The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  Cat rubbed the price tag between her thumb and forefinger but she didn’t tear it off. Eventually, she tucked it back down in the collar. Then she carried the dress into her bedroom, dug out an empty hanger from her closet, and hung the dress from the knob of her bathroom door, where it rippled like a ghost in the air generated by her ceiling fan.

  When Cat went to the studio the next day Felix was there, throwing clay and listening to loud, clanging music. For a moment she sat staring at the tapestry stretched out, unfinished, on her loom. She found the dark line of Finn’s hair. Ran her fingers over it.

  “Wow, Cat, that’s really gorgeous.”

  Cat jumped and snatched her hand away from the loom. She looked over her shoulder. Felix was leaning against the support column, his hands shoved in his pockets. “Is it a commission?”

  Cat shook her head. She turned back to the loom. “It’s a gift.” As soon as she spoke she knew it was true, even though the thought had not occurred to her until then. A gift. For Finn.

  “Seems pretty involved for a gift,” said Felix. “Please, in the name of all that’s holy, tell me it isn’t for the reg.”

  Cat smiled. “It isn’t for the reg.”

  “Thank Christ.” Felix walked up beside her, crossed his hands over his chest. His face had a particular expression it adopted whenever he was examining the work of anyone who helped pay rent on the studio—like he didn’t want to look at the piece at all, like he was afraid he might have to say something negative and increase the rent shares. He tilted his head to the side.

  “I think you could sell this easily,” he said. “You know. If you change your mind.”

  Cat nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “How is the reg doing?” Felix asked. “Does he know you spend all your time making presents for other people?”

  Cat tugged at the hem of her skirt. She pulled her metal cigarette case out of her pocket but didn’t open it yet. “He bought me a dress.”

  “Okay,” said Felix.

  Cat extracted a long, slim cigarette and slipped it into the side of her mouth. She wanted to tell Felix about Richard’s proposal but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. If she told him, he would tell everyone. Then she would be forced to think about it. She would be forced to come to a decision.

  She didn’t want to marry Richard. But the dress almost made her want to say yes. She had fallen into a pattern of normalcy with Richard, one her mother would have approved of. An entrepreneur working twelve-hour days on the promise of the future. A ring. A dress. So it wasn’t what Cat wanted for herself—that didn’t matter. Because when Cat thought of what she wanted, of the person she wanted, she knew it was impossible, she knew she was acting like a silly, petulant child.

  “By the way,” said Felix. “Miguel’s having another rent party on Saturday. You should come.” He reached over and stole one of Cat’s vice girl cigarettes. “Ten bucks at the door, BYOB, no regs.” He winked, pulled out his lighter, mimed drawing a cigarette down from his mouth. They walked outside to the front stoop, both knowing better than to let the scent of cigarette smoke get entwined in Cat’s work. Felix lit her cigarette and then his own.

  “Can I bring someone?” she asked. “Not Richard.” She squinted against the sunlight. The scents of jasmine and wisteria and honeysuckle stained the air around them, the blossoms lush and bright despite last week’s freeze.

  “Who else do you know?” asked Felix. “Everyone’s gonna be there. Miguel’s made up flyers. Jane’s band’s going to be playing.”

  “He won’t know about it.” Cat dragged on her cigarette. “The person I want to bring.”

  “The recipient of your artwork in there?” Felix arched an eyebrow.

  Cat tilted her head down. She ashed her cigarette. She let herself feel silly, petulant. Like a child. But she didn’t say anything at all.

  * * * *

  The day of Miguel’s rent party, Cat dropped the box containing the ring into her silverware drawer before digging her comm slate out of her purse and calling Finn. She actually called him—called the main line of the house computer, rather than connecting directly into his brain. Finn answered. Novak residence. Dr. Novak cannot take calls at the moment. How may I help you? He sounded like an automated answering machine.

  “Finn,” said Cat. “I know it’s you. Stop working.”

  On the other end, a slight pause. “Why do you think I’m working?”

  “You’re always working. I want you to go to a party with me.”

