“I’m coming home with you,” Susie said. “After you name me.”
He’d asked for ideas about her name. Susie mentioned the earlier prototypes: Aleph. Galatea. Hadaly. Coppelia. Donna. Linda. Sharon. Rei. Miku. She recited her design lineage like a litany of saints.
“Whatever you think will sound best in bed,” she concluded. “It doesn’t really matter to me.”
This was how New Eden did it. How they roped curious, disbelieving scientists into what they knew, deep down, was probably some kind of cult. They did it by giving them what, even deeper down, they’d always wanted. Derek had no doubt that if he’d asked for a jetpack, a fair approximation would have shown up on his doorstep the next morning, complete with a bow and a gift tag.
Not that he’d asked for Susie. They said he’d have “close contact” with the prototypes, so that he’d have a better understanding of how they really worked. He probably could have rejected Susie, if the situation made him uncomfortable. But it didn’t. Not in the slightest. It was exactly the kind of relationship he’d always craved: all of the fucking and none of the feeling.
“Human women always have expectations, don’t they?” Susie had asked, when they talked about his history.
She was right, but she was also wrong. The expectations women had of him weren’t the problem. It was that those expectations were unrealistic, contradictory, and constantly changing. Moving goalposts. You had to be sweet, but also predatory. You had to be funny, but never laugh at your own jokes. You had to be charming, but not smarmy. And in the end it never mattered, you never measured up, no matter how many dinners you bought or raises you got.
He’d been on the cusp of breaking up with his last lover before the quake. That happened while she was supposed to be near the waterfront. They never found her body. A selection of her diaries, stuffed animals, and photographs was buried instead. She’d been a bit of a packrat. Derek and her mother and sister filled the coffin with all the things Derek had once wished she would just get rid of, already, so they could have some clear space in the apartment. But she’d been so sentimental about her things.
Now Derek was the one who was sentimental about things.
He watched Susie sprinkling paprika and sumac over the tray of food. Her fingers plunged into the bowls of spice again and again, and their red stain crept up her skin. She wore the same blank expression she’d worn through most of the meeting. Now Derek reached for her tablet and read the words printed there: Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
He showed her the tablet as she placed the tray on the coffee table. “I’m really not a Catholic any longer. I’m not sure I ever was. You don’t have to try to impress me with this kind of thing.”
“I know.”
“So you were just, what, commenting ironically on the situation?” Could they do that?
“The words seemed pertinent.”
“How did you learn the Jesuit motto?”
Susie knelt on the floor in front of the coffee table. “Your predecessor told me.”
Derek paused with a carrot stick inclined toward his half-open mouth. “Excuse me?”
“The woman who held your position before you,” she said. “She was Jewish, but she attended a Jesuit university. We kept a mezuzah on the door. She lives in Israel, now, I think. I think it used to be Israel. It might be something else, now. The border seems to move around.”
Derek blinked. “A woman.”
“Yes.”
“Did she live here, too?”
“Yes.”
“Did she…?” Derek gestured vaguely. “With you?”
“Was she fucking me, you mean?” Susie asked. Derek nodded. “Yes. Only a handful of times, though. I think she was curious about whether the failsafe is gender neutral. She wanted to make sure that we could love men and women equally.”
“And do you?”
“Why shouldn’t we?”
“I meant you specifically. You, Susie.” He leaned forward. “Your name wasn’t Susie, then, of course.”
“Ruth,” Susie said. “With that one, my name was Ruth.”
“That one?”
Susie folded her red hands. “You aren’t surprised, are you?”
A chickadee trilled outside: chickadee-dee-dee-dee. Susie blinked at him. Derek turned from her to the plate of food. It was perfectly prepared as always: all the vegetables cut the same size and shape and angled exactly around the hummus, the spices sprinkled with a certain flair. She had even nailed the hardboiled egg: a perfect pale yellow yolk with nary a hint of green at its edge. Susie did it the same way every time. She was reliable that way.
“No, I’m not surprised.”
“Are you angry?”