while the black stars burn (3 page)

Not spinwebs,
he corrected.
We spin no webs. We hunt those who are violent, and we protect those who are peaceful. We are
Akavishim.

“Akavishim,” she repeated, and she heard her parents gasp.

What do I call you?
she asked.

Brother Firebelly
, he replied.
I am yours.

“And I am yours.”

The Strange Architecture of the Heart

Mira watched her husband Jeffrey draw invisible signs in the air in front of the couch. He’d been planted there for hours; she couldn’t tell if he was coding or gold farming. His blue sensory visor was tight across his eyes and ears. She couldn’t hear the music, or whatever he was listening to, but clearly it was loud enough to drown out the thunderous crack of the bomb exploding down the street.

She hesitated, then stepped forward and tapped him gently on his left shoulder. His whole body jerked in surprise, and he hit the button on the side of his visor to turn the digital lenses transparent.

“What’s up?” He gazed up at her through his smudged glasses, looking annoyed and disoriented.

“Another one got through the shields. Down the street. It took out the United Dairy Farmers store.” The Hand of God southern apocalyptic cult had been blown to microscopic ash in a government anti-terrorism raid, but their cloaked Khishchnik satellite was still in high orbit somewhere, periodically sending honeybee-sized fusion bomb drones down to random northern cities. It was the most senseless of senseless violence, but nobody in charge seemed able to stop it. Or they didn’t have the political will to stop it. Either way, experts guessed that the satellite was packing more than ten thousand drones.

“Oh, jeez.” He blinked, his eyes focusing on her a bit more. “Anybody hurt?”

“Four killed, they’re saying. A woman and her two little boys. And the store clerk.” Mira felt sick picturing them all lying there in pieces in the rubble. She hoped they hadn’t suffered. The boys’ father had to be beside himself with grief. She didn’t know him or his dead family, but she could imagine what he was going through.

“Damn.” An expression of sympathy attempted to crawl across her husband’s face, but it died past his lips. “Well, when it comes, it comes.”

He lifted his hand to tap the button and shut her out again, but she reached out and put her hand on his. Her heart quickened in her chest; she was too nervous to say
I miss you. Please make love to me
, so instead she stammered, “I’m scared. Could you come upstairs with me for a while?”

It wasn’t a lie. The drones scared the shit out of her. They killed her father. They killed her girlfriend Amy. There wasn’t a damn thing she could do to protect herself or anyone else, except move down south. Which meant leaving everyone they knew and everything they’d worked for and becoming refugees. All the Southern cities were bursting with people and housing was so expensive that they’d be broke in a matter of months even if she found decent work on top of Jeffrey’s job. It felt like they’d be trading the possibility of a quick death with the certainty of slow starvation.

“Please?” she said.

Jeffrey opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, going silent for two or three seconds. In those fleeting moment she imagined that they went upstairs, hand-in-hand, and he lay down with her to cuddle, and soon they were kissing, and then they were having sex for the first time in five years.

And then she imagined that she got pregnant, and she didn’t miscarry like last time. She imagined she gave birth to a healthy baby who had his blue eyes and her curly brown hair, and she imagined she finally had a family. She imagined what it would be like to feel the weight of her baby’s warm head in the palm of her hand. She imagined what it would be like to have a toddler grab her legs and say “I wuv you, Mama!” She imagined no longer having to sneak off and cry in the women’s restroom when the young secretaries announced their pregnancies at her office.

“I really need to work,” he said. The same thing he’d said every night since she miscarried. He’d seemingly convinced himself that if he just stayed busy enough, he’d never have to face his own grief over losing their child.

She felt all her fragile imaginings crumple into nothing.

“
Please
?” she whispered.

“There’s a 30% bonus if I can get this deployed by midnight.” He looked puzzled, then frowned in concern toward the kitchen. “Is Rachel malfunctioning?”

Heat rose in her face. “No. I just…wanted to be with you….”

His expression was blank, distant. “I’m really busy. Sorry.”

The sudden spike of anger felt like battery acid in her chest. But she made herself smile. “Fine.”

She turned away and went into the kitchen, where Rachel was kneading bread and humming Christmas carols. Just ever-so-slightly off key, sometimes; it was part of her naturalistic programming.

