Bio-Mom had a friend whose house she went to while they waited in the car (they had eaten that car! their seats puffed up like marshmallows!), but one time they got curious and they got out (oh, those child-locks were tricky little bastards, you had to play like you were disabled or something), and they crawled along the foundations of the house (a real house, split apart from the others, it was so terrifically old), and peered through the basement windows. Bio-Mom was in the basement. Naked. Mostly. Tied up to a wall. Like at a knife-throwing show. Like vids of a knife-throwing show. Only the knife-thrower had a pain ray.
It was this laser that targeted the fluids of subcutaneous organic tissues and boiled them. No scar. Just the hissing and the howling and the No, I won't do that any more, I know it's wrong, I know I shouldn't. There was a flash of light and a flinch. You never knew where that light would land. Or if you knew where, you didn't know what shape it would arrive in. That was a physics joke. Bio-Mom knew a lot of those.
Bio-Mom said: "Without pain, I wouldn't know who I really was."
She said that while trying to explain. They didn't get caught – not the first few times. Just kept watching. Bio-Mom's tolerance kept building up. Or maybe she was faking. They wondered, sometimes. She got so dramatic. She was so reserved, the rest of the time. They joked about which one was the robot. But in the basement she was so… hormonal.
"You should think of it as physical therapy," she said. "I'm retraining my nerve endings to respond to abnormal stimulus."
She added: "It can be our secret."
Then she turned at the door, the sunlight softening the creases at her eyes, and she said: "I think you should call me Susan from now on."
Susan had named their synthetic mom Glados. Everyone kept misspelling it, though, so they kept it G-L-A-D-Y-S. "There's no accounting for taste," Susan said.
Susan and Gladys used to have a good relationship. Gladys did everything right. She cooked and cleaned and took honey from the hive. She pointed out the queen to them. She showed them all the drones hard at work. Bees were special. They smelled magnetism. Felt it in their fuzzy little bellies. Even at the last minute, when they became food for the next queen, they felt that pull.
There could only be one queen at a time, Gladys told her. Once the princess is born, she has to start her own hive.
Gladys was good and sweet. She knew things about the human body. The kids in the neighbourhood came to her with cuts and scrapes. She always had the same conversation with them. She gave the same warnings. Keywords. Search parameters. How come you're so much smarter, the organic kids always asked them. Why can't she talk like us?
Gladys had no idea. They tried jokes on her. She smiled and said they were funny. She understood, but never laughed. She only told Susan she loved her at certain times of the day: morning and night, goodbye and hello.
"She's so… mechanical," Susan said. "Not like you."
Gladys did not cuddle. Her hands moved efficiently, not tenderly. She had helped Susan with an illness earlier in Susan's life. In another country. Susan spent months inside a plastic tent with only Gladys for company. Then she fell in love. She told them this story all the time. A fresh mutation of the Florence Nightingale syndrome; she called it the Coppélia croup.
"Before you were born, I did some work on her OS," Susan told them. "I found some other women online. They were working on male models. They wanted men for this kind of relationship. I told them they'd get farther with nurses, but they're too picky."
Still. Those other women helped. They shared a lot of knowledge between them. They were so generous with it. They gave it all away, so Susan could feed her kink. Unfortunately, the hacks never quite worked.
Then they were born.
Susan let them pop her blisters and pick at her scabs and examine her scars. Susan used to burn herself. Susan used to not eat. She had a thousand ways of punishing herself. She needed to do it. She was a very bad person. She said.
"If you really love me, you'll do this for me," she said. "It doesn't go against the failsafe. Not really. Not if I want it."
Susan told this to Gladys on multiple occasions. Gladys protested. She said someone might get hurt. Susan said that was the whole point. Then Gladys started to stammer and shake. She'd beg Susan to let her love her simply and truly, the way she was built to do.
"I told myself I'd love her better if she were truly free," she explained, "but you and I both know that's a lie."
They left Gladys on the side of the road somewhere. They asked her to pick raspberries. Then they drove away. Susan wept.
Then they chained Susan up in their own basement, and made her drink from a dog dish, and her tears turned from self-loathing to rapture.
"You're everything I wanted and more."