Human Sister (29 page)

In early December, after making plans for the upcoming winter holiday vacation, Elio and I called Mom and Dad. I planned, as had become usual over the years, to stay with them through the holidays, but Elio had a reservation to depart about three hours after our arrival in Calgary. He would be flying on to visit his mother and friends in Amsterdam.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Mom said, looking with mock sternness at Elio. “We want more than just to see you. After all, we can see you right now. We want to get you in our arms and squeeze you and kiss you, eat meals with you, throw snowballs at you. You’re part of the family now. You have to give us two days, minimum.”

“Yes, two days,” Dad chimed in. “It would mean a lot to Mary and me to have both of you in our home for at least a couple of days.”

I thought I saw tears begin to well in Dad’s eyes and was surprised and pleased at the interest he and Mom were showing in Elio and me, seemingly out of the blue.

When Elio and I arrived in Calgary midway through a bright afternoon, I again was surprised by apparent changes in both Mom and Dad. Mom’s fingers were no longer stained yellow, and her breath was fresh, not smoky and stale. She had sworn off cigarettes. Dad appeared to have shed some of his reserve, hugging both of us enthusiastically, even giving me a warm full kiss on my lips. And that night over dinner, he told stories of happy days in university when he and Elio’s father had been close friends.

The next morning, however, the warm feelings became strained when, during breakfast, Dad announced that my brothers were interested in Elio and wanted to see him. “We’ve made arrangements for you and Sara to visit them this morning at the lab.”

Elio glanced at me nervously before answering Dad: “I’d like to meet Sara’s brothers. I feel they are, in a way, my brothers, too.” Elio again glanced at me. “But I promised Grandpa before we left that I wouldn’t.”

“What?” Mom said. “Why did you do that?”

“Grandpa says it’s becoming increasingly dangerous to have knowledge of androids.”

“What about Sara?” Mom asked. “She knows.”

“I’ve known about my brothers since I was a little girl,” I said. “We can’t change that. But we can protect Elio from the risk.”

Mom and Dad looked at each other. I was aware that I’d already acquired a quiet, comforting knowledge by which I knew much of what Elio thought even before he said a word, knowledge gleaned from such subtle signals as nods, shifts of body posture, frowns, blinks, or murmurs so slight that it was unlikely anyone else even noticed. And I was aware that he was becoming similarly attuned to me, so that a twin of each of our thoughts and feelings often seemed spontaneously to emerge and resonate in the other. Now, as I watched Mom and Dad look at each other, I wondered how much more of such implicit communication they shared after having been together for so many years.

“Well, if you promised,” Mom finally said, “I guess there’s nothing we can do. But First Brother is going to be disappointed. I don’t know how many times he’s told me not to forget to bring Elio in to see him.”

I was puzzled by First Brother’s interest in Elio, but I didn’t ask about it because I felt that my question might be perceived as envy: why the interest in Elio but not in me?

The next morning, as we sat around the table after finishing breakfast, Mom reached out one hand to me, the other to Elio, who sat across from me. Dad did the same, resulting in the four of us being joined in a circle around the table. Mom and Dad seemed to exude unusual intensity in this joining of hands. Weeks later, Elio would tell me that for an instant he’d had the feeling we were about to embark on a séance.

How could we have surmised then that it would be an ending?

“I want to start,” Mom said, “by saying how much I love both of you, and how happy I am you came here to see us, Elio. Your father meant a great deal to both of us. He was a remarkable man, and Karl and I are so grateful that your relationship with Sara has brought you closer to us.”

Elio smiled, but there was a look of longing on his face.

Mom then turned to me. “I understand from your grandma that you and Elio had a private marriage ceremony alone near the airport in Amsterdam. We’d like it very much if you’d share that moment with us now.”

She reached into her pants pocket, pulled out two bimetallic rings, yellow gold and white platinum, and placed them side-by-side in the middle of the table.

“We thought you’d like something more formal with your family,” Dad said, “rather like an announcement to, and an acknowledgment from, the world of your love for each other.”

The two rings blurred into each other through an aqueous film over my eyes. I swallowed hard and looked at Elio. How beautifully changeable he was, smiling broadly now, dark eyes sparkling, and every muscle in his face expressing delight and vibrant energy.

“Do you remember the vows you gave each other?” Mom asked. “If they’re too private, you don’t have to. But if it’s okay, we’d like you to repeat them for us this morning.”

“I’d like us to stand,” I said, “so that Elio and I can hold hands.” I wanted this occasion, this recognition of belonging to a family and to Elio, to be as intimate as possible.

Dad glanced around the room. “How about in front of the fireplace?”

Elio and I stood in front of the red-brick fireplace, above which hung a large evergreen wreath covered with brightly colored little ornaments. Never before had I seen anything resembling holiday decorations in Mom’s house. Perhaps it is true, I thought, that people mellow with age.

Mom stood beside me, holding a ring. Dad stood beside Elio, holding the other ring. Elio took my hands in his, and I began the promises, word for word, that I’d given him six months before. But this time, because Mom and Dad were there, the words were richer with meaning, rooted now in a larger world. They came out slowly, each like a carefully crafted gift to be cherished by everyone hearing them. I wanted Mom and Dad to know how I felt. I wanted Elio’s and my love to blossom in the sunshine of their blessings.

