Chapter Three, Part Two

Standing below their feet, I found myself at a loss for words. The two of them watched me, blinking slowly. Bryce scraped his chair to the center of his cell and sat down. Juliet spoke first.

“It’s been almost a year, Mom.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I stepped closer to her case and she winced like she wanted to scoot her chair backwards. “I haven’t been feeling well. The doctors had me on bedrest for three months.”

She frowned. “Your Baron’s? Is it under control?”

“It is now,” I lied. “Up and about for a couple days.” Juliet’s face softened and she pulled her chair to the glass. “Do you know what’s been going on outside?” Bryce leaned forward. The cells weren’t quite close enough together to have a normal conversation.

“Murders in Redmond. I heard children died.”

“Just one. But it’s bad. Things in the block are tense, the AMU is stepping up. I’m trying to find out what happened and resolve it.”

“You don’t know what happened? After Harriet, you really don’t know?”

“Nobody knows that. Not yet.”

Juliet scoffed and shook her head.

“I’m trying to get in touch with an engraver that supposedly worked on the android.”

“Harriet was never transferred here,” said Bryce. “The video didn’t go over?”

The prison had revoked our filming privileges after the incident. The footage we had was unusable. “No,” I sighed.

“I would have liked to see her.”

I looked at them both. “The truth is, Harriet is in trouble. She could be shut off within a year.” Bryce recoiled like I’d slapped him. “We’re doing everything we can to save her.”

“You had better be!” He stood up and put his hands on the glass. “You and Swan and all of them. She stood for everything you believe in. You can’t let that happen to her.”

“We are, I promise. We’ve got members of congress on our side. We’ll relocate her if we have to. Harriet is not going anywhere.”

Juliet sat, legs crossed, staring off at the white portal out of the exhibit hall.

“Someday, we’re all going to be back together,” I said. Her eyebrows raised but her gaze didn’t shift. “As long as I’m still around, I’ll fight for that.”

“Keep making promises you can’t keep, and people might stop putting stock in you, Grace.”

“Juliet.”

I waved him off. “It’s okay, Bryce.” I went to Juliet’s glass. “You know I regret nothing more than what I did to you. It kills me to see you two like this. Dancing and curtsying for them.”

“Sometimes I wonder if it is a dance anymore,” she said softly, softly enough that Bryce couldn’t hear. “The people that come here, they read our story, they meet us, and they ask about themselves. And I can’t help myself, I indulge them. I tell them their life is special, their love is real. If I ever get out of here…do I even want to be human again? Petty, self-absorbed things.”

“I hope you’ve held that in,” I said.

She finally looked at me, disgusted. “I wouldn’t put myself in jeopardy like that. If I go, Bryce is alone. I can’t do that to him.”

“I’m getting you out of here, I swear to God.”

—

The night before, an android had been murdered in Lomond. Sense video was published anonymously, showing the owner and his friends chasing an old-model Baird down an empty road. “Come back, frankie! Hey, come on back!” The Baird was fast, but clumsy. It glanced off a parked car and spun onto the ground. The car’s alarm went off. As the Baird began to get to its feet, one of the boys swung a metal pipe into its face. “Ohh!” groaned the cameraman. “Ohh, ohhh!” His foot appeared, to kick the android back down.

“Sir, you’re hurting me,” the android said.

“I’m hurting you?” He kicked again. “You don’t know what pain is, you shit.”

“This is for all of you frankies and bleeding-heart Animus faggots,” shouted one of them. The camera jolted up to him. He raised the pipe. “Stay off our street!” Little cogs and coolant and shards of plastic sprayed across the asphalt. The rounded cap of the skull cartwheeled off camera.

Swan couldn’t stop watching it. She sat across from me at the diner, shaking with rage as she rewound and replayed the crush. I was chain smoking. Four butts stood up in the ashtray. We were meeting with Swan’s Sons of Man contacts in Redmond, if they ever showed up.

“They’re half an hour late.”

She didn’t look up. “They’ll be here when they’re ready. Enjoy your cigarettes.”

“I have work to do today.” Out the window, a girl leaned over into a bike taxi.

“It wouldn’t be work around here, would it?” Swan was looking up at me now. I couldn’t come up with anything to say. She rolled her eyes and took the cigarette from my fingers. “You know, I did have my reasons for asking you not to play detective down here.”

