment, which almost made me forget why I had gone out onto the patio in the first place.
I watched Kali scurry around the kitchen, her precious little head popping in and out of view in the space between the countertop and cabinets. She was preparing food for a dinner party we were having that evening. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt genuinely happy. My life felt complete, and I told myself that after I read the unopened document on the table in front of me, any subtle fears remaining in my mind would be put to rest.
Getting Kali off Oasis-C had been no picnic. Because Kali had used up her leisure-time accrual on her trip to Vega System, I had to lie to the club manager at Eros Inc. and tell him I wanted to hire Kali as an escort for a business trip. Then I had to pay him an “accommodation surcharge,” as he put it, and pay for the revenue the club would lose as a result of her absence. I had to bribe the customs clerk on the way out because he claimed he could be severely penalized for not obtaining Kali’s service files. When we finally reached Earth, Customs separated us and got a different story from both of us as to the nature of our relationship, something we should have worked out while in transit. Kali said we were married. I said she was an escort. It took forever to get things untangled, and then the supervisor came in and informed us that Kali would have to undergo a whole battery of medical exams because she had no previous earth visitation record. I threw a fit and convinced them that there was something wrong with their database (I’m good at that), and they finally let us in without any unnecessary probing.
From the first day we arrived home, Kali was amazing. I didn’t really know what to expect. In the back of my mind, I thought she might ditch me once we arrived on Earth. The opposite occurred. Right from the start, she put everything into our new relationship. We sat up late almost every night and talked, got to know each other inside and out. Some nights we’d hike to the top on one of the hills surrounding my ranch house, and make love under the blanket of familiar stars, and then spend the rest of the night making crazy plans for the future like kids on a camping trip.
A few weeks after we’d been back, I had some reservations about introducing her to my friends. I wondered what they would think. I wondered what she would say. I wondered if she would act differently around them. But Kali fit right in. She was friendly, animated, and engaging. She even had my old college buddy, Trips, howling with laughter one evening, something his wife hadn’t witnessed in years. When we had some nosy business partners of mine from the consulting firm over for dinner, she made up an elaborate fictional history, saying she used to be a teacher in a U.F.C. free zone in Brazil. She was incredible. Every time I looked at her, I got a feeling in my gut like I was a kid seeing the Earth from the Moon for the first time.
I took another sip of Margarita and then opened the package on the table in front of me. It contained the original technical documentation for the beta version of the Ultima Model B. I had a colleague of mine procure it for me the first week Kali and I arrived on Earth. Back when I still had doubts about her. It had taken seven weeks to arrive, and my colleague said they refused to deliver it via any medium other than hard-copy mail. The Phoeneus Corporation was required by law to disclose the documentation, but it seemed they wanted to make it as difficult as possible to obtain.
I flipped to the contents page and found a section titled “Verbal Reprogramming Algorithms.” I turned to the section and began reading:
“The Ultima Model B Cognitive Processor(tm) possesses a verbal reprogramming feature which allows exact customization of function, and provides a simple, reliable process for correcting any minor errors which may occur over time. To initialize Verbal Reconfiguration Mode, the certified owner must present the Model B Cognitive Processor with the following series of questions in exact order:
A question beginning with the word “Who.”
A question immediately following the unit’s response which begins with the word “What.”
A question immediately following the unit’s second response which begins with the word “Where.”
A question immediately following the unit’s third response which begins with the word “When.”
A question immediately following the unit’s fourth response which contains the word “Why” and ends in tag question format.
Upon completion of the aforementioned line of questioning, the unit will state it’s model designation, manufacturer, and serial number. At this time, …”
I put the manual down and looked in on Kali again. I wondered why I still had doubts. I knew in my soul that she was human. There was a visceral connection between us that I couldn’t deny. She was the embodiment of everything I’d ever hoped for in a woman. Still, there was a part of me that mocked my happiness, a part of me that said I was fooling myself. That part of me, that voice of doubt, had always been with me, never letting me fully enjoy my accomplishments in life. It had been there throughout my career, telling me I was substandard, incompetent. It had ruined my first marriage, telling me I didn’t deserve it, that I wasn’t good enough for my wife and that she would eventually find someone who could give her more. I decided it was time to silence that voice once and for all. I decided to ask her the questions listed in the manual and put my unfounded fears to rest.