  “I wasn’t working.”

  “Awesome! So you have no excuse.”

  “Why do you want me to go to a party?”

  “Because it’s a fucking hipster rent party and I want someone there with me who won’t spend the entire time talking about their performance art at the Partisan.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. Cat dug her nails into the fabric of the couch and wondered what she would have to say to convince Finn to drive into the city to see her. Because she needed to see him. She knew if she didn’t see him she would forget who she was.

  It was desire, but a different sort than usual.

  “I’ll leave now,” Finn said finally. “What time does the party start?”

  “I don’t know, ten or so. You’ll make it.” She paused. “Thanks, by the way.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Cat tossed her comm slate aside. Sunlight poured in through the windows, heating up the apartment like a convection oven. It made her sleepy—she felt as though she hadn’t slept in days, not since Richard proposed. A few days ago he’d sent a message to her comm slate. The offer still stands. Cat had stared it for a long time, her heart vibrating in her chest, before deleting it.

  Many hours later, after the sun had set violet and red into the horizon, Finn rang the doorbell to her apartment. Cat was sitting at her desk, wearing the gray silk dress—the tag removed—and a pair of cheap cowboy boots, idly distracting herself with her laptop. The silk tingled against her skin. The laptop’s tiny fan hummed like a purring cat. “It’s unlocked!” she shouted. The door clicked open, his shoes thudded against the floor. Cat snapped her laptop shut and looked up, and when she saw Finn warmth rushed through her, a flush in the layers of her skin. She jumped to her feet and threw her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder and didn’t say anything. He was there, solid as always. He was real.

  For a long time, she held him, she breathed in the scent of him, a scent like winter afternoons, cold and mechanical. He set his hand in the small of her back.

  “Would you like me to drive to the party?” Finn asked.

  “What?” Cat said. “Oh, no. It’s in the Stella. There won’t be any parking for like five kilometers. We can take the light-rail.”

  Finn’s fingers twitched.

  “I don’t like going out in public,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  Cat split herself away from him, looked up at his dark eyes. “What happened?”

  Finn’s irises vibrated. He didn’t answer.

  “Finn!” Cat wrapped her hands around his and thought about the news reports that occasionally found their way onto her comm slate during slow periods at the vice stand: Androids were becoming inexpensive and therefore ubiquitous, and the protests kept increasing. From the Fundies. From the labor unions. People like Erik Martin. God, she hadn’t thought of him in years. An abomination.

  Finn’s irises were still shimmering.

  “Do you not want to go to the party?” she asked. His eyes focused on her.

  “The party’s fine.” One of his computational pauses. “The other guests—they’re your friends.”

  Cat pressed her palm against Finn’s chest. He looked down at her hand. His eyes were still vibrating. Cat stared at him appraisingly, head tilted to the side.

  “Do you have any idea how human you look?” She paused. “You aren’t . . . like the others, the mass-produced ones. Not really.”

  His eyes didn’t stop vibrating.
It was the only motion in his body. He didn’t blink; he didn’t move his limbs. He didn’t twitch his fingers. The air-conditioning didn’t even tousle his hair.

  “I mean it. No one who just sees you for two minutes on a light-rail is going to think, Oh my God, a robot! They aren’t going to do anything to you.”

  And as it turned out, the ride on the light-rail was uneventful—she kept her arm looped through his and no one looked at them twice. They were traveling into the part of the city known for strangeness. At one point Cat glanced at their reflection in the light-rail mirrors, and all she saw was a handsome dark-haired man and a girl wearing too much eye makeup who smiled waveringly back at her.

  She did not think about Richard.

  At their stop, Cat went into the liquor store on the corner and bought a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Coke and gave them both to Finn to carry as they walked through the neighborhood to the party. It was darker here than in other parts of the city, even the part where Cat lived. Half the streetlights were burned out. The darkness made their footsteps’ echo against the cement seem louder than it was. Cat kept the tips of her fingers pressed against Finn’s wrist. They did not speak.