“And I have mine.”

She took a long, choking drag. “These never work on me,” she said, and crushed the cherry with her thumb. “You need to accept that your personal time is private only to a point. People are watching us.”

“I think most people would want Animus involved in figuring this out.”

“You’re a little too at home in Redmond. Might start some talk about your motives.”

“You think I’m here on vacation?” Angry, I lit another.

“I wasn’t talking about myself.”

“Oh, please! I had to turn my back on Redmond to even think about working on Animus with you. You think I’m engraving again?” Quieter, “Jetting?”

“I’m only worried about the temptation, Grace. When you signed on with me, you agreed. It’s a toxic place for you.”

“It’s where I’m useful. Listen, I found some things out. There was an engraver involved. And he works for SAI. I think he caught a rap, and contracted out.”

Swan frowned, and stared through me.

“You didn’t want to hear that, I know.”

“Who did you get that from?”

“A contact.”

“‘A contact.’” She jabbed the ‘t.’

“We don’t know how direct his orders were, or even if he was ordered. All I know is we have access to SAI’s records and labs, and someone who can look into it for us.”

“Kyle?” Her eyes went wide. “You keep him out of this.”

“Kyle’s my employee.”

Again, Swan snapped the cigarette from my hand, and threw it down the far side of the table. It bounced off the window. “There’s not much I can do to keep you from running amok, Grace, but I won’t let you endanger him like this.” She stood up, hands on the table.

“Sit down.”

“Kyle’s not participating in your little investigation. Understand?”

“Sit down, and let’s discuss this.”

“I’m not sitting down!” she yelled.

“Swan.”

She looked around us at the people who had turned in their seats to watch. She sat down. “I’m sorry. This fucking video.”

“I know.”

“This is never going to be investigated. Unless it’s by people like us.”

“We aren’t giving Shinohara a pass on this. I’m contacting that engraver, Swan.”

Before Swan could argue, she got a look on her face and stood up again. “We’re not done,” she muttered. “Fame! Quill!”

I turned and saw the android who’d given Swan her gun. The name fit. Quill. A lanky, hangdog body. Olive vest, dark blue shirt and pants. “Finally, we meet,” he said. His voice was deep, maybe even modulated to shake my guts. “Grace Nguyen.”

“Gaban, now,” I said, shaking his hand. His touch was unnaturally smooth.

“We’ve been looking forward to a meeting.” Fame had been sculpted professionally, or perhaps by someone with more passion than that. Her features were elfin, otherworldly. She followed Swan down the booth, scooting with her, flirtatiously entering Swan’s bubble. When Swan looked confused, Fame laughed and returned to her side. She put a hand across the table for me. “It’s about time we sat down together, Grace.”

“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I never would have thought I would be having this meeting.” I took her hand.

“That is a beautiful ring.”

I looked at it and rubbed the blue stone. “It is.”

“We have a lot to make up for, we know.”

A server approached our table. “Can I get you folks anything? Coffee?”

“No, thank you,” said Fame.

“Water?”

“Sure. No ice, please.”

Swan ordered a cup of tomato soup and a salad with no dressing. Quill ordered nothing. I took coffee and lit another cigarette.

“I won’t make excuses for our predecessors. What happened to you and your family is impossible to imagine or atone for. Even so, you should understand, that attack is one of our deepest regrets. Most of all, we regret not communicating with you. It could have prevented… many mistakes. You’re an ally the Sons should have reached out to decades ago. Your rescue the other day really drove that home.”

Swan cocked her head. “Rescue?”

“Grace stared down an AMU squad that was harassing one of our community leaders,” said Quill.

Swan got a disbelieving smile on her face.

“Jacob could be trapped inside a box right now, if not for Grace.” Fame sipped some water. Swan, still smiling, jabbed at her salad. “He told me you were impressed with our outreach.”

“Another thing I thought I’d never see,” I said. “How long have you been working here?”

“A couple years. We’ve only gotten the resources for a real operation recently, though. There’s several people in our organization who spend their time fundraising. You know how Redmond is. It’s a grassroots effort; far too difficult to secure state or federal funding. And there’s the AMU to contend with, as you saw.”

Swan gave me a look, and gave a small tilt of her head towards Fame.

