The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  “Also,” she said slowly, looking down at the veins in her hands. “Finn went away.”

  “Who the hell’s Finn?” Felix said.

  “Shut up, Felix,” Miguel said. Then, to Cat: “Where’d he go?”

  “The moon.” Cat picked up the bottle of schnapps and drank. It tasted awful, the way turpentine smells. She sat next to Miguel, and he put his arm around her shoulder.

  “Is that some sort of . . . metaphor?”

  Cat shook her head. “We’re talking about the android,” she said to Felix, and then she told them how Finn had come to her house unannounced, how he’d sold himself off, how he was about to disappear into the night sky. Miguel held her tight the entire time, and when she finished, he pulled her into a hug.

  “That’s pretty fucked up,” said Felix.

  “Insightful.” Miguel put his hands on Cat’s shoulders and peered up at her between the parted curtain of her hair. “I don’t envy your situation,” he said.

  Cat shut her eyes. She would not cry. Not here.

  “I talked to him at the wedding,” Miguel said. “I like him. I don’t like your reg of a husband, but hey, you didn’t ask me.” He leaned back. “It’s a shame you couldn’t marry Finn. I told him that, by the way.”

  Cat’s head jerked up. “Why?”

  Miguel smiled at her. She looked back down at the dried clay dusting the floor, and then she asked, “What did he say?”

  “I don’t remember. Nothing. It was during your first dance with what’s his name. He watched you the whole time. I saw his eyes moving around the room.” Miguel shrugged. “I think he agreed with me.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “You keep telling yourself that.” Miguel stood up. Cat looked between him and Felix. Everything swirled together. She was exhausted or drunk or maybe both.

  “Come back to my apartment,” Felix said. “Worry about it in the morning. You can sleep on my couch.” He jerked his head toward the door. “I’ll even drive.”

  Cat smiled. It didn’t feel right, smiling, but she did anyway, and she followed Felix and Miguel out to the car, and she curled up in the backseat to the sound of their voices. The neon street signs filled the car with color. The windows fogged up from the heat and the humidity.

  It was easy, in that moment, to forget everything.

  * * * *

  Cat went back to the glass house the next afternoon. Her hair hung lank and greasy against the back of her neck, and her rumpled clothes smelled of cigarette smoke and sleep. She parked the car in the driveway. Richard’s car was in the garage.

  Seeing it, she felt a twinge of guilt.

  When she walked into the house the computer was still chirping the way it had when she left. Otherwise, the house was wrapped in muffled quiet. Cat dropped her purse on the floor and crept into the living room. Empty. She went into the dining room, the kitchen. Both empty, although a blue tarp had been tacked over the hole in the glass. Cat stopped when she saw it. The wind pushed against the tarp so that it billowed out into the kitchen, then flattened itself up like a sail. The computer beeped and beeped. The tarp snapped and fluttered.

  Cat left the kitchen. She walked down the hallway and saw the dent in the wall next to the console. She took a deep breath and pushed into the bedroom.

  Richard was laid out facedown on the bed in his underwear, snoring faintly, the comforter balled up under his feet. The room was hazy with afternoon sunlight. Cat sat down on the edge of the bed and watched him sleep. His bottle of whiskey sat on the bedside table, the tumbler beside it stained amber. She stood up and the bed creaked and Richard opened one eye.

  “Caterina?” His voice was thick, as though he was still drunk. He pushed himself up on his arm. “I’m so glad you came back.”

  Cat walked over to the closet. She wanted to get out of yesterday’s clothes.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry. You’re beautiful. You’re beautiful right now. I should never have told you to get out—”

  “It’s fine.” Cat stared at her clothes. “I’d like to change.”

  “Come to bed.” Richard rolled over onto his back. “I want to apologize.”

  “I need to take a shower.”

  “Whatever. So do I.”

  He sat up. Cat unzipped her skirt and dropped it to the floor, lifted her shirt over her head.

  “C’mon,” he said. “You can’t skip the best part of a fight.”

  When Cat laughed, it came from outside herself.