  Cat didn’t know the scruffy, bearded man guarding the door to the party, collecting covers. She handed him a pair of wrinkled bills she’d withdrawn earlier that day and nodded toward Finn and said, “I’m getting both of us.”

  “You friends of Miguel?” the man asked.

  “I knew him in college.” Cat smiled dazzlingly, and the man looked expectantly at Finn.

  “I’ve never met him,” said Finn.

  Cat took Finn’s hand and pulled him into the noisy, smoky, dimly lit house. Old, scratchy music played on an antique record player, set up like a centerpiece in the middle of the living room. People stood around and smoked cigarettes and laughed. Cat threaded herself through the crowd, dragging Finn behind her, toward the table in the dining room sagging with the weight of alcohol. Cat poured herself a whiskey and Coke. Finn stayed close to her side and looked thoughtfully out over the party.

  “Are you okay?”

  He nodded.

  Cat sipped her drink. It tasted syrupy and bright, and she wanted to drink it as fast as possible. The music wailed long and low. Something fluttered against Cat’s left shoulder.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter.”

  It was Miguel, Miguel who was short on rent that month. Cat hadn’t seen him in nearly half a year but he looked the same: same dark curly hair, same lopsided grin. She rolled her eyes. He always called her that in college. The mad scientist’s beautiful daughter.

  “That’s a fantastic dress.” Then: “Who’s your friend?” He raised an eyebrow. “Boyfriend?”

  “This is Finn,” said Cat. Finn nodded mechanically at Miguel and held out his hand and Miguel shook it.

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Finn,” said Miguel before leaning in close to Cat’s ear. He smelled of aftershave and alcohol. “This is the one, isn’t it? Who your thesis was on? Jesus Christ, Cat, I thought you were making it up.”

  Cat hushed him, but Finn was already staring at her with what she imagined to be alarm. “You wrote about me?”

  “You shouldn’t be upset,” Miguel said to Finn. “It was gorgeous. You should make her give you a copy.”

  “Why did you write about me?” Finn asked.

  “I wrote about the nature of consciousness,” said Cat.

  “Through the lens of an android.”

  “Shut up, Miguel.”

  Miguel laughed. “I do work with the Automaton Defense League now, did you know that? I may have passed out a few copies.”

  “Jesus, Miguel.” Cat’s face burned.

  “I’ll take your name off. God, I thought you’d be flattered.” He threw his arm around her shoulder and squeezed. “Here, I’ll make it all better.” Then he turned toward the liquor table, and Cat gulped her whiskey and Coke. She glanced back at Finn. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Her cheeks were flushed and hot. “I didn’t give specifics. I didn’t name you or anything.”

  “It is all right,” said Finn. Unexpectedly, he pushed a piece of her hair away from her face. His hand lingered there, and for a moment Cat stared at him, her heart pounding, the place where his skin touched hers burning up. “I’d like to read it sometime.”

  “Okay, sorry to interrupt you two, but here.” Miguel held out two tumblers of a pale pink liquid. “Rose-petal liqueur. Grew the roses myself. Felix helped me ferment it.”

  Cat took one of the glasses. He offered the other to Finn.

  “I can’t drink anything,” said Finn. “But thank you.”

  Miguel smiled. “I always like to offer anyway.” He knocked back the liqueur and set the tumbler down on the table. “All right, I’m out. Cat, thanks for helping the cause. Finn, you don’t know how happy it makes me to know you’re real.” Miguel laughed again and disappeared into the party’s dark crush. Cat sipped the rose-petal liqueur. The sweetness made her head spin. She almost didn’t realize how alcoholic it was. Almost.

  “Is it . . . good?” asked Finn.

  “It tastes like flowers.” Cat finished her glass and poured another. The room brightened. Finn began to glow. Cat realized she had forgotten to eat before coming to the party. She wrapped her arm around Finn’s waist and pulled him into the backyard. No one was out there except for a few girls setting up amplifiers on a plywood stage in the corner of the yard. She lit a cigarette. The moon was huge against the violet sky. Cat stared at it.

  “Do you see a rabbit or a face?” she asked.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In the moon.”

