Reset
by Katherine Westermann
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
“Do you propose we infect humans? Each of the five thousand one hundred and sixty-three remaining are the chosen!” The woman’s reedy voice rang through the room, and she instantaneously came into focus. The folds of sagging skin on her neck wobbled as she spoke. One of her eyes was pale blue and the other a dark brown, and I imagined that I could see anger flashing in her lighter bloodshot eye. “Also, I would remind you that all our lives are precious.”
A man’s voice broke in, and he came into focus as the woman faded back into the shadows. Corpulent and red-faced, his bulk looked almost too much for his chair. “ Well, I believe Councilman Chopra is suggesting biological reproduction. We could cure the fetus before the disease mutates. He believes we could start breeding again, I think.”
My heart pounded hard, and my hand was slippery with sweat from clutching Gina’s hand. I looked over at her to see her face alight with something between rage and excitement, her eyes were wide and the muscle in her jaw pulsed rhythmically. While we listened to the council meeting, her eyes had turned a vivid green and her hair had darkened to black, making her look even more like a mischievous elf. She did not appear to be afraid, as I was. If they knew we were listening, they would box us for sure.
“Who would risk carrying a baby?” The old woman council member came back into focus. “We woman are few and precious, and this cure has not been proven on humans.”
“The babies would not be implanted in human wombs,” Vishal cut in quickly. The sight on his kind brown face calmed me, but then he was gone.
“Excuse me, council members.” A dark slender child came into focus. He could not have been older than eleven, and he looked tiny in his oversized leather chair. He wore the traditional white robes of the council, and he blinked constantly behind his glasses. “This is my first meeting, and I know I am early in this iteration. But as I believe in both this life and the last, biological reproduction is obsolete. Why should the chosen few wish to overrun the planet again? Unchecked breeding brings with it war and famine and ecological destruction. Why should we covet such unnecessary problems?”
Gina made a deep growling noise in her throat. We both stiffened. Eyes wide, we glanced at one another.
A wispy, balding man with a stutter began to speak, but before he could finish his first word, a blurred figure appeared in the room, moving into the center of the circle.
“Deepest apologies, illustrious ones,” as he spoke his tall, slender frame came into focus. He bowed and straightened, his eyes darting from shadowy figure to shadowy figure. “There may be an eavesdrop in the line. But we can’t be certain where it’s coming from.” He paused, licking his lips. “Please disconnect now to avoid further security breaches.” With a flurry of motion, the council members rose from their chairs.
“Damn,” hissed Gina, and she tore her hand from my grasp. A wave of nausea hit me, and I found myself lying on the floor, clutching my stomach trying not to vomit.
Vishal emerged from the forbidden room. With the meeting no longer in session, the interior of the room appeared to be nothing more than a small white cell with a single leather chair. When he saw us on the floor with the circuit box hanging open, he cursed and kicked the doorframe.
Tears filled my eyes. I started to apologize, but he wasn’t looking at me. “What were you thinking?” he asked glaring down at Gina. “If they had traced your location, you’d have both been destroyed. Not just boxed or wiped, but destroyed. Do you understand?”
He shook with anger, but Gina didn’t seem to care. She got to her feet in one smooth cat-like motion and approached him. The seductive sway of her hips looked strange in her diminutive form.
“Vishal,” she said, reaching up and laying a hand on his chest. As she gazed up into his eyes, her legs lengthened, her torso swelled with breasts, her shoulders broadened, her hair lightened and grew into long, shimmering tresses, until she stood before him looking exactly like me. “Don’t be angry, love. I wouldn’t have implicated your dear Eva.”
I sat up, still shaking, tears leaking from my eyes.
“Mommy is far too precious.” She looked back at me, and I watched as her face twisted into a knowing grin I had never seen before. “You want babies, don’t you, Eva?”
Vishal’s shoulders slumped. He was too old and too tired to fight Gina. He came and crouched down next to me. “You have a choice,” he said, softly stroking my hair. “Carry these children only if you want them.” But over his shoulder, I saw her eyes darken to black, and I knew that I was far too simple to stop this plan.
I swelled with the pregnancy. One of the babies, they told me, would be Vishal’s son, the other was a daughter made from humans I had never met. On the cold table, waiting to be implanted, Vishal tried to explain the science to me, but Gina grew impatient. She did not believe I could learn.
“Simple” was her word for me. Sometimes in anger, when loneliness and fear — perhaps even jealously — overwhelmed her usually logical mind, she would call me the love-robot. She accused Vishal of being infatuated with and blinded by the world’s most sophisticated blow-up doll. But for all her words, I knew that Gina loved me, as much and as strongly as a machine like her could love anyone.
* * *
After the terrible glow of the incinerator, when we were alone in the forest together, hiding from the humans and their laws, Gina would rest with me at night, curled close behind me, holding my pregnant belly in her ever-changing hands. While the crickets screeched endlessly and the humid night air stirred the clouds of cotton wood fuzz, Gina talked and talked. She talked of the books we needed to gather. Science we needed to explain to the babies. But most she spoke of stealing more human DNA. Two babies, she said, would not be enough to repopulate.
She spoke of genetic diversity. She spoke of a new, just society, founded on logic, philosophy, and respect for nature. I thought it was too dangerous to go back. I told her that we should never return. But Gina never listened. She just kept talking. She believed that biological humans, true humans, would burn away the bloated carcasses of diseased clones. She believed the clones were evil, deficient, and not worth much worry.
