Michael Carson Painting
I entered the office to find Julia sitting behind the glass executive desk in the late Iris Eventide’s grey leather chair. The west-facing wall was a giant floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the city’s older high-rises. It was too bright, and my eyes watered; it was too cold, and my skin tightened as it prickled.
“I told you to call before coming up. Close the door.”
Like Iris and her two daughters, Julia’s eyes were deep-set and heavily lashed. She wore a nude lipstick that made her look half-dead.
“Who sent you up? Devana? Samuel?”
“Just the girl at the front desk,” I answered.
Julia held a button on the built-in com system. “Michael? Julia. Fire Devana. Now. Give her a parachute, but I want her gone in the next fifteen.”
The button snapped up. “Well, that’s one problem solved, anyway.”
She templed her fingers over her nose and let out a deliberate sigh. It sounded hollow and deep. If I didn’t know better, I’d have bought it entirely.
I shifted in the silence. “I was surprised to hear from you.”
Her eyes snapped open with an audible click. “Were you? You sent a card.”
“Iris was important to you. Sending a card is pretty standard gesture of human empathy.”
“Ah.” She pressed her hands flat on the desk, then pulled them up, eliciting a soft sucking sound. “Perhaps I miscalculated your affection for me, then.”
“Not necessarily.” I drifted to the plastic abstract chair across from her and sank gingerly into it. Her directness was both destabilizing and refreshing. Humans so rarely stated exactly what they thought, too concerned with saving face.
“I need your help. Do you still have access to DameCo’s electronic records?”
“Not since I left.”
Left was a pretty word. I hadn’t stepped foot back in DameCo’s offices since Iris had unceremoniously thrown me out via security after finding me and her precious prototype splayed out on the floor of the lab. I hadn’t meant it to happen, hadn’t realized a human could be so susceptible to the flirtations of a machine designed to flirt. It was addictive. Terrifying. Electrifying. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to date a living human in the two years since. I’d done my job too well, and gotten trapped by it and canned for it.
“Hypothetically, if I gave you credentials—secretly, of course—would you kow how to locate all of my development files?”
“Yes…”
“My…mother is dead. Vera and Isolde will move to take over the company, but my…sisters-” Spoken with hesitation, as though the word was a new one on her tongue. “-are glorified genetic imprints who only care about lunches and their social media accounts. Iris designed me to be business savvy and keep DameCo running smoothly after her death. She had Senator Blanken’s ear and was working on legislation to give people like me legal status and rights, but since her demise, I’ve heard through my own whisper network that Blanken has tabled that work. I don’t have time to fight legal battles with him, even if I had the right to do so.”
She lifted a slip of paper from the desk and slid it towards me. “I need this put into the appropriate files at Hampshire General. It needs to look as authentic as possible, properly timestamped and all that. And I need my development files deleted in a way that they cannot ever be recovered. Can you do that?”
I looked at the paper. Julia Iris Eventide. Born: September 8, 2028, 1:52am. Mother: Iris Vale Eventide. Father: James Anderson Blanken.
My head snapped up. “You’re using Blanken’s name?”
“Call it insurance. In case he ever decides to come after me. I doubt he will.”
“Your…sisters will protest.”
“Iris left me everything, including the administration of their trusts. They’ll know what’s in their best interests.”
“And the board of investors?”
“Leave them to me. They know what’s in their best interests as well as Iris did when she started putting all this in place.”
I hesitated, but the situation, the gravity of what she was asking me to do, made me bold. “And what about me? If I delete those records, I’ll have nothing to put on my resume. I won’t be able to get a job in this field again.”
Julia watched me with eerie stillness, and then rose, smooth as poured water, flowing around the desk and over to me. She kicked off her Jimmy Choo’s and melted into my lap. My brain crackled back to a memory of her seated on my workbench, hairless, the back of her skull spilling out a mass of rainbow wiring. Her hands, so soft on my neck, tracing my throat, the mechanism in her chest that simulated breathing picking up a pace beneath her paper gown.
“I’ll take care of you,” she said, her voice perfectly husky. Who’d added that detail? She draped her arms around me, just like old times, and I coughed a lump from my throat.
“You don’t really love me,” I said, voice hoarse. “You can’t.”
The tone wasn’t the only thing that had been updated. When she pressed her lips to mine, her kiss was variable and fresh, unexpectedly creative. It took my breath away.
“If you do this for me,” she said, fingers touching my chin, so smooth, so light, “I’ll be human by legal standards. I’ll need someone in my life to…Oh, what is it you all like to say? Keep me grounded? Love me for who I am on the inside?”
“But it’d be a lie.”
Her lashes rose and fell as her gaze darted over every inch of my face, eager for something. “Your love isn’t a lie, is it? And would you really care if mine is programmed? A hundred thousand units sold suggests humans don’t mind pretending it’s authentic affection.”
She folded the counterfeit birth certificate into my hand and leaned down again. It was Samantha, my old lab assistant, who had taught her this move, I thought. Or maybe Job, with his soft smile. Maybe some new hire with a flair for the sensual. Whoever it was, they’d done a bang-up job, because like all the customers who had left five star reviews on DameCo’s various models, it sure as hell felt real.