The Mad Scientist's Daughter (22 page)

  Richard worked his usual long hours – even longer now that SynLodge was on a meteoric rise toward capitalistic greatness. It had finally begun to turn a profit, he told her on one of his rare Sundays at home. Another AI company, Noratech, was talking about incorporating it. Cat nodded along to all this business chatter but rarely listened; when she listened, she didn't care.

  During the blur of days, Cat looked forward to her long evening walks. She followed the meandering cement paths cutting through the neighborhood, the houses twinkling in the twilight. Even though the days were already uncomfortably hot, the evenings still held on to a faint strain of coolness. Many of the neighborhood houses didn't draw their curtains, and Cat liked to peer in through the illuminated windows at the families set up like tableaux inside: a housewife with frosted blonde hair, children in school uniforms, a service android – they were all androids out here; anyone who could afford these houses could afford a robot that looked like a person – washing the dishes or mixing up cocktails. Sometimes she lit a cigarette, away from the house's computer, which always read the smoke as a fire.

  She wondered if anyone walked past her glass house at night. She wondered what they saw, what conclusions they drew about her, curled up on the low-slung divan with a reading slate and a glass of red wine. No service android. They wouldn't know that the house itself was veined with artificial intelligence.

  Cat had also begun to donate money to the Automaton Defense League.

  She didn't tell Richard. She'd made the first donation at Miguel's urging, down at the co-op, with no intention of making another. But then a few weeks later she had sunk so deep into her suburban haze her waking life felt like a dream. Halfway through one of her walks, she stopped beneath a pine tree drooping with heat, pulled out her comm slate, and signed away a portion of Richard's money to an organization that wanted to shut down his company.

  The donation cleared her head. After that, when the neighborhood closed in on her, she donated. It helped, sometimes.

  One humid evening in May, Cat came home after a futile afternoon at the co-op to find Richard drinking a glass of orange juice at the breakfast table. When she walked in he leapt up and threw his arms around her shoulders, pulled her down onto his lap.

  "Where would you rather live," he asked. "The beach or the mountains?"

  Cat teetered on the edge of his knees, steadying herself against the table. "The beach, I guess."

  "Excellent," said Richard. "Because if this purchase goes through, that might just happen six months out of the year." He winked. "And I've got something else up my sleeve, too."

  "What?" She didn't particularly care.

  "It's a secret."

  Cat slid off his lap. Richard drained his orange juice, stood up, kissed her, and then scurried out of the kitchen, toward the office in the back of the house, where he could continue working even though he was at home.

  "Well," said Cat to the empty kitchen. "What was that about?" When there was no response, she added: "Computer?"

  "Mr Feversham is pleased about an impending financial contract involving SynLodge." The computer had a chiming voice that always sounded insincere. "I can request more information from Mr Feversham if you would like."

  "No," said Cat. "Forget it. It's not important." All conversations with the house's computer went the same way: it repeated what Cat already knew. It mistook her small talk for serious inquiry.

  Nearly a year in the glass house. And although Cat had grown accustomed to the automation easily enough – the toilets cleaned themselves, the walls released armies of vacuum bots every other day at exactly 2pm – the computer's voice still unnerved her. It didn't sound like a robot, but it didn't sound like a person either. The voice had a hollowness to it, an emptiness, like the bottom of a well. When the computer had first been turned on, a few weeks after they'd moved in, Cat had wandered uneasily from room to room, waiting for the computer's polite chime. Even now she sometimes jumped when she heard it.

  Cat dug in her pocket for a cigarette, found one, slipped it between her lips. She didn't bother to light it. Not with the computer recording every impurity in the air. Cat pulled out one of the uncomfortable metal chairs and sat down. She leaned her head against her hand. She tried to look outside, but the sun had set and all she saw was her own reflection in the glass wall.

 

The next afternoon Cat asked the house computer to bring up the chat monitor. She was in the house's office; Richard was at work. He was always at work. She punched into the keypad the string of numbers to connect her to the computer in her father's house – the old dusty one, the one he'd set up in the dining room after her mother died.

