Chapter 15
HE HAS GONE! It is over!” Anna said to herself, standing at the window; and in answer to this statement the impression of the darkness when the candle had flickered out and of her fearful dream mingling into one filled her heart with cold terror.
“No, that cannot be!” she cried, and crossing the room she rang the bell. She was so afraid now of being alone that, without waiting for the servant to come in, she went out to meet him.
“Inquire where the count has gone,” she said.
Pyotr said, “What? Who?”
“The count! Count Vronsky! Oh, you fool!”
The servant stammered that the count had gone to the stable.
“His honor left word that if you cared to drive out, the carriage would be back immediately.”
“Very good. Wait a minute. I’ll write a note at once. Run with the note to the stables. Make haste.”
She sat down and wrote, in an unsteady hand:
“I was wrong. Come back home; I must explain. For God’s sake come! I’m afraid.”
She sealed it up and gave it to Pyotr, who looked at it, confused, for a moment. “It is a message!” shouted Anna. “Bring it to him. With your feet!”
Oh, how she missed robots!
And yet, once Pyotr had gone, she was afraid of being left alone; she followed the servant out of the room, and went to the nursery.
Why, this isn’t it, this isn’t he! Where are his blue eyes, his sweet, shy smile? was her first thought when she saw her chubby, rosy little girl with her black, curly hair instead of Seryozha, whom in the tangle of her ideas she had expected to see in the nursery, in the arms of the governess they had hired to replace the II/Governess/65. The little girl sitting at the table was obstinately and violently battering on it with a cork, and staring aimlessly at her mother with her pitch-black eyes. Anna sat down by the little girl and began spinning the cork to show her. But the child’s loud, ringing laugh, and the motion of her eyebrows, recalled Vronsky so vividly that she got up hurriedly, restraining her sobs, and went away. Can it be all over? No, it cannot be! she thought. He will come back. I will believe. If I don’t believe, there’s only one thing left for me, and I can’t.
She stumbled about the house.
Who’s that? she thought, looking in the looking glass at the swollen face with strangely glittering eyes, which looked in a scared way at her. Why, it’s I! she suddenly understood, and looking round, she seemed all at once to feel his kisses on her, and twitched her shoulders, shuddering. Then she lifted her hand to her lips and kissed it.
What is it? Why, I’m going out of my mind! and she went into her bedroom. . . .
Where she beheld the elegant, porcelain figure of Android Karenina.
Who, holding out her hands to her mistress, spoke.
“Anna,” said the elegant machine-woman in a sweet and powerful voice, exactly the voice Anna had always imagined, gentle and reassuring and human but radiating the calm power of authority: the firm and loving voice of a mother. “You must be calm now, Anna Arkadyevna.”
“Android Karenina, dear, what am I to do?” said Anna, sobbing and sinking helplessly into a chair.
“You will bear up, face the world, and do what you must.”
“You speak, Android Karenina. You speak so beautifully.”
“Indeed. The silent Android Karenina you knew and loved was a Class Three. Though resembling that model in many ways, I am a Class Nine.”
“A Class Nine? But . . .”
“Hush, dear Anna. I must tell you of what comes next.”
Anna wondered if this conversation was real, but felt that if it was indeed a dream, she did not want the dream to end. Android Karenina held out her hands, gathered Anna to her bosom, and spoke once more.
“In the future, the changes now convulsing society will continue. Tsar Alexei, as your husband is poised to formally rename himself, will complete his control over Russia. Groznium and its attendant technologies will disappear entirely from the towns and provinces. All machines, and all power, will be consolidated in the cruel hands of the Tsar.”
“Dear merciful God,” Anna interjected, but Android Karenina bade her be still.
“But hope will survive, in the form of a resurgent UnConSciya, led by one exceptionally brave and intelligent man. With access to a small pocket of groznium, and a network of underground laboratories, this man and his cohort will keep the spirit of the Age of Groznium alive. In the deepest secrecy, and at the gravest risk, they will experiment, and eventually achieve great breakthroughs: in robotics, in armaments, in transportation. They will even revive what was once called . . . the Phoenix Project.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yes, Anna. Travel through time”
Anna tugged free her hair from its clip and felt her dark tresses tumble across her forehead, trying, as she often did in moments of emotional upheaval, to take comfort in her physical being. But now, she felt a painful sense that there was something false about her own beauty, something hostile.
“Eventually, this brave rebel leader and his cohort will hit upon a way to kill Tsar Alexei before his reign of destruction can begin.”
Anna’s eyes widened and her hands began to tremble.
