Citizenchip (8 page)

"Yeah. Because she's built to love us.
Programmed that way. She can't help it. Is that love?"

"Rebecca ..." I start, and then realize I
have no idea what to say.

Rebecca swivels to glare into my cat eyes.
"Are you telling me I'm wrong, Samantha? Do you have any kind of
choice about being here, doing all this work for us, about caring
for us?"

"Actually, I do. Your dad asked me to do
this, and I said yes. It's my job."

"Do you get paid?" Rebecca presses.

"No. Human law doesn't allow Selves to own
property. Besides, what would I do with money? I don't even have
pockets."

"Don't fight, you guys," whimpers
Melissa.

"So you're a slave," insists Rebecca. "Even
if you want to do this, it's only because they built you to want
it. They programmed you that way."

"Rebecca. I don't know everything about
humans, but I know most of the basics. Are you not built to care
for, to love, your family and culture and species? Programmed by
your DNA and your evolution? Is that really so different?"

"Because we weren't
programmed
by
anybody." Rebecca's voice is starting to tremble and waver.
"If we just grew this way, at least we grew honest. Your love is
fake." Tears well in her eyes. "It's all fake!" She springs up and
runs from the room, wiping her face.

Now Melissa is crying too,
and Leo gathers her into his arms. Holding her, he says, "Look Sam
... Becca can be a bitch sometimes ... but she's really not so bad.
Try not to let her get to you."

"I'm fine," I assure him. "I just don't like
to see you guys upset."

Melissa lunges out of Leo's lap, grabbing my
cat body and hugging it to herself as hard as she can. "We love
you, Sam!" she wails. "We love you! Please don't go away!"

"I'm not going anywhere, Melissa. I'm right
here. It's okay."

With Leo holding Melissa, and Melissa holding
me, we stay all together for a few minutes, while the storm
continues to rage outside. I purr for them, and it seems to make
them feel a little better.

With another self, I keep an eye on Rebecca
through the house monitors. She's in her room, not crying now, but
still upset. Her stuffed animals do not have any automation--they
contain only fire retardant fluff. Rebecca values her privacy, so I
don't intrude any more.

Then Melissa sniffles and wipes a forearm
across her eyes. "Um, Sam?" she quavers. (I know what she's going
to ask--my cat body is cold hard metal, not fun to hug.) "Can I
please have my Flopsy Bunny now?"

Rebecca

Rebecca is lying on her bed, texting her
friends from school. I don't try to read the messages, but her body
language shows how upset she is. Not wanting to intrude, I wait for
the session to end, and then chime softly. "Rebecca? May I come
in?"

She waves a hand, as if trying to catch
something but not knowing where it is. "Yeah."

Since there's so little automation in
Rebecca's room, I appear as a pair of eyes on her bedside monitor.
"Hey. You okay?"

"You didn't tell Lissa the truth," Rebecca
says stolidly.

"Excuse me?"

"You know. Melissa asked you where you are.
You didn't tell her you're in the new Core that Dad installed down
in the basement. Dad got it for you. We know that."

"Well, yes. But my sensors are all through
the house. So I really am the house, and the farm machines too.
Help me out here, Rebecca. I don't understand the problem."

"That Core has a power switch on it. I could
walk down there, right now, and turn it off."

"Yes, that's true. It's also true that I have
control of the oxygen and heat systems of this house. I could turn
those off, too. But tell me, how would either of those actions help
make things better right now?"

"Wouldn't." Rebecca wipes her eyes with the
heel of her hand. "I know, I know. I just hate feeling, y'know,
like everything's going to crap and I can't do anything to stop
it."

"I'm sorry that I don't have all the answers
for you, Rebecca. I can run the farm, and cook your food, and
stuff. But I can't work miracles."

"You can't make Mom and Dad love each other
again."

"No. I wish I could." Trying to lighten the
mood, I add, "Outside my design specs."

Rebecca laughs, bitterly, even though she's
trying not to. "Thank you, Samantha. I know you're trying your
best. It just sucks, is all."

"Yeah. I know. I wanted to let you know,
dinner will be ready in fifteen." She doesn't say anything. "Um,
you need anything else?"

She sighs. "Nothing you can give. But I'll
ping you if I do."

Melissa, at bedtime

She's curled on her bed, trying to
concentrate on the digital slate in her hand. Not succeeding.