When I finished, Mom lifted the ring she held. “Here, Sara, put this on Elio’s finger. For me it’s a symbol that I’m giving my dear, dear daughter to you, Elio, to love and cherish and care for all your days.”

I put the ring on Elio’s left ring finger, then kissed his finger, feeling at once the cool firmness of the metal and the warm softness of his flesh.

After Elio stated his vows, Dad handed him the other ring and said, “With this ring, I give my best friend’s son to you, Sara, to love and cherish and care for all your days.”

During that moment and for the nearly two hours that followed until we waved good-bye to Elio at the airport, I felt blissfully part of a loving family that included Mom and Dad.

For years during the winter holidays, my parents had become increasingly oriented toward work, but this year, after they waved good-bye to Elio at the airport, they seemed busy almost to the point of panic. Our scheduled trip to Banff was canceled, and every night until I returned to California, we slept on cots in the lab.

“Please be a love and stay out of the way. We’re so busy right now,” Mom said after I’d asked several questions the night after Elio had left. Probably in response to seeing that I felt hurt and disappointed, Dad gave me a draft of an article on evolutionary quantum computation that he was preparing for publication. He asked me to proof it.

That task kept me out of the way for the next three days. On the night of 25 December, as we sat down in the break room for a quick dinner, I handed him back his draft with my comments. He immediately began reading. When Mom asked him to eat before his food got cold, he requested another espresso. He downed the steaming liquid in a gulp and got up, saying that he was going to his office to look up something.

I had just fallen asleep on my cot later that night when Dad knocked and turned on the lights. “Thanks for your comments. Very insightful. You solved the problem I wrote in the margin on page 7. All of us here have been working on it unsuccessfully for some time now. Your brothers are curious about how you solved it and would like to examine you over the next few days. Would that be all right?”

“Sure! That would be great!” My brothers are interested in me, I thought. At last!

I lay awake for hours, fantasizing about our getting to know one another better and becoming closer. But the next few days would validate Grandpa’s admonition that disappointments are the disharmonies between expectations and desires, on the one hand, and the patterns of reality, on the other.

One day just over eleven years earlier—it was about a month after Uncle Marcus had been killed—Grandpa returned home from Berkeley later than usual. He typically traveled to Berkeley in his tiltrotor two or three times each week to visit old professor buddies or take care of his duties as chairman of the board of Magnasea, the company his father had founded that was primarily in the business of robotic systems and deep-sea mining. Magnasea had had the Navy contract to develop android SEALs, the so-called Sentiren project, that resulted in the creation of my brothers. It was about a half year after my birth that the Navy canceled the Sentiren project and my brothers left the Magnasea lab to live at home with Mom and Dad, the home from which I had been cast only a couple of months before.

Grandpa usually returned from those trips to Berkeley in good humor and with interesting stories to tell. But that evening, his face appeared unusually long and creased.

Grandma offered him a glass of wine and asked what had happened. He told us that in the morning First Brother had taken the Turing test. Present during the test, along with Grandpa, had been Mom, Dad, Second Brother, and a panel of ten professors.

I asked what the Turing test was. Grandpa said it was a procedure proposed by Alan Turing in the mid-twentieth century to determine whether a system had achieved human-level intelligence, based on whether the system was able to deceive human interrogators—who were permitted to ask questions of the system but were otherwise veiled from it—into believing it was human.

“I take it from your demeanor that First Brother failed,” Grandma said.

“Of course, he did! I told Karl we shouldn’t participate in such foolishness. Given our current state of knowledge, it should be obvious that only a human can pass the test, unless, of course, the examiners are incompetent. Not a single person on that panel could convince a dog examiner that he or she is a dog, if dogs could give and respond to such tests. And what would that tell us? That humans don’t have the intelligence of a dog?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, for example, a human testee—he’s the one we suppose is trying to deceive a dog examiner into thinking that he, the human, is really a dog—might be smart enough to feign that he finds the smell of anuses intriguing, but when the dog examiner asks, ‘Oh? How so?’ the human would be left speechless, whereas any dog capable of communicating could write a book on the subject.”

“Grandpa!” Grandma scolded.

“Do you have a better explanation? No, I didn’t think so.”

There was a fleeting look of shock and displeasure on Grandma’s face; then she looked at me and her mouth silently formed the word “grumpy.”

“Anyway,” Grandpa continued, “humans don’t have canine intelligence, and canines don’t have human intelligence. So it is with androids. They think faster than we do, so they see patterns we don’t, unless we do a lot of analysis. They’re not as attuned to emotional, especially sexual, nuance. They don’t have sex, for heaven’s sake, so why should they be? Thus, they don’t laugh at the same jokes, they’re not offended by the same things, and so on. To report that an intelligent system has failed to pass the Turing test is to report nothing more than that the intelligence isn’t human.”

He gulped down the remainder of the glass of wine and scowled.

“You didn’t care for the wine?” Grandma asked. “It’s last year's Chardonnay.”

“It’s fine, fine.” Grandpa rolled his eyes. “In fact, I’d like another glass. What’s troubling me is Second Brother’s response to a question Professor Scripps posed after the test. I’m sure Scripps and others will make hay out of Second Brother’s rash answer.”