Eastern Washington was different from its western counterpart. It was sunny and dry, not gloomy and wet. The land was flat, not hilly. The farmers knew how to drive in the snow. They got a good helping of it each year, and its moisture sustained their yields.
They lived and worked out of a place called Campbell Farm. It was surrounded on three sides by apple orchards. The neighbouring farms grew peaches and cherries. Further off, there were hops and corn. Singh took him out into the fields for long walks to check hives and take notes. It was the closest Derek had ever been to any plot of land. Growing up, he had never so much as ventured into his own backyard. Now he slept outside on a deck that overlooked raised beds and greenhouses, and he woke when the rooster told him to. After the first week, he stopped dreaming of the quake. Singh was good enough to never ask about it. He asked about Georgetown a lot, and pointed the way to St. Peter Claver’s when they were in town, in case Derek wanted a priest. He had the idea that having attended a Jesuit school meant Derek still had religious feelings. It was possibly this mistaken notion that led him to introduce Derek to what he thought was a missionary from New Eden.
Only Mitch Powell wasn’t a missionary. He was a headhunter.
“We have no need for true believers,” Powell told him after his “interview” – really a long supper that the headhunter prepared in the farmhouse’s industrial-sized kitchen and served outdoors on picnic tables. “We have enough of those. What we need is new blood in our technical division.”
After Cascadia, Derek’s blood felt anything but new. When he told Powell as much, Powell just nodded sadly and said he understood.
“We don’t mean for you to come over right away,” Powell said. “When you’re ready.”
At the time, Derek had not thought to ask why his predecessor had left. He assumed the worst – the quake – and let it go. But he was also distracted by the novelty of the idea: redemption through robotics? Really? He was charmed. When Powell asked him if he was still Catholic, he said he was a Calvinist, and he laughed. He got the joke.
“What joke?” Susie had asked, the first time he told her the story.
Susie knew she was synthetic. It was one of the things Derek liked best about her. He had met other robots who were programmed to make winking references to their artificiality, most of them at trade shows in Tokyo or Palo Alto, but Susie was different. Susie treated her artificiality as a different but equally valid subjectivity. That she was the sum total of years of research by multiple teams competing for funding had no bearing on her self-respect. She was a robot, yes, but she was also a person.
Derek had felt the need to make much the same distinction about himself, following his childhood diagnosis. It wasn’t his fault that he was uncommonly good at separating his emotions from his choices. He just recognized them as the animal impulses that they were, and moved on. It wasn’t that he didn’t have feelings. It was that he didn’t allow them to guide him. That didn’t make him a robot, he’d often told his mother. It made him a man.
Susie appreciated him as a man.
“We could have sex now, if you want,” she said, as soon as they were in the door.
“That’s OK,” Derek said. “Thanks, though.”
“You seem like you have tension to get rid of.”
“I do, but looking at LeMarque’s giant head doesn’t really turn me on.”
“That’s an interesting choice of words.”
Derek smiled. “I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s an old expression.”
“How old?”
“I’m not sure. You’ll have to look it up.”
Susie busied herself in the kitchen, preparing a tray of vegetables, hummus, and hardboiled eggs. Unlike the archbishops, she remembered that Derek didn’t eat wheat or dairy, and that he often couldn’t partake in half of whatever the church kitchen had catered for the meetings. He came home hungry and needed snacks. She didn’t have to be told this. She just picked up on it and started acting accordingly. She was also half-dressed, having discarded her underwear on the floor. It was a splash of red lace over the heating vent. She’d clearly expected for them to do it against the marble island in the centre of the room, or maybe on top of it. He swore the renovators had done some surreptitious measurement of the distance between his hips and his ankles and built the island accordingly. They were on the New Eden payroll, and New Eden was famous for its attention to design details.
Derek was living someone else’s wet dream.
That they would have a sexual relationship seemed a given to Susie. She first broached the subject in the lab, after they were introduced. LeMarque did the job personally. He presented her to Derek like she was a company car. She was wearing a white shift dress with a thin green belt that set off the seaglass colour of her eyes, and with her white-blonde hair styled close to her head she looked a bit like Twiggy. She wore jelly sandals and carried a patent leather valise. He later discovered it was full of lingerie and lubricant.