Rachel was a Juno 2500 Personal Assistant Android. She’d been Amy’s, purchased via the proceeds of a large National Science Foundation grant awarded to Amy’s lab. Rachel started as a gene sequencing slave, but soon she was upgraded to work as Amy’s personal assistant at conferences and was quite well-received at poster sessions.

Amy brought Rachel with her when she visited three years before. Jeffrey didn’t care that his wife had a girlfriend; he probably wouldn’t have cared if she had a boyfriend, either, but at the time that felt like a step too far to Mira. Mira took Amy upstairs and they made love while Rachel made them all dinner. Afterward, Amy decided to go to the store to find a kind of Riesling she liked.

A honeybee drone hit her on the way home; there wasn’t anything left of her to bury.

Mira spent weeks lost in a fog of depression; when she emerged, she realized that Rachel was still puttering around their townhome. Apparently, nobody from Amy’s university had come looking for Rachel or had even asked about her; everyone assumed she had been vaporized along with her mistress.

Furthermore, Jeffrey had changed Rachel’s serial number records in the national database and had programmed her with additional behaviors and skill sets. Mira discovered this when, after one of her crying jags, Rachel gently hugged her and oh-so-politely asked if cunnilingus might take her mind off things.

As it turned out, it did.

Since then, Mira had used a big chunk of the money she’d been saving for adoption search fees to swap out Rachel’s decorative genitalia with a fully functional package modeled on that of a male porn star whose movies Mira intended to never see.

“Rachel,” Mira said.

The lovely android stopped kneading the dough and turned, smiling expectantly. A millisecond later her face took on a perfect expression of concern. “You look so sad! What’s the matter?”

“I’d like you to take me upstairs and fuck me unconscious.”

“Okay, but…I think your blood sugar is low. You should eat something. I can make you a snack?” Rachel wiped her hands off on her apron.

The android was equipped with a multitude of bioscanners and was never wrong about such things. “Okay. Fix me whatever.”

Rachel carefully set the dough aside in a glass pan, draped it with a damp tea towel, and made a perfect, tiny peanut butter sandwich and poured her a half-glass of milk to go with it. Mira dutifully ate it.

“Do you feel better?” Rachel asked.

“I do, thank you. Now, please take me upstairs....”

*

Afterward, Mira fell into a hard sleep on Rachel’s soft, lifelike bosom. Unlike Jeffrey, Rachel would not have a bad dream at 3am, slip out of bed and go work on the couch. Unlike Jeffrey, Rachel would not start perspiring in the middle of the night and fill Mira’s ears with trickling sweat. Unlike Jeffrey, Rachel could never get her pregnant.

Mira woke and quietly began to weep.

Rachel stirred. “There, there. What’s the matter?”

“I want a baby,” Mira confessed. She felt like a loser saying it out loud. Here she was, nearly forty, a damnable cliché of a woman with a ticking biological clock. And she was in no position to have a child, not physically, not logistically, not in any way. It took a village to raise a child, she knew, and had no village. She didn’t even know their neighbors’ names. Worst of all, she couldn’t talk herself out of her heart’s desire. “I want a baby so badly and I can’t have one. Jeff won’t help me….”

“I would be glad to help you care for a child,” Rachel said.

“I’d need Jeff to fuck me at least once,” Mira replied bitterly.

“You could get artificial insemination.” Rachel sounded slappably cheerful. “Or you could adopt.”

“All of which require money. Which I…have spent on other things.” Her shoulders sagged at the admission.
The one thing I want most in the world, and I just don’t want it badly enough to actually do anything about it. Loser.

“Like what?” Rachel chirped.

“Like you. Your upgrades, anyhow.”

“Oh.” The lovely android paused. “What about a boyfriend?”

“What about one?”

“A boyfriend could get you pregnant at low or no cost!”

“Rachel, baby, if I could get myself a boyfriend, I’d be with him this very minute.”

*

The next night, Rachel went out to go grocery shopping and was gone for so long that Mira began to fear that she’d been stolen. The tracking software on her phone said the android was about four blocks away from where she should be. In a nightclub, of all places. Had she been kidnapped? Mira didn’t know if she should call the police or just keep waiting. She paced while Jeffrey did his technological pantomimes on the couch, oblivious.