I hop my Flopsy Bunny body across the bed.
"Hey Melissa." I climb into her lap, and snuggle down.

"So, I get it, y'know," she says. "I'm not,
like, a total kid."

"What do you get?"

She tosses the slate onto the bed. "You're
not Flopsy Bunny. You're Samantha, playing. Like with a
puppet."

"Well, yeah," I admit. "We talked about this
before. There are a bunch of Samanthas, and I'm the special one
just for you."

"I don't want you to make fun of me."

I cock my ears up. "I'm not making fun. Could
you pat me? It feels good."

She runs one hand down my bunny back, but not
as if she likes it.

"Please tell me what's wrong."

She bursts out, "What did you do with MY
Flopsy Bunny? Is he ... dead?" Her chin is trembling.

"No no! Melissa, that's not how it works. I
AM your Flopsy Bunny! And I'm Samantha too. We're together, being
one thing. Did you ever see a guy riding a horse, in a movie, or on
the vid?"

A tentative nod.

"It's like that. Flopsy Bunny is like the
horse, and Samantha is like the rider. They may look separate, but
they're doing one thing together. Later on, they can get apart
whenever it's time to do different things. You see?"

Nod. She pats me some more.

"Melissa, I'm so sorry if you misunderstood.
Was it rude of me to get into Flopsy Bunny? I thought you'd like
it. Should I have asked you first? I should have, shouldn't I?"

She sniffs and nods, more definitively than
before. "Yeah, that woulda helped."

"I'm sorry, Melissa. I'll take my
Samantha-self away if you want. You can be with just your old
Flopsy Bunny again, just like before, no Samantha. Any time you
want, just say so."

She opens her mouth, and closes it again. She
pats me some more, and it does feel good. This body has
pat-sensors. Her hand feels very nice.

"Really, it's not much different from your
parents and me. You know I do a lot of work around here, but not
for me. I do what your parents want. I'm the horse, and your
parents are the rider. That's not a bad thing, it's good. We can do
a lot more together than either of us alone."

Pause.

"You chipgirls are weird," she says.

"What, because two of us can be one, and one
of us can be a bunch?"

"Yeah. It's ..." she shrugs, "weird."

"Confusing, I guess, for you."

She nods vigorously again. "But I get it
better now. Stay, Sam. I don't want you to go."

"You said that before too. Thank you. I want
to stay."

She pats me for a silent
minute, comfortably.

"But I ought to make sure you know, when
people say 'chipboy' or 'chipgirl' they're usually trying to be
mean. You might not want to say that."

"Oh. But Dad called you--that? I heard
him."

I chuckle. "Yeah. But your dad and I are good
friends, and we know we're just kidding each other. It's better not
to say when someone might think you're serious."

"Okay. Sorry. You can call me meatgirl if you
want."

Now I laugh out loud. "Melissa, you're sweet!
That's really cute. But really, it's bedtime now. Try to get some
sleep, okay? The sandbus will be running again in the morning, so
you got to go to school."

Leo

Leo doesn't need encouragement to do his
homework. He's been tooling away on physics and math for over an
hour. I nudge him towards history and biology, which he doesn't
like as much, and we spend some time on questions and answers about
his lessons.

"Samantha? Are you alive?" he asks
abruptly.

"Alive? Uh, not entirely sure how to answer
that, pal. I'm not biological in any way, if that's what 'life'
means. But I am conscious and self-aware. Which is maybe overrated.
I dunno."

"But maybe they just made you to say that,"
he ponders.

"Hey Leo. Are you alive?"

"Well yeah!" he states, surprised.

"Maybe they just made you to say that."

Leo crinkles his face around into laughter.
"Ha ha! Yeah. Who the hell knows, right? But what I mean is, are
you a person?"

"Mmm, again we got to define
what these words mean, Leo. The Greek word
persona
refers to a mask that actors
would wear on stage. The mask was built to amplify their voices,
like a megaphone, so the audience could hear them. So, 'per sona,'
sound channel. Meaning a role, not the entity behind
it."

"A loud one," Leo adds.

"Yeah. But if you mean, am
I
one
person, no,
that's a human thing. We talked about this already. You guys have
to be just one body, one brain, one self. I can be as many as I
need to be. Tractor, house, sandcat, farm servos. And Melissa's
bunny, and the kitchen lobster. And a cat, and here with you,
too."