  Her father's face appeared on the screen, startling her.

  "Daddy," she said. "I… How's it going?" Her father never answered when she called this computer. She wasn't sure he left his laboratory anymore. He'd gotten so frail lately, his skin sallow, his face gaunt. "You look… Are you eating enough?"

  "I'm fine." He drawled the
fine
out into an unconvincing twang. "You don't need to worry about me." He smiled. "How are things in the glass house?"

  "They're good."

  "I'm sorry I haven't made it out there. We've been so busy, Finn and I, what with this lunar station and all." He smiled gently. "But you weren't calling to talk to me."

  Cat's cheeks warmed. "I was just calling home. To talk to anyone."

  "Let me get Finn. Cat?" He peered at her. With the changes in his face and the glassy quality of the video chat monitor, she barely recognized him. "I love you. I hope you're happy."

  Before Cat could answer, her father disappeared. On the screen, she saw the dining room windows, the sheer curtains hanging lank and still. Her air conditioning switched on. The foundation of the house groaned. The oleander bushes outside clicked against the glass.

  Finn came into view.

  "Cat," he said. "How are you?"

  "I miss you." Every time she called, she asked him the same question. "Would you like to come visit?"

  "You're married." Always the same answer.

  Cat listened to the creaks and moans of the house. She always felt like the house computer was eavesdropping on their conversation. Recording it.

  "Daddy looks so thin," she said. "Is he all right? Is he eating?"

  Finn paused. His skin looked too pale through the camera. "Yes," he said. "He's fine. You don't need to worry about him."

  Finn's eyes twitched away from the camera, back to her. She'd never seen him do it before she married. But now, every time she spoke to him, she counted the number of times his eyes flickered away from her.

  She didn't know what it meant.

  "You're just busy," said Cat. "With the lunar station."

  "Yes," said Finn. "The lunar station."

  "How's that going?"

  "Well."

  "Are you sure you don't want to come visit? Or I can come visit you."

  He looked away, looked back.

  "You're married."

  Always the same answer.

  "I should go," said Finn. "Lots of work to do."

  "I understand."

  The monitor flickered black, then bright blue, then switched to the screensaver of floating, iridescent jellyfish. Finn had severed the connection from his end. He was gone. Her father's house was gone. Replaced by jellyfish that looked like ghosts.

  Cat went out to the front porch, to get away from the house computer. She lit a cigarette. She smoked more now that she could afford the taxes on the cigarettes and didn't have to cull a stash from customer donations. Next door her neighbors, several decades older and from families that had been wealthy before the Disasters, were sitting on their porch. She heard the lilt of their voices, their twinkling laughter.

  Cat walked through the yard, smoking, the sound of Finn's voice ringing in her ears.
You're married
. Next door, the neighbors stopped talking. Cat looked up at them, and they lifted their drinks in greeting. The wife smiled, pressed one hand against her silver hair. Cat waved with a cigarette pressed between her fingers.

  That was the extent of Cat's interaction with her neighbors.

  She finished her smoke and went back inside. The house echoed with its emptiness. She wandered into the living room. Turned the video screen on manually. It was still set to the twenty-four-hour news feed Richard watched in the mornings while he lifted weights. Cat watched the screen for several seconds before she realized she was looking at the view from the lunar station: grainy, crackling footage of the moon's surface in more-or-less real time. Robots that looked nothing at all like people crawled in and out of the shot. Cat turned up the volume.

  "About to send the first manned mission," said the voiceover. "The tests all look great. Everything's coming together ahead of schedule." The image of the moon flickered and was replaced by a pair of newscasters and an older woman who looked like a scientist. She seemed vaguely familiar; Cat wondered if she had come to her wedding.

  "We'll be cycling through, once a year," she said. "Our hope is to understand how humans cope, psychologically, with life on the moon."

  Life on the moon. A life of barren soil and silvery breathlessness.
I'd live on the moon
, Cat thought, dots of sunlight scattering across the living room floor.
Couldn't be any worse than here.