After rereading the “Verbal Reprogramming” section a few times, I put together an inconspicuous line of questions in my head, and hesitantly walked inside. I took a seat at the kitchen table, and stared down at the saltillo tile floor as I reviewed the questions in my head.
Kali was standing over the island countertop in the kitchen, chopping radishes for the radicchio.
She paused as I sat down and flashed me a casual smile. “Too hot out there?”
“No. In fact, it’s really comfortable. We might have to go for a swim later.”
“Sounds good to me. As long as there isn’t a dress code.”
I watched her now. My eyes studied her hands as she steadied a head of broccoli on the cutting board, sliced off little flowerets, and then scooted them to the side of the board with the knife.
Even her hands were exquisitely crafted. I followed the shape of her tanned, sinewy arms over the beautiful, rounded angle of her feminine shoulders, and then, found myself fixating on the slight delicate craftsmanship of her neck. God, I loved everything about that woman. The innate levity of her features made her incredibly seductive and at the same time, accentuated her buoyant, childlike vigor. Her spirit was lighter than air. She was wearing a short off-white, spaghetti strap sundress and beige, ankle-strap heels. I decided, while entranced by her curvaceous calves, that as soon as I was done with my little experiment, I would make love to her right there in the kitchen. I wanted to mark the exact moment of my complete acceptance of her, and my new faith in myself, with a baptism of passion and emotion.
“Who was it that said, “All that is truth is beauty, and all beauty, truth?”
“I’m not sure. But I’m sure I used to know, before.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, before Oasis-C. Before they erased my memory. Are you all right? What’s with the poetry?”
I held my tongue, careful not to speak and mess up the precise line of questioning outlined in the documentation. I tried to think of a way to couch the next question without sounding like a total nut. I noticed a glass of wine on the counter by the cutting board.
“Where’s the wine?”
“On the wine rack.” She looked at me and furrowed her brow. “Are you all right?”
I ignored the query and tried to remember which word the next question began with. Was it “why” or “when”? “When do the guests arrive?” I blurted out.
Kali set down the knife slowly and stared motionlessly at the cutting board beneath her. Her silence began to scare me, but I didn’t speak. Finally, she turned to me, her eyes wet with tears.
“Say something, Denton.”
I remained silent, not sure what the mixed expression on her face meant.
“Say anything. Go ahead.” This time her voice was charged with contempt. An overwhelming surge of fear overtook me and a feeling swelled up in my gut, like I’d been back-kicked by a bull down a bottomless well.
“Go ahead, Denton, be a man. Say it!”
“Why,” I shouted, more a challenge to an unknown god than a response to her derision, “did you pick me for this masquerade, can you tell me?” I snarled in a hot breath as I finished the question.
The answer was cold, indifferent. Kali turned and faced me. Her body seemed to snap into perfect posture, and then the words fell from her precious mouth in a hollow monotone. The weight of them almost made me collapse.
“I am Ultima Model B, manufactured by Phoeneus Incorporated, serial number 805769.”
I felt a wave of nausea shoot through me. Kali stood frozen in her heels like a department store hologram. I stared back at her like an idiot, like a boy blinded by a solar eclipse. I don’t know how long I stared. It was a moment devoid of linear time, but at some point, I remember seeing something which resembled a ripple of emotion surface on her face and then disappear.
The oven timer screamed like a siren, a shrill wake-up call. The veal cutlets were done. Kali snatched the chopping knife from the counter before I could fully comprehend what was happening. I wanted to stop the moment. It made no sense to me, and for a second, I thought I had lapsed into a dream state. My thinking froze, as if I were suddenly bearing the force of 10 G’s and, at the same time, everything in my environment shifted into fast-forward. Then Kali was almost on top of me, reanimated like a denizen of hell, pushing the knife at my head with an overhand motion. Her face contorted with sudden rage, and her lips snarled back, revealing her pointed eye teeth. I raised my left hand and gripped her forearm to block the jab, but the inertia of her body overpowered me and the tip of the blade made a shallow puncture in my neck, just to the left of the Adam’s Apple.