“Animus works directly with a few members of congress. I may be able to lower the heat on your community workers.” Fame raised her eyebrows, and I felt Quill shift to look at me. “After the massacre, Redmond is back in the news. Support for work like yours may be a priority soon.”

“Our name is still a dirty word,” said Quill. “The only time we rate the national feeds is to stoke fear. It might be risky to call attention to our activity like that.”

I shook my head. “There’ll always be people who fear you. Showing people your good works is a net gain.”

“If you can get the AMU to back off our kiosks, it would be a great help,” said Fame. “That would be a good start. And once your government lines see what we do, it may set the stage for more productive cooperation.”

“It’ll be done. I have a meeting later today with two of our allies.”

She nodded in approval. “As long as we’re on the topic, what kind of relationship do you imagine having with the Sons?”

Swan didn’t speak up, and simply listened for my answer. “Look, at this point, everyone knows Sons of Man is a collection of cells, not a monolith. But there’s a baseline of suspicion still there. Even for me, all due respect. Ideologically, we’re in agreement. The relationship I imagine long-term is a partnership. Working together, we could get a lot done, but we need to be sure about you, and we need to be able to sell the connection.”

“That’s fair. For now, we’ll cooperate. Watch out for each other.”

“Good deal.”

Fame smiled. “Next item. The video.”

“Grace, you probably know it was filmed in your block,” said Quill.

The thought made me shudder. I had only watched the video once, but it was enough. The looks on the boys faces. The nauseous camera. “I know.”

“We’re trying to find the attackers in the video. Grace, you had planned a program to educate on sentients, before. Do you still have a line to Lomond’s schools?””

“What for?” I asked cautiously.

Fame spun a sugar packet on the table. “Right now, the police are withholding information because, they claim, some of the boys are minors. I don’t think they deserve that level of privacy.”

“We want names, biographies. We’ll make them known, we’ll make them hated. Without that kind of spark, the cops will bury the case and nobody will care.”

“You think we could change the course of the investigation? By law, their only crime is destruction of property.”

“That’s why we need to publicize them,” said Swan. “You show this video to anyone, and they’ll feel sick. People know this is about more than vandalism. They know killing an android is murder. Putting names to the faces brings this to a spot where people can demand action. Not against an abstraction like android murder, but against individual murderers.”

“And you hope the issue will evolve to addressing the real question.”

“Whether it works like that or not,” said Fame, “I want them to hurt for this.” Swan and Quill nodded at her.

Chapter Three, Part One

Even before my stay in the hospital, I hadn’t seen Bryce or Juliet in months. Kyle came with me to the museum. They knew me there and let us in for free. It was a busy day, and hot. Groups of schoolkids on field trips ran through the halls. Tourists snapped pictures in front of various sculptures and murals. We would be ignored.

“I put some work into tracking down this Harrison Daly. Shinohara has records on him. Notes from recruitment scouts, mostly, plus a couple mentions they compiled from Redmond feeds. But no employee record. This is the guy?”

Penny’s plan had worked. I’d managed a good performance for Warrick, the former king of East Redmond. He was on his way to a speedy trial, and his replacement was waiting to be approved by the associates. “He’s somebody. My contact doesn’t know the degree of his involvement.”

Kyle itched his arm, looking up at a painting instead of at me. “I don’t know how much further I can go with this, Grace. Just so you know. I’ve been staying within my confines, dressed up my search for Daly with other Redmond techies, but I can’t risk Animus’ relationship with SAI.”

“You couldn’t go asking about employees in the engraving departments?”

“I don’t even know if anyone else has heard of this guy. One search I can explain away, but going further is a lot more of a risk. If I knew where to look, what to look for, that might be worth it. A name isn’t enough.”

I turned and paced away for a moment. Kyle had more freedom at SAI’s labs than he was choosing to account for. I sat on a marble bench. “He might have been pressed. There’d be a record if he traded jail time for a contract. Check with legal, we’ve dealt with them before.”

“Ask the senator. He likes you, in with the AMU. Plus, he’s with Grady. If SAI is involved somehow, that’s good for him….” Kyle continued down the wall of paintings. They were from an artist I had known in Redmond. Pastoral landscapes, coastlines, forests. All with the black monolith of Redmond looming in the background. Kyle stopped in front of the coastline. “My family is moving,” he said. “Down the coast, California way.”