 

One day Cat found a stack of boxes in one of the spare bedrooms. She'd planned to go to the co-op that day, but the weather had turned cold and rainy, and she knew the traffic would be terrible. The gray light seeped through the glass walls and settled over Richard's sleek Danish furniture. Cat was restless. She couldn't weave, but she still wanted to do something with her hands.

  Cat sat down on the spare room's cold tile floor. The rows of track lighting set into the walls burned steadily against the rainy darkness. She pulled down the first box: it was full of tufts of yarn and scraps of expensive, designer fabric. Cat pulled out a handful of yarn. It reminded her of her project at the co-op. The gift.

  Cat slid the box aside and pulled down the next one, which was full of more art supplies, these even older: dried out tubes of oil paint, a bouquet of paintbrushes with crusty, hardened bristles. A few canisters of undeveloped antique film. High school stuff, junk that had been shoved into the back of her closet at her old apartment.

  Something glossy and flat was tucked down at the bottom of the box. A photograph. Cat eased it out, trying not to smudge the print with her fingertips. Charcoal dust billowed into the air.

  It was the photograph she had taken of Finn over a decade ago, his eyes boring straight into the camera. It could have been taken the last time she saw him, last week, when they spoke through the video chat, when Finn reminded her that she was married.

  Cat deflated. She crawled across the floor until she was leaning against the bedroom wall, the photograph of Finn balanced on her knees. So he didn't age. He looked the same as he had the first time she saw him, when she was five years old – and he would look the same long after she had disintegrated into the soil of the cemetery, when the only trace left of her would be a string of molecules in the wildflowers above her grave.

  She wondered why knowing this did not make her feel revulsion or fear or malignant curiosity, why all it did was add to her pervasive and unending sadness.

  Cat dropped the photograph back into the box. The rain picked up, rattling against the roof. She stood up, put the lid on the box containing Finn's photograph. Maybe the traffic in to the co-op wouldn't be
that
bad. She hadn't felt this strong a desire to work in a long time.

  "Computer," said Cat, walking out of the room and into the dark hallway. "If Richard comes home, tell him I went into the city."

  "Of course, Mrs Feversham. However, may I advise you of the extreme weather forecasts for this afternoon–"

  "Not necessary, Computer. I've driven in a thunderstorm before." Cat grabbed her purse and slipped on a pair of flats.

  "If you insist, Mrs Feversham."

  Cat drove for nearly an hour through the rainstorm. The traffic was terrible, and the glow of brake lights blurred and streaked as though it were made of rainwater.

  The studio wasn't deserted when Cat finally arrived, parking her car along the curb. Felix stood huddled under the narrow overhang jutting out over the stoop, the ember from his cigarette glimmering in the darkness. Cat pushed out of her car and ran splashing through the puddles up to the door.

  "Holy shit," said Felix. His voice materialized as smoke on the wet air. "Or as my Auntie Lynn would say,
As I live and breathe.
I thought you were dead."

  Had it been that long since she'd come to the co-op? Cat realized she couldn't remember.

  "Seriously, though," he said. "It's great to see you. Did you come to say hi or…" He waved his cigarette around.

  "I wanted to work on the tapestry."

  "Oh thank
God,
" Felix said. "Lucy has been harassing me nonstop about that fucking loom. She wants to try her hand at weaving again." He rolled his eyes. "I caught her sneaking over to it the other day with a pair of scissors. Nearly kicked her out of the co-op. I told her it was a gift and she needed to back the fuck down."

  "Yeah." Cat tugged at her hair. "I'm sorry about that. About not coming. The time got away from me–"

  Felix put a hand on her shoulder. "It's fine. As long as you're sending me that monthly rent check, your work is safe with me."

  The inside of the studio smelled like turpentine and old clay. Rain pounded against the tin roof. The damp air seemed to hang in clouds near the ceiling. Cat tossed her purse aside, shook out her wet hair, and walked over to the loom. The silvery-green threads of Finn's tapestry fluttered unfinished in the breeze from the metal fan next to the sink.