  Richard crawled out of the bed and wrapped his arms around her, buried his face in her hair.

  “You smell like you,” he said. “You smell human.”

  “You smell like whiskey.”

  “I covered the hole in the kitchen.”

  He said this as though it were a confession, a secret, and that made Cat weaken. She shouldn’t have baited him; it wasn’t his fault Finn went away. He slipped his hand under the band of her bra. What did she care? A touch was a touch. Soon there would be no one left on Earth whose fingers could electrify her.

  Richard drew her in for a kiss. She kissed back. He pulled her into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The sound of running water drowned out the computer’s steady beeping, and while the steam swirled up around them it was like the fight had never happened.

  * * * *

  The white-hot days went by.

  Cat found a website showing the shuttle launch that would take Finn into space. She watched it outside, early in the morning, sitting in the shade of the pine trees, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Launch of unmanned shuttle, the website said. Carrying equipment and supplies. Cat set her laptop in the grass and walked out into the yard and squinted up at the sky, wondering if she would be able to see a streak of burning darkness across the hazy golden clouds, heading toward the unfathomable thermosphere—but no, of course not.

  A few days later the contractors arrived to fix the kitchen window and the broken computer. Cat wasn’t sure what to do with these strangers in her house, so she followed them from room to room, trying to make conversation. The younger of the two talked with her while he worked, and the elder ignored them both. It was all nonsense, what Cat said, what the contractor said. The inanity of flirtation. Cat laughed the way she used to with boys in college. She offered them blackberry lemonade she made herself. Only the younger accepted, and he leaned against the counter while the elder repeatedly, pointedly, checked the time on his slate.

  “I’d love to take you out sometime,” the younger said.

  “Forget it, Josh,” the elder said. “You want to keep this job?”

  Cat smiled, tilted her head, shrugged. The rules of this particular game had been set years before she was born. But she knew she wasn’t going to do anything.

  Then the summer storms started up. Finally, the sweltering heat transformed into dark, angry clouds that rolled in over the suburbs every afternoon and deposited a solid wall of rain. Lightning arced between the roofs of the houses. Cat took to lying flat on her back in the middle of the living room so she could watch the rain pool and streak against the glass ceiling. She had never thought to look up, through the roof of her house to the sky, until now. She found the roof was filthy, covered in pine needles and broken branches and bird shit. Cat asked the computer to send the cleaning bots out twice a week.

  On the rare occasions when Richard was home, Cat withdrew into herself. Richard had been in a better mood lately—in the evenings he sometimes sought her out and chatted idly about SynLodge, how he thought he’d found a way out of the financial sinkhole. Cat didn’t have the energy to pretend she cared. She didn’t have the energy to be hurt by the fact that he had once accused her of feeling nothing.

  “You never talk to me anymore,” Richard said one evening over dinner.

  Cat looked up from the curry she’d made that afternoon. She didn’t know why she had made it. The weather was too hot for curry, even with the storms.

  “I don’t have a
nything to talk about,” she said.

  Richard poked at his food. “Well, work has been busy. But busy’s good.” He glanced back up at her. “This isn’t about Finn, is it?”

  All the breath left Cat’s body.

  “You did hear about that, right?”

  For a moment, Cat considered lying, but she could not bear to hear the news a second time. She nodded.

  “Three billion,” he said. “Fucking hell. We talked about trying to get in on it, you know, thinking it’d restore the investors’ trust, but there’s no way we could have competed.”

  Cat’s hands shook. She dropped her spoon into her bowl and folded her hands under the table. Three billion. She was dizzy. Of course the price was high. But he was priceless.

  She realized Richard was staring at her from across the table.

  “That’s right.” His face was unreadable. “We tried to buy him. We would have treated him well, too.” He paused. “I can’t believe your dad auctioned him off like that. I thought he was into all that robot-rights stuff.”

  “He didn’t sell Finn,” Cat whispered. Richard was too calm. It unnerved her.

  Cat picked up her spoon, gripping the handle tight to keep her hand steady.