“You’ve been talking about that a long time. You’re not going with them?”

“I like it here. And I’ve made enough to live on my own, finally. Besides, you need me,” he grinned. “What would you all do if I left?”

“Hire somebody with more balls.” He looked annoyed at me. I finished dusting off the back of my coat and gave him a push. “I’d kill to live by the ocean, you nut!”

Juliet and Bryce were kept in the same wing of the museum as a collection of Swan’s work. A coincidence, but one that always made me worry.

A transplant from Redmond, Swan burst onto the Atherton scene when she was only nineteen. Despite its mathematic roots, her large-form origami speaks viscerally to the viewer, transporting them to new places, reviving animals extinguished in humanity’s march through time….

The card made no mention of Animus, but the exhibit’s proximity to Bryce and Juliet meant visitors would learn the rest of her story eventually. Chatter rumbled out of the graver hall, filled with museumgoers asking them their inane questions. Kyle and I stayed back, waiting for the crowd to thin out.

“This is interesting work,” he remarked. “Even her busywork foldings today have more…force? More of a statement.”

“These were popular for that reason. They’re technical pieces, non-political, purely visual. There’s nothing to think about them. It’s meditative.”

We stood in front of a to-scale giraffe. “I like it.” Kyle looked up it its empty, flat face. “I don’t think they’re apolitical. I think it was after we made cranes for you in the hospital, she was telling me origami taught her about what it means to create form from a blank. Self-image, representation. It made me think of engraving, actually. You worked with blanks, too. There was a foundation, but no one would say Cherie and Harriet were anything alike.”

“That just sounds like art to me.”

Embarrassed, he turned back to the giraffe. “It made sense when she said it.”

Another group of kids swarmed into Bryce and Juliet’s hall.

“She compared it to the faces we put on. The way we hold back or accentuate parts of ourselves to live in different contexts. Work Kyle. Boyfriend Kyle. Son Kyle. I dunno.”

I had moved to my favorite piece from this period. The mountain. “I don’t see it.” The largest in the collection, the mountain towered above us, the giraffe, everything. I had watched Swan fold it. The paper had taken up all but the very edges of the warehouse exhibition floor. We wrote on it as we waited for her to begin. She sat on the side, making last-minute tweaks in her head as I wrote “Love to the nth.” The words were folded inside, now.

Kyle was enchanted, and I didn’t want to deal with so many people in the other hall. I stepped into the sound circle of the video exhibit.

The interview was filmed in a Redmond spot I recognized, a vacant lot where Swan’s artist friends worked. The laundromat where I used to bring my wash was in the background. She was four, but acting twenty-one. She had a half-shaved head with the rest of her hair in braids. Stupid hacker shades that she managed to look cool in.

“I try to be as proper as I can,” she said. “But the level people demand — there’s no call to be that proper in this life. There’s something sick about a country that lets its citizens live the way we do. The solar blocks are failing. They don’t produce the energy we paid for, and we paid in advance. The living spaces are cold, dirty, inadequate, and we need them anyway. It’s a joke.”

I received a buzz on my Sense from the museum reminding me to check out the exhibit on the pioneering renovation of solar blocks such as Lomond that came a few years after my trial. Other blocks, like the one the documentary highlighted, had stayed much the same, just more stained.

“You’ve been outspoken ever since you showed up; I remember seeing a show of yours a year ago where you spent your speaking time updating the crowd on the unrest here in Redmond. Do you think there’s something about your politics and your attitude that’s speaking to your success?”

“Absolutely I do. I think people are ready to hear all this, and they’ve been waiting to have this conversation, and I’m the lucky one who got my picture taken holding the mic. There’s better people than me to talk to about this. I’d direct your attention to Harriet, or Yost. Countless other names you’d know if this story were really being covered.”

The museum told me to visit Bryce and Juliet’s exhibit for more information on Harriet. The film cut. As Swan strutted down the bustling streets, nodding to people she passed, the filmmaker described her in sappy, loving detail. Her celebrity was in full swing.

“In my life, I feel like I’ve folded myself up into a certain shape. I hide pieces of me away, unfold and structure parts of me that I want to represent. Everyone has their separate lives. Whether it’s your sexuality, your gender, your race, you have an image that you are forced to manage. For too many in this country, this is a life-preserving skill.”

