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.
Stargazer 