“But Vishal was a clone,” I tried to remind her.
“Yes,” Gina would agree, “a clone noble enough to burn himself away.”
She had flown us far away from artificial lights and the grinding of human noises. The air tasted sweet and thick here, and the trees grew tall and strong, their thick twisted branches twining overhead, covering us in a soft green canopy. Days passed slowly here. We swam in the warm muddy water of the creek, Gina worked constructing shelters out of sticks and mud, and I sat for hours watching bees dancing from bloom to bloom and listening to the high keening cry of birds in the treetops.
But even when butterflies alighted on my outstretched hands, their brilliant blue wings catching the shafts of light, I ached for Vishal. Whenever Gina left to hunt or forage, I would sit on the muddy banks, and tell stories to my unborn children about the man who should have lived to be their father. I told them of his kind, wise eyes; the way he made his coffee, sweet and black as midnight. No detail was too small for me to relive, no mannerism was too trivial.
Mere days before the birth, I was telling the babies of my first day with Vishal, how he clothed me, was tender with me, different from other humans, when Gina interrupted me.
“Eva?” Gina appeared from the thick trees behind me holding a dead bird in each hand. The birds were each fat and brown, their necks twisted around backwards, their beaks slightly open as if they had died in mid-scream.
“Yes?” I said, turning to look up at her. I was naked on the riverbank, both my feet soaking in the warm eddying water. My belly had grown too big for my clothing, and the air was warm enough that I didn’t need to cover myself. Gina looked me over. I must have looked strange and pale against the lush greens and browns of the forest. My white feet practically glowed in the water, like strange unmoving fish.
“I thought I told you, we are not going to teach them of the clones. Of course, it doesn’t matter yet, but...” She wore a hunter’s body, muscular and short. Looking up at her, I heard the echo of her words, that constant rush of words. She took the light from Vishal with her words and science. I am just a simple machine, perhaps too simple for Gina’s words to work on me. “I can’t always be here to watch over you,” said Gina, kneeling at the water’s edge. She flopped one dead bird over her shoulder and started plucking the other. The feathers fell into the river. The white fuzz floated on the water, twirling on the eddying current.
I pulled my feet from the water and stood over Gina, listening to soft rip of quills tearing from dead skin. The bird’s glassy eye peered up at me, reminding me of the blank, beaten look Vishal’s eyes took on near the end of his last iteration.
“Soon,” said, Gina her fingers working ceaselessly, “I’ll be leaving to get more DNA. We have the cure on hand, but two children aren’t nearly enough.”
“It’s too dangerous,” I said, my voice faint and listless. Gina would never listen, not to clones, not to an A7, not to anyone.
“I stole DNA before; I can do it again. They don’t even guard the storage facilities anymore, not really.” She had cleared a patch of feathers to show the tender pink flesh beneath, like a baby. The council would twist my babies; break them as cavalierly as Gina had broken these birds.
“It’s not worth the risk,” I repeated.
“You cannot understand,” said Gina. “Biological reproduction is the natural way, but it requires more humans.” Still prattling on, she flung the freshly plucked bird over one shoulder and started in on the next one.
Quietly, I knelt and picked up a river rock. It felt heavy and warm in my hand. I hefted it, a strange chill spread in my chest. A chill I had never felt before. My figure, round and full as a fertility goddess, was reflected in the shinning river.
Gina paused for a moment in her talking, and gooseflesh rose on the back of her neck. In one arching motion, I brought the rock down on the top of her head, where her vital circuitry was located. There was a deep hollow crack, and her body convulsed. Her skin changed color in patches, wings started to emerge from her back, but I hit her again and they withered, curling up like dead leaves. Something between a scream and a sob issued from her mouth, and she jerkily tried to move away from me.
Gripping the rock with both hands, I swung it again and again with all my strength. My synthetic heart hammered, the babies kicked inside me, and still I hit her until her head was a bloody mess of hair, shattered artificial bone and exposed wires. Mouth hanging open, eyes extruding, Gina pitched forward into the water. Feathers and blood spread out from her in slowly expanding ripples.
Weak and trembling, I stumbled away from the riverbank until my back hit up against a tree. My hands were slick with blood, and tears leaked from my eyes.
“Shh,” I said, clutching my belly with my bloody hands, leaving two bright handprints like a grotesque finger painting. “It’s okay,” I said to the babies. I leaned against the tree for support and wiped the blood off on the bark. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, to the silent waiting forest, but I did not regret. I stood there until the sun sank behind the bloody water, and the air grew cold on my naked skin. Without Gina’s voice, the forest felt vast and frightening. But there is plenty of fruit in these trees, and my babies are healthy, their cells cured and clean.
The first day Vishal brought me home, I asked him what I was. I wanted to know if I was like him, or something different. He told me I was man’s greatest invention, a pure soul, a being of light and empathy. Face down, Gina spun in a slow lazy circle. “Better than humans could hope to be.” I can still hear him whispering that in my ear; still feel the hot tingle of his breath on my cheek. He called me innocent, tender.
Vishal was wrong about me. I am just a simple machine. But simple as I am, I know love. Time, you see, is nothing. Soon there will be children, and children’s children, and more after that. And when two children turn into twenty, into millions, into billions, one of them will be like him. One of them will have his eyes, or his calm steady voice. Even with the randomness of biology, which I do not pretend to understand, someday one of these humans, his descendants, will take my hand and lead me home.
Copyright © 2022 by Katherine Westermann