My response to the injury was automatic and must have come from some primal place inside I didn’t even know existed. I had a hold of her knife hand near the wrist and I twisted it counter-clockwise, forcing her entire arm to twist unnaturally. Her right shoulder dipped, and I quickly slipped my left arm behind her shoulder and around the front of her neck, and then pulled her to the floor, while at the same time kicking her legs out from under her.
Kali dropped the knife as she pounded onto the tile. She landed on her back and immediately began looking around for the weapon.
I climbed on top of her and pinned her, hooking my feet under the inner portion of her thighs, the same thighs that had received the rhythm of my passion every night for the past two months, and then paused. It was all too surreal for me. Was I now supposed to beat to death the woman I had loved minutes before? She squirmed and twisted, trying to break free. I raised my right hand to slap her with the false hope that it might snap her out of her homicidal rage, and as I did, she jerked her body to her right and flipped on to her stomach. Her left hand was free, and she reached the knife, which had fallen under the table. With a back-handed twisting motion, she swung the knife around. I fell backward to avoid the blade, but she managed to slash my abdomen just below the diaphragm.
The pain of the cut registered but didn’t seem critical to me. The swing brought her left arm around so that she was again on her back facing me. I kicked my legs up underneath me, so that I was in a crouching position, and then stomped on her wrist with my right foot. The knife again fell from her hand and clattered on the tile.
In an impulse which now seems completely foreign to me, I grabbed the spaghetti straps of her sundress in each of my hands, and as she leaned up and twisted away from me, crossed one, then the other, over her head. I then grabbed the two straps on either side of her neck and pulled outward with all my strength. Kali tried desperately to bring her feet up under and reach a standing position, but I stomped on the back of her calves and then stood up fully myself and pulled at the straps with such concentrated effort, I feared I would pass out.
Kali’s body finally went limp. I relinquished my grip on the straps of her sundress and sank to the floor. Wiping the cold sweat from my forehead, I fought back a wave of nausea as the adrenaline surge gave way to shock. My eyes searched Kali’s face, which, frozen in the expressionless twilight of death, seemed once again innocent and child-like. The thought arose in my mind that maybe I was still on the back porch, lost in a wicked waking dream. For a second, the suggestion seemed plausible. Then Kali’s eye’s fluttered in their sockets as if she were in a deep REM state, and I realized what was happening. After a prolonged oxygen deficit, the cognitive processor would shut down all systems to avoid damage to her synthetic organs, and then, after a timed delay, would restart.
Cursing, I pressed my thumb to the cut on my neck, which was beginning to throb with pain, and picked up the knife from the floor. I knew what I had to do. If her synthetic heart was damaged, she would be permanently shut down until it was replaced. Her eyes were fluttering consistently and her chest moved slightly, drawing a shallow breath. I straddled her waist, and raised the knife over my head with both hands and then hesitated. Something in the back of my mind made me freeze. Was I acting prematurely? Maybe I had missed something. I mentally retraced the events of the past few minutes. She had responded to the line of questions just as the manual said she would. That proved it. That proved she wasn’t human. But still, something didn’t add up.
As I was trying to pinpoint the error in my logic, Kali opened her eyes. I flinched, and immediately brought the knife down, aiming for the right edge of her breastbone. Kali’s eyes opened wide with terror, and then squeezed shut as the blade penetrated her chest.
***
That evening I sat in my study, the farthest room in the house from the kitchen, and tried to make sense of the past two months of my life. The shock had slowly subsided into an overwhelming grief for what had transpired, but eventually, the analytical part of my brain reemerged, and I began to question everything about my relationship with Kali.
As the bottle of Glenlivet on my desk went from half-full to half-empty, I identified the fundamental question that needed to be answered. Who would benefit if I were living with a synthetic that I genuinely believed was human? Who had the motive to plant her in my house? Then it all came to me. HelixCorp was the chief rival of InterSol, the mining company I had a consulting contract with for the past two years. If HelixCorp had a plant in my house, a walking, talking listening device, then they had access to sensitive information regarding when and where their chief competitor was experiencing systems failures. They could then capitalize on this knowledge by allocating resources to those sectors of the galaxy and negotiating new contracts with InterSol’s frustrated customers. And because of the recent service tariff deregulation, do it all legally.