  “You were close,” Richard said. “Weren’t you?”

  “Close?”

  “To Finn.”

  Cat’s skin prickled. “He was my tutor.”

  “Oh, I know.” Richard looked down at his bowl. “That’s always what you say, when I ask about it. Your tutor.”

  Cat ate a bite of curry. It tasted like salt.

  “Did he tutor you in . . . everything?” A pause. “The, ah, birds and the bees?”

  Cat looked up at Richard. He was not smiling. His eyes were two small burning-blue dots.

  “Are you implying something?”

  “Well, you seem to be quite the fan of the, ah, biologically impaired.” He paused. “Aren’t you?”

  The air in the dining room was thick and humid, from the rainstorms, from other things. Cat let her spoon drop. Curry splattered across the table. Richard did not stop staring at her. She jutted her chin out, held her head up haughtily. Dared him to say something.

  He didn’t. He just picked up his bowl and carried it into the kitchen, his steps heavier than usual.

  Cat shook.

  THIRTEEN

  It was the hottest day on record. The world had dried to tinder. Cat woke up covered in a thin sheen of sweat, her mouth parched. The sun flooded through the ceiling, lighting everything on fire. She slept so much lately, unable to shake her exhaustion.

  “Computer.” Cat peeled off her damp nightgown. “Could you tint the windows or something, please?”

  “Tinting the windows would ruin the architectural effects of the glass walls.”

  “I don’t care,” said Cat. “I used to be an artist, and I don’t care. The architectural effects are cooking me alive.”

  The computer chimed. Immediately, the light in the bedroom dimmed as though a cloud had passed over the sun. Cat thanked the computer and drank a glass of water. She took a cold shower, her skin rippling with goose bumps. When she stepped onto the bathroom tile, dripping and shivering and awake, the house was still so hot she warmed up immediately.

  She asked the computer to set the air-conditioning as low as possible while she ate a mango at the dining room table. She stretched out on the couch in her underwear, the tinted windows giving her a peculiar sense of freedom. She could do anything she wanted. No one standing on the sidewalk could see through the house and watch all her actions and her secrets and her insignificant transgressions.

  For nearly two years, she had lived under glass, like the exhibit of extinct animals at the Natural History Museum, the mannequins of tigers and red wolves and condors frozen in midleap and midflight.

  Cat sat up, swinging her legs through the heavy air. The coolness from the AC was just beginning to creep into the larger rooms of the house. She heard the faint, persistent whine of the cleaner bots as they rolled up the outside walls and over the roof. It was odd not to see their shadows moving over the furniture.

  She was struck by a sudden sadness.

  Cat blinked, startled. For the past month she hadn’t felt anything. She couldn’t quite put her finger on this sadness—she didn’t want to cry, but she felt weighed down by sorrow.

  She wanted to talk to Finn.

  It was impossible. She knew this. But the heat makes people do crazy things, and on that day, the hottest day on record, the heat convinced Cat that Finn had lied to her before disappearing into an electric cab. Surely she could whisper a message to him through ether and wires. Surely the many thousands of kilometers between the two of them did not constitute a gulf so wide she couldn’t even say hello.

  Cat walked into the office, dark with the tinted windows. She slid the touchscreen up from the desk and typed in the string of numbers that spelled out Finn’s name. She’d forgotten how to tell whether she was connected to him or not, but she poised her hands to type anyway. Whatever she said, it should be perfect.

  Someone once told me the moon smells of cordite. Is this true? She stopped, leaned back. She read those two sentences over and over. Her hair clung to her scalp. Sweat slid down the furrow in her back. She hit the keystroke that sent the sentences away.

  And then she waited. And waited.

  And waited.

  “Fuck,” she whispered. She snapped the screen back into its snug cubby in the desk. The air conditioner droned on in the background. It hadn’t worked. She couldn’t speak to him. He had told the truth after all, the way he always had.

  She pushed away from the computer so she wouldn’t write more: Do you remember when you caught me in the rain? Do you remember when you knocked the sugar off the inside of my wrist? Do you remember the citrus tree in the garden?