But then Rachel came through the front door, half-carrying a guy who was pawing at her breasts. The curve of his strong jaw reminded her of Jeffrey. He was somewhere in his mid-20s, and his tight black tee shirt showed off his gym-buffed arms and chest, muscles as flashy as any peacock’s tail. But he was so drunk that Mira doubted he could stand on his own. She wrinkled her nose at the stink of beer and dance club sweat.

“What’s this about?” she asked Rachel.

“I brought him for you!” Rachel beamed. “He’s a perfect complement to your genetics!”

“Uh.” Mira watched the guy twist Mira’s nipples like he was trying to tune an old-fashioned radio. “That’s...very thoughtful of you, but...no.”

“Why not?” Rachel frowned, clearly perplexed.

“Baby, look at him...he’s fifteen years younger than me and sloppy drunk.”

The young man lifted his head from Rachel’s chest and ogled Mira with bloodshot eyes. “Ahmna drunk, juss alil tipsy.”

“If you’re worried about his performance, he’s had an erection for over an hour.”

“I’m...sure he has.” Mira bit her lip, trying to figure out how she could gracefully get the young man out of her house.

“Go on,” Rachel pulled the young man’s hands off her and pushed him toward her mistress. “Go say hello to Mira. She likes you.”

He staggered forward like an oversized toddler, grinning. Mira took a step back.

“Izziss gonna be a threeshome?—”

He took another wobbly step, but then his knees buckled and he pitched forward, slamming his forehead into the corner of the marble-topped console table Jeffrey had bought Mira soon after they married.

“Oops,” said Rachel.

*

Mira held Rachel’s hand as the paramedics carried the unconscious young man to the ambulance, blue anti-hemorrhage foam mounded on the gash on his face and a brace strapped to his neck. They told her the young man would be fine after he got hospital treatment. Jeffrey was still obliviously coding on the couch.

“Don’t worry, I’ll clean all the blood off the floor.” Rachel sighed. “So sad. He was a perfect genetic match for you.”

“I’m sure he was,” Mira replied slowly. This was surely the most mortifying thing that had happened to her all year, but she still found herself oddly touched by Rachel’s efforts. “I...appreciate what you tried to do. But please don’t bring me any more guys.”

“How can you get pregnant without one? You told me artificial insemination is too expensive, and he would have been free!”

“Oh, Rachel.”

Mira paused. The android
did
have a valid point. She certainly wasn’t going to magically conceive all by herself. If she ever developed a super power, parthenogenesis wasn’t likely to be it.

“There are some things I can try on my own that will be less...awkward,” Mira finally said. “Hopefully.”

“All right.” Rachel sounded cheerfully skeptical. “Whatever you think is best. But let me see the men, okay? I want you to have a good baby.”

“I will.”

*

Mira decided to set up a profile on HeckYesDates. Further, she decided she’d be completely honest in her introductory hologram and tell her prospective suitors that not only was she looking someone to father her child, her android would be chaperoning all first meetings.

The replies didn’t exactly flood her account. And when they gradually trickled in over the course of the next few weeks, she was fairly appalled at her prospective suitors. The first guy was dressed in black tactical gear and ranted about racial purity. The second rambled about playgrounds and was visibly high on drugs. The third could barely string any words together at all and at one point he drooled on himself. Her mood sank lower and lower; surely this terrible dating site was no more than a one-way ticket to Loserville.

But her hope began to bloom again when she received a reply from a fourth respondent. He was a man in his late 30s, and he seemed witty and intelligent and wasn’t bad looking. Mira showed his hologram to Rachel, who walked all around his image, staring at it as if she were evaluating a used car.

“Look at his fingers. He’s got webbing.” The android shook her head. “He’s genetically risky.”

“Oh.” Mira was crestfallen. She’d been so taken with his green eyes and Dr. Seuss quotes that she hadn’t noticed his hands, which he mostly held behind his back during his monologue.

“I’m going back to the bars,” Rachel announced. “I will do my best to find a sober man.”