I remembered the night on Oasis-C when I first met Kali. She invited me back to her room. She prevented me from walking out that night with a convincing emotional display. She had accused me of playing her, but I was the one who had been played. Cleverly played, but all the same, I was the fool.
I didn’t sleep for three days after Kali’s death. I felt angry and defeated. I felt like a kid who had indulged in some selfish excursion at the expense of his own common sense. The voice in my head, that cynical, uncompromising voice of doubt had been right all along. And it made sense to me now — because it spoke the truth, regardless of the consequences. And that realization made me see that voice as an ally.
A week later, I received the autopsy report on Kali. It was standard procedure to perform autopsies on all high-level synthetics that attempted to harm humans. The cause of the malfunction had to be documented for legal purposes. As I skimmed the first page of the report, trying to decipher the medical jargon, I was not surprised to find that a transmitting beacon had been implanted in Kali’s maxillary sinus cavity which was capable of sending long-range signals, presumably to HelixCorp. But as I read on, I was shocked to find that the report referred to her as human. Her brain had contained conspicuous amounts of a precursor chemical used, on Earth, in a drug medley which aided in the neuro-reprogramming of high-level primates. The drug combination was used to modify the brain function of apes to enable them to routinely perform certain occupational tasks. In Kali’s case, it was used to program her into believing she was an Ultima Model B.
The realization of what I had done rushed over me like a solar windstorm. I knew now the reason I had hesitated before ending her life. Something in me, on an unconscious level, had known she was human. I had failed to take into account that if her theory was true, if she was a human who had been neuro-chemically programmed into believing she was a synthetic that thought it was human, then why wouldn’t her response to the verbal commands hold true to the technical documentation? In fact, it would be extremely necessary, if all the brain tampering had been done by Phoeneus Corporation. At the same time, if she had been an Ultima Model B, she could not have exhibited violent action after being verbally prompted to reach a ready-state for reprogramming.
In the days that followed, the police traced Kali’s prints to a woman who went missing the year before in U.F.C Brazil, a schoolteacher named Kate Windsor. She held degrees in education and anthropology, and had published a book on the universal mythology of indigenous cultures. She had been doing volunteer work in an area which had been ravaged by guerilla warfare at the time of her disappearance. This revelation made me sick with rage, that a woman of her caliber was ruined, her life tossed away like garbage, for the profit of the power-elite. But what made me even sicker is that I failed to see the reality of the situation. I failed to listen to the sound of truth.
***
It has been over a year now since Kali’s death. I have relentlessly investigated Phoeneus Corporation, trying to discover whether Kali’s was a singular case, or if all, or a significant number, of the Model B line were neuro-chemically programmed humans. So far it is still a mystery to me. However, I was able to find a covert link between HelixCorp and Phoeneus Corporation. Both are owned by a large conglomerate headquartered in the Bootean system which is not required by Earth law to disclose any of its holdings or interests.
I tried to go to the media with my story, but because I had nothing but speculation and theory, they refused to cover it. Now I know how Kali must have felt. Lately, something inside me has been telling me that it’s time to end my career and start teaching. Maybe do some volunteer work. I am trying to listen to that voice. Though I spent my entire career paying attention to detail, to subtle connections, I never applied that practice to my life.
I now realize that if I had only had enough faith to heed that momentary hesitation before I brought the knife down, my life would have been incomprehensibly different. When I think of Kali now, I think about the importance of seeing things for what they really are. Even her name, which she chose for herself on Oasis-C, had been a clue, a gift from her, that pointed to the truth of what she had become — Kali, ancient east Indian goddess, the Black One, the nexus of the dualistic power that resides in all women, the beautiful, horrible, wonderful, life-giving, life-taking mother.
Story copyright © 1998 Dan Dobbs
Artwork “Alien Repairs” copyright © 1998 Martin Murphy