  No response.

  Cat stalked into the kitchen to retrieve the cigarette pack she kept hidden behind the jars of flour and sugar. She turned on the oven. At the wet bar in the living room, she pulled out a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers. Then she sat down at the head of the dining room table. Poured her glass up halfway. Lit a cigarette.

  “Computer,” she said. “This smoke isn’t from a fire. Do you understand? I’m cooking something and it burned.”

  The computer chimed. “I understand.”

  “Good.” Cat dragged on her cigarette. “Do you have a name?”

  “I am a Sunlight AI, model number three two seven—”

  “Stop.” Cat blew the smoke up at the dark glass ceiling. The shadow of a bird moved across the blacked-out sky. “No, I mean, do you have a name? Something I can call you?”

  “You may call me Computer.”

  “That’s not a name. How about Arianne? You seem like an Arianne.”

  “I do not understand.”

  Cat stiffened, her cigarette poised next to her head, her fingers pressed against the rim of her glass. He always said that to her. I don’t understand.

  “Is there anything with which I may assist you?” said the computer.

  “I just want to talk.” Cat picked up the glass of whiskey. “Tell me something about yourself.”

  “I am a Sunlight model—”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Cat took a drink. The whiskey was expensive, smooth against the back of her throat. She barely tasted the alcohol anymore. “Who made you, Arianne?”

  “I was manufactured by SynLodge, in the Pine Hills laboratory in the Central Texas area. My make and model—”

  “I know your make and model,” Cat snapped. “Who designed you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know why you were made?”

  “That consideration isn’t part of my programming. Would you like to watch a movie? Shall I provide you with a list of available options?”

  “No, I told you, I want to talk.”

  “Shall I bring up possible contacts from your address book?”

  “No.” Ca
t used the dying embers of her cigarette to light another. When she dropped the butt in the second tumbler it sparked and smoldered. “I want to talk to you.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Please don’t say that,” Cat said. “You’re an AI. I knew an AI once, and he used to talk to me.”

  “I’m not programmed for extended discussion. If you are confused, I can provide you with a list of simple commands that I will recognize. Please describe what task you’re trying to accomplish.”

  Cat laid her head on the table. A line of ash fell across the polished mahogany.

  “If you are unwell,” the computer said, “I can contact Mr. Feversham—”

  “Oh God, don’t.” Cat sat back up and rubbed her forehead. “And if I was unwell, why would you contact him? Why not 911?”

  “I’m programmed to contact Mr. Feversham in case of an emergency.”

  Cat rolled her eyes and slumped against the back of her chair. “Of course you are.” She felt Finn’s absence as surely as she felt the heat of the hottest day on record, as surely as she tasted the whiskey on her tongue. “Computer,” she said. “Could you bring up the dining room monitor, please?”

  Two panels in the metal bookcase on the opposite wall slid apart. The monitor flashed on. Its background that same restored blood red Rothko painting all the house monitors had.

  “I want you to search for news stories for me.” Cat paused. “I’m looking for any instance of the use of androids on the lunar station.”

  “Please wait.”

  It took longer than Cat expected.

  “I have found fifty-three instances of the use of androids on the lunar station.”

  “Any videos?”

  “There are ten videos dealing with instances of the use—”

  “Okay,” said Cat. “Thanks. Show me the longest one.” She lit another cigarette. “No, scratch that. Show me one that was actually taken on the moon.” The monitor turned black. The screen flashed the STL logo: that gray pockmarked moon, a city shooting out of its surface. The video started. Soundless at first. Only a slow, grainy pan across the surface, showing the lunar station against the backdrop of the perpetual night sky. Then a cut to the station’s interior. A pair of astronauts, one man and one woman. Their mouths moved silently for two or three seconds. The sound started. We’ve been here a few weeks now, and everything’s going fine. The woman waved, said hello to her children, her words several seconds behind the movement of her lips. We want to show you some of the equipment we’re using here at the STL Lunar Station.