  Finn looked up. He took a long time to answer, his eyes shaking, the moonlight dusting across his features. Entire decades had gone by since Richard proposed. It was a memory now. Harmless. Nothing she would ever have to think about.

  “I see a face.” Finn looked over at Cat. “It’s laughing.”

  “Yeah, I always thought so.” Cat sipped her liqueur. She couldn’t stop drinking it. She dipped a finger in and stirred it around. The liqueur clung to the pores of her skin. She said Finn’s name. He glanced over at her. She slipped her finger into his mouth, felt the artificial dampness of his tongue.

  “Can you taste it?” she asked. Finn nodded. He closed his eyes.

  “What do you think?” She let her hand drop to her side.

  “It tastes of fermented sugars.”

  Cat drained the rest of her drink, threw the tumbler into the soft grass, and kissed Finn, hard, in public, surrounded by the moonlight and the girls in the band. She pulled away from him.

  “Come dance with me,” she said, hearing the slur in her voice. Her entire body pulsed with desire. Richard Feversham had cast some sort of suburban spell on her, with his ring and his proposal, his expensive dates and expensive gifts, his normalcy, and Finn had broken it.

  They danced for two hours. The party filled up the house and once people got drunk enough the band started playing and everyone danced, flailing around arhythmically. Someone took the doors off the hinges and created an uninterrupted passageway between the inside of the house and the backyard, a corridor of sweat and music and flushed fevered bodies. Finn danced better than Cat expected, and she realized, drunk though she was, that he was copying the movements of the people around him, combining them to create something new. This was always how Cat danced as well. He did it more efficiently.

  Cat laughed so much that evening, she grew tired of laughing. She spilled beer down the front of the gray silk dress and she shouted, “Shit!” but, really, she didn’t care—really she was glad the dress was ruined. It was a dangerous thing, to own something so expensive. The party wore on. People trickled out. Cat felt herself sobering up, but she was tired of drinking, tired of the taste of beer and whiskey. The band stopped playing and someone turned the record player back on. Cat threw her arms around Finn’s neck and swayed to the music’s slow, d
roning violin. No one stared at them. No one said anything. If only this party were the real world. If only Finn could take her on dates to trendy and expensive restaurants. If only Finn would drop down to one knee and give her a ring in a box of black velvet.

  Cat stopped. She stopped and Finn didn’t and he stepped on her foot, his heavy black shoe grinding into the toe of her old cowboy boot. Cat yelped.

  “You’re not dancing.” Finn pulled away from her and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “I’m tired.” She placed a hand on his elbow. They were back inside, and there was no one else in the room with them—the few people left at the party had migrated into the kitchen to play some stupid drinking game. Every now and then, their laughter burst out over the crackling music.

  “Would you like to go home?”

  Cat shook her head. She dragged her finger through her tangled hair, damp with sweat and the moisture in the air.

  “Finn, can you fall in love?” she asked.

  Finn froze. On the record, one song faded out and another began. Laughter from the kitchen.

  “What.” He didn’t say it like a question. His voice was strange, distorted. Then he blinked. “You’re not the first person to ask me.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No. The preacher came to Dr. Novak’s house not long ago. He asked me the same thing.”

  “Oh, Finn,” said Cat. “No. No . . . I meant.” She stopped, bit her lower lip. “Please don’t think—”

  “Think what? It’s a reasonable question.” He paused. Cat’s heart pounded. Her head ached, the start of a hangover. “No, I don’t believe I can. Love is far too ill defined a concept to work within my current parameters. It’s too . . . abstract.”

  “Oh.” Cat took a faltering step back. “It’s too hot in here,” she said, and she stumbled backward, out into the backyard. The air was damp with dew. Music throbbed out of the walls of the house. Her heart had splintered into a thousand shards of glass. His kindness is a program. A program.

  A program. A computer.

  Finn came outside. For a moment he stood in the doorway, haloed by the light of the party. His skin wasn’t flushed red, his hair wasn’t matted down with sweat. Then he glided toward her.