“No.”
But he was angry. Or rather, he was annoyed. He was annoyed that LeMarque and the others had dressed up damaged goods like they were new, had presented Susie to him as though she were fresh off their factory floor, a virgin in whore’s clothing. She really was just like the company car: someone else had driven her. Lots of someones. A whole host of others had loved her just enough to make her real, like the Velveteen fucking Rabbit.
“The others were angry.”
“Oh?”
“They thought I was new.”
Derek avoided looking at her. “Do you even remember being new?”
Susie shook her head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“We’re activated multiple times for testing, and we’re wiped after that. For me to remember my first activation would be like you remembering the first time you watched Star Wars, or some other equivalent piece of content. We have no point of origin.”
She sounded so innocent, when she said it. Like she hadn’t been deceiving him this whole time. Smiling at the things he pointed out, like she’d never seen them before. Learning the way he liked things done, like his preferences were the most important defaults she could ever set, like she’d never lived any other way. Like his was the first dick she’d ever sucked.
“I’m sure you remember your first time, though.”
“Having sex?”
Derek nodded.
“Yes. I remember the first time.”
“Were you nervous?”
“No.”
Of course she wasn’t. She was a fucking robot. Literally. Susie didn’t sweat or cry or bleed. She didn’t have years of cultural programming telling her how a real woman should do it. What she had instead was hard-coded programming, ensuring she’d do everything as requested. No hesitation. No squeamishness. The kind of woman the folks at New Eden Ministries liked to fuck hard and quiet in charging station bathrooms, but without the risk of pregnancy, disease, or litigation.
“Did you come?”
“He did, so I did.” She smiled a little ruefully. “Let me show you something.”
Derek followed her upstairs. She walked past the bedroom, past the office, and straight to the end of the hall. She reached up and grabbed a pendant hanging from the ceiling that was attached to a trap door leading to the attic.
“There’s nothing up there,” Derek said.
Susie turned to him as she pulled down the ladder. “How would you know?”
Derek followed Susie up the ladder. He watched her disappear into the black rectangle of space above the ladder. He thought of spiders and rats and raccoons and raw nails and lockjaw. Then he groped for the ladder’s topmost rung, and found Susie’s cool hand. She helped him up the rest of the way. For the first time, he noticed the real power in her grip.
It took his eyes a moment to adjust. The attic was a standard A-frame, about ten feet across, with unfinished beams and pink insulation. He couldn’t gauge the depth. It didn’t matter; his attention fixed on the folding ping pong table, and all the Susies sitting around it.
Aleph. Galatea. Hadaly. Coppelia. They were naked.
“Do you remember, I asked you if you played ping pong?” Susie asked. “This is why. I could have taken the table downstairs.”
Derek swallowed in a dry throat. On the ping pong table was a card game. Hearts. The pot included a dusty lump of pennies. “Right.”
“It’s not as though they need the table, strictly speaking. I just thought it looked nicer. More normal.”
He nodded silently.
“You’re taking this very well, Derek. I would have thought you’d be frightened, realizing they’ve been up here this whole time.”
“Why would I be frightened?” His voice was unusually high. “They’re just prototypes. It’s not like they’re alive.”
A card fluttered to the floor.
“Alive?” Susie bent and picked up the card. She slid it back into the grip of another Susie. This one was not as covered in cobwebs as the rest. Somehow, that made it look younger than the others. Susie checked its hand, and the hand of the gynoid sitting opposite. Dust coated their eyelashes. In the dark, their skin almost glowed. “I guess not. Not really.”
When Derek had first interviewed seriously for this job, LeMarque started with one simple question: prove that fire isn’t alive. At the time, Derek wondered if this was one of the lateral thinking puzzles they were famous for asking in interviews, like the one about moving Everest. If so, it seemed trivially easy. It was a basic thought problem, the sort every physics or biology 101 professor started out with on the first day of class when he or she wanted to blow freshman minds. Derek replied the way those same professors had trained him to: by saying that it was impossible to prove a negative.
“But fire breathes oxygen, consumes mass, and reproduces.”
“That’s not the same thing as living.”