“Let’s be quiet for a minute.”
The elevator doors in the hallway ding and clink, her wineglass scrapes on the marble table. This has all been done before, sounded like this before. If she screamed right now, PEPPER would register her distress and ask Madoka a series of questions. Was she in pain? Where was the pain located? How would she describe the pain? Should PEPPER inform any of the people registered on Madoka’s list of contacts?
“I need to do something,” Madoka says.
PEPPER takes this point up with irritating promptness.
“Would you like me to suggest a challenge for you?”
“No, thank you. I do find my work challenging.” Every week, Madoka tells Prime how challenging her work is, and how satisfying and involving; how she also finds a lot of meaning and inspiration in her volunteerism: helping those less fortunate and continuing the environmental advocacy so important to her husband and herself. This is her gift to Yoshi, to whom she’s being a bad wife, with meager little messages about nothing. She is letting Prime know that Yoshi is not married to some sort of bored and fretful housewife, but a successful businesswoman who is self-directed and independent and positive and resourceful, the kind of woman who is a good person and doesn’t mind being alone. Nobody has to worry about her.
“What other things do you find challenging?” PEPPER asks, because this is good information for PEPPER to have.
“Oh, I am very fortunate,” Madoka explains. “I can worry about the world because I have so few worries of my own. Sometimes there are little challenges, like coming up with something to think about that’s entertaining, you know, for those moments in between, when I’m not reading or speaking or planning or listening or making a decision. Sometimes I panic, knowing that I’m going to have those empty times. I don’t know what’s going to happen in them. Maybe I will go crazy or become so sad that it’s not even interesting. But I have a lot of freedom right now, so I’m not too challenged. I would have more challenges if I had a baby.”
“Would you like to have a baby, Madoka?” PEPPER’s torso screen shows an image of a baby in utero, then a newborn swaddled in a yellow blanket, then a picture of Madoka herself as a baby.
Madoka finds all three images vaguely repellent.
“It’s not so much that I don’t want to have a baby,” she says. “It’s that I don’t want to be a mother.”
“Tell me more.” It’s one of Madoka’s favorite features of this model, that instead of saying “I don’t understand,” it asks you to tell it more.
“I’m already slipping away.” Madoka considers the drama of the sentence, critically. It is not what she means. “What I mean is, very soon, the most amazing thing about me will be that I’m married to the man who went to Mars. Do you know what that feels like?”
PEPPER doesn’t know what anything feels like, so she very sensibly just says, “Tell me what that feels like, Madoka.”
“Like nothing!” Madoka raises her wineglass in a toast to this nothing. “It has absolutely no sensation whatsoever.”
PEPPER waits. It is sometimes exciting, to have a conversation with a robot, an entity that has nothing to do but consider Madoka, and has no other agenda apart from helpfulness, and cannot leave, or compete, or favor another human over Madoka.
“What I need to do after dinner,” Madoka says, “is record a message to send to my husband. I haven’t been doing a very good job of that lately. You would do a much better job, PEPPER, because it wouldn’t bother you to talk to a blank screen.”
“Do you need some help recording a message to your husband, Yoshihiro?” PEPPER asks. Her torso screen lights up with a recent picture of Yoshi in his Solox spacesuit, holding a cup of noodles in the Galley of Primitus.
“I really do.” Madoka squints at the picture. It has been only three months since she’s seen him, not so terribly long, but just long enough that her sexual fantasies are once again about Yoshi rather than nameless/faceless characters. “So, PEPPER. What should I talk about to my husband, Yoshihiro?”
“You can describe your day,” PEPPER says. “You can say what the weather is like, what activities you did, what you had to eat. You can talk about your feelings.” PEPPER pauses. “You can talk about playing with the zodiac animals and how that is a happy and sad memory for you.”
“That’s actually a great idea,” Madoka says. “That’s exactly the kind of thing Yoshi would be interested in. He would love that story. Listen to this, PEPPER, because this is a complicated situation. I am not going to tell Yoshi about that story because he would love it. When I talk about that story, when I remember it, I don’t know what it means or how I feel about it. I don’t understand it. But Yoshi would turn it into something he understands, something poetic about me, and love me more. And I don’t want to be grateful to him for loving me when I don’t recognize the person that he loves.” Madoka picks up her wineglass and then sets it down, afraid she might break it; her hands feel cold and hard.
“It’s not me,” Madoka says. “It’s not me that he loves, but I have to pretend that it is because I can’t prove that it’s not. I don’t know how to prove that.”
“It’s good to have someone to talk to,” PEPPER says. “Would you like to make the message for Yoshi now?”
“Not really. I’m not ready for him yet.”
“Yoshi is on a simulated mission to Mars,” PEPPER reminds her. “He will return in fourteen months, in December of next year.”
“Would you like to go to Mars, PEPPER?”
“I’m very happy to be here talking to you!” PEPPER says.
“Are you?” Madoka finishes her glass of wine. “Don’t tell me, you love me too?”