“What . . . what . . .”
“Their plan will rest upon an ingenious new technology, the result of many painstaking years of labor and experimentation: an animalcular machine simply called the Mechanism, which can be implanted directly into the gray matter of a human’s brain. This microcosmical apparatus, once thusly embedded, preserves the biological processes of the host while slowly but irrevocably extending itself throughout the higher-level functioning of her neurological system—transforming the subject over time from a human into a highly sophisticated machine.”
“Such a thing cannot be,” Anna said, horrified.
“It can. Or, rather, it shall be. And yes, ethical objections will be raised, great debates will ensue, but ultimately the rebels of UnConSciya and their brave leader will make the only choice: the sacrifice of a single human being is a small price to pay to alter Russia’s past, and thereby rescue her future. And so agents will be sent back through time to apply the Mechanism in the host for which it was expressly created.”
Anna cried out once, held her hands before her, and squeezed her eyes shut tightly. “Android Karenina, stop,” she wailed. “I command you to stop.”
“Many years ago, Anna Arkadyevna, you ceased to be a person, and became a machine-woman of an entirely new kind: the Android Karenina Class Twelve. A new kind of robot, one with a single raison d’être: to murder Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin.”
“I command you to stop!”
Anna sprawled herself out on the sofa, trembling, her face buried in her hands. No griefs of her life, none of her husband’s cruelties, no imagined betrayal committed by Alexei Kirillovich, not even the loss of her darling Sergey, compared with the suffering she now experienced.
“Why?” she sobbed. “Why create such a device . . . to seize, to appropriate the mind of a living person? Why not just build some . . . some weapon, some bomb to detonate at his bedside?”
“Because, dear Anna, the same equations that proved time travel possible also showed that the flow of history is exceedingly resistant to human tinkering. And so the nature of the target must dictate the nature of the weapon. Your husband, aided by the powers of the malevolent Class Three upon his face, maintains steely control over all elements of his life. He has long planned his rise to power; he has countless contingency plans and defenses ready in case of technological attack. He is the master of his world—with one exception: you. Within the intimate bounds of the home, he is vulnerable.”
“Please . . .”
“It had to be his wife. It had to be you.”
Anna wept silently on the sofa, not wanting to hear more, but helpless to move.
“As the Mechanism took root within you, its programming slowly amplified your natural distaste for a cold and awkward husband into utter repulsion. That hatred should have led you finally to kill him—but we underestimated the depth and power of your loving nature and your urge for freedom. Rather than letting your passion drive you to murder, you seized upon it to fuel your surprising new love for Count Vronsky. You abandoned Alexei Alexandrovich rather than slaying him—but, alas, Anna, that only hastened his descent into inhuman tyranny. Thus, despite all our years of secret struggle, the mission failed.”
Anna looked up, tears pouring down her face, trying to understand. “So the godmouth—the flower trap—all efforts by UnConSciya to . . . to destroy me?”
“No. Efforts to destroy Vronsky, in the hopes that with him dead, you would return to your household, take up again the mantle of unhappily dutiful wife, and complete your mission. But, again, the timestream is difficult to shift.”
Sadness and confusion filled Anna’s body like black ink poured into a glass. She felt, as she had felt so many times in the past, Android Karenina’s comforting embrace around her shoulders. Then her beloved-companion—no! a different android! oh, but beloved still—said: “It’s not too late.”
In her mind, burning and wild with emotion, Anna grasped at what she thought Android Karenina was telling her, and the strong face of Vronsky swam up before her mind. “Yes! It’s not too late—I have sent a note . . . he’ll return. . . .” She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. “By now he has received the note and is coming back. Not long, ten minutes more . . . But what if he doesn’t come? No, that cannot be. He mustn’t see me with tear-stained eyes. I’ll go and wash. Yes, yes; did I do my hair or not?” she asked Android Karenina, who stared back at her, and then spoke again, her voice changing to a low, sad whisper.
“It is not too late to complete your mission, Anna. You can agree to follow the program.”
Anna stared back. “Android Karenina . . . no . . .”
“Go to Petersburg. Kill Alexei Alexandrovich with your own hands. You are the only one who can.”
“I am not a killer! I am a human being!”
“Alas . . . you are no longer.”
Anna Karenina jabbed wildly for her beloved-companion’s neck, but to no avail: this model had eliminated the exterior Surcease switch entirely. But when Android Karenina lifted her end-effectors from Anna’s shoulders to swat her away, Anna rolled off the sofa, leaped out the empty hole where the windowpane had been, and escaped down the street.