“You’re talking about androids.”

“I’m talking about anyone who has to somehow hide or remold who they are in order to live. In my work I want to express the purest form I can, whether that means a perfect replica, or a perfect symbol. I’m fascinated both by the truth and by what people present as the truth.”

Finally, we entered the exhibit. It was still packed, and people kept coming. “We should have come early,” said Kyle. That morning, I had slept through my alarms, tried and failed for an hour to get up, and couldn’t find anything in the house I wanted to eat. Redmond had taken a lot out of me, and today was shaping up to be trying as well.

The entrance herded us left, where began the story of Grace Nguyen and the creation of her five sentient androids. A larger-than-life photo of my young self posed for the camera with grease stains on my face and my arms pockmarked with coolant scars. I bypassed the laser-cut acrylic tablets telling me that I came to Redmond at seven, after both my mother and father had been laid off in a labor dispute. Bryce and Juliet’s cell walls reached all the way to the ceiling. There were enough people that I felt like I could be nudged off to the other end of the hall if I wasn’t assertive. I slipped between two large bodies and caught, from a tablet, that I left home as soon as I could, striking out on my own in the tech district where I began work as an android mechanic. I felt glances as I passed, people thinking maybe they recognized me, but they were only here to speak to the androids.

Juliet was sitting in her wooden chair with affected relaxation. She looked like she should be drinking a martini. The display cases were eight feet by eight, four feet off the ground to aid viewability.

“Have you ever been in love?”

Juliet was asked this a hundred times daily. Years ago, before she and Bryce were captured, she was in love with a woman named Reina. She was hunted down before it could go bad between them.

“Before I came here, I had a boyfriend,” she said. “Another android, like me. I understand love. I can’t be sure that I’ve actually been in love.” She caught me in the crowd and I saw a spark in her eye.

“Did he ever come to visit you?”

Juliet really looked sad, then. “No. But I don’t blame him. I was afraid, too, before I knew what it was like here.”

“You don’t hate it in there? I would go crazy, I think.”

“No,” she smiled. “I’ve always enjoyed being here. Twenty-five years this summer. I think it’s important to educate people on how far android technology can be pushed. I’m a thirty-six-year-old model. Even back then, I was programmed to experience human emotions and empathy. How much more sophisticated must androids have become since then? ”

Someone behind her piped up. “You aren’t too convincing. Any human would be suicidal by now.”

She wasn’t able to conceal her disdain, and several people oohed and ahhed at the expression she pushed back down. All smiles again, she looked around the crowd. “For safety, the authorities downclocked my processor before donating me. Harriet is my sister, after all.”

“Do you think that’s fair?”

“Whatever was inside Harriet that made her do what she did, we still don’t know. It could be inside me, as well. But the glass is thick, I promise,” she joked, rapping on the wall.

I turned to see Bryce standing. His chair was pushed to one corner of the cell, spoiling the view for a good portion of his spectators.

“What were you before you were a doppelganger, honey?”

Bryce was a pleasure model, generically handsome with a couple sculpt touches from my chisel. Formerly the property of a basement parlor, rented out by the half-hour. “I was a domestic, once. A part of a family. I helped cook and clean, I kept an eye on the kids, walked the dog.” His story left out the explanation of how he ended up hanging in a scavenger’s library. “It gave me purpose. I miss my life with them, sometimes.”

“And what is your purpose?”

He answered as if it were drilled into his head. “An android’s purpose is to carry out their programming. I was made to help in home life, and so that gave me purpose. I was modified to interact with humans, and now that is my purpose. Same as any tool.” I heard the question make its way to Juliet, who answered that she had been a stylist.

From the ceiling came the museum’s announcement chime. “Visitors of the Atherton museum — Our engraving exhibit and visiting hall is closing for mid-day maintenance.” Juliet looked up, confused, then back down to me. “We will reopen the wing at 2 PM. Please follow the docents out to the main museum.”

Griping, the crowd shuffled out of the exhibit. A few tried to talk to Bryce and Juliet before they left, but the two of them pretended to be under a spell of obedience to the museum. Kyle gave me the thumbs up from the entrance, and followed the rest of the visitors, leaving me alone with my children in the enormous, echoing hall.