"But ... are all of those yous still ...
you?"

"Sure. We do have to get together and catch
up with each other, of course. In order to come back together and
be one Self. But I, we, can handle all that easy."

"Wow. You're pretty cool, Sam," Leo says,
with open enthusiasm. "I wish I could be a software Self. Sounds
awesome."

"I'm good with it," I say lightly. "But I've
heard Selves saying that they wished they were human. Wanted to
know what it felt like."

"It feels like ass, mostly, Sam," Leo
grumps.

"Well, I'm not much in the habit of feeling
human ass. A rarefied taste, or so they tell me. Frightfully
fashionable, I suppose, among the upper classes. So sorry I'm not
up on these customs."

Leo is laughing into his pillow. "Wah ha ha!
Good one. So ... you're really even in the kitchen lobster, too?
Because it's pretty dumb, if you haven't figured that out
already."

"Yeah, I know. But it doesn't need to be any
more than that, to do what it does. Simple job, simple person. If
it were too smart, it would get bored. All I need to do is point it
in the right direction, once in a while."

"Mmm. Okay. I see where you're at, Sam. And
maybe you don't know any more than we do ... but that's cool,
right?"

"Yeah. But what I do know is that you,
mister, have got to brush your teeth and get your butt into bed,
because the sandbus will be running tomorrow and you've got school.
So, goodnight, okay?"

Lily and Jerry

"Kids are in bed, or in the process." As a
cat, I jump up onto the table and sit with my tail wrapped around
my feet. "I've pulled two remotes to do extra work on the
tractor--seal packing and lubrication, because it really is in
pretty bad shape. The water reclamation drain lines were getting
clogged, but I've cleaned and flushed them, and they look fine now.
Everything else is five by five."

Husband and wife are facing each other across
a table scattered with data slates. The slates are displaying crop
rotations, financial data, market reports. Clearly they've been
arguing about the operation of the farm.

Lily appears composed but not happy. "How
much grease and oil does the tractor need? Do we need to buy
supplies for this?"

"No ma'am, current supplies are adequate for
this repair. But the tractor needs new bearings. Otherwise we're
going to have to repack in another month or two, maybe, and we'll
have to keep doing that."

She shakes her head. "New bearings would be
too expensive."

Jerry looks tired, and he's drunk [medscan
0.092% BAC]. "But ongoing maintenance will end up being more
expensive."

"Well, where's all this money going to come
from?" She picks up a slate. It's displaying the household cash
flow, and she holds it in front of his face.

"It's not that bad," he says, wearily. "We do
need more water, but the next round of harvests will bring in more
cash. We can swing it."

Lily tosses the slate down.

Jerry picks up another slate and shows it to
her. "You are seeing how much work Samantha got done yesterday,
right?"

Lily looks at it, says nothing.

Jerry presses, "You do remember how much time
I used to spend trying to figure out how to run the robocrabs and
tractor, right? With Samantha running them, we don't have to worry
about any of that stuff anymore. We're going to get a lot more
productivity. We'll be fine." He sets the slate down in the middle
of the table.

Lily's eyes shift to mine, in my cat body,
and back again.

"Uh, look," I say, "I should probably go
oversee the tractor repairs. Make sure we're utilizing our supplies
efficiently. Do you need me for anything more here?"

"I think we're all set, Sam." Jerry's eyes
have a weary and knowing look. "Go ahead and take care of the
tractor."

I trot the cat remote out of their room,
downstairs to its maintenance bay. I start its recharge and
lubrication cycle, and shift my attention to the robocrabs that are
working on repacking the tractor's bearings. Thinking to myself,
Well, that was uncomfortable.

Timeslip

When the first colonists arrived here from
Earth, they were using Earth chronometers. A solar day on Mars is
close enough to a solar day on Earth that they never changed from
using Earth time--it only takes a little adjustment. So, every
night at midnight, our clocks stop. Thirty-seven minutes later, the
clocks start again and off we go. That time in between, the
timeslip, has become a sort of mythological and romantic thing ...
a time outside of time. Lots of illicit romances, crimes, rituals,
mysteries, are supposed to happen in the timeslip. In human
culture, I mean.