The Mad Scientist's Daughter

  “I liked your speech,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Finn said.

  Cat smoked and leaned against the fence. The grainy wood poked the small of her back. “He told me the whole story,” she said. “About how he found you.”

  Finn didn’t say anything. Cat’s hands shook. Daniel ran along the edge of the fence. The cicadas buzzed, and it reminded Cat of the day the hospital called to tell her that her father was dead. She snuffed out her cigarette on the fence and dropped her head on Finn’s shoulder. He didn’t move: not to pull her close, not to push her away. The sky was an oppressive shade of blue. Over near her mother’s grave (her father’s grave), the caretaker was turning on the lowering mechanism. A loud, mechanical lurch and then a slow and steady grinding, metal on metal. Cat closed her eyes. The cicadas. Machinery. Daniel shrieking and laughing as though the funeral had not just happened.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know what to say,” said Finn.

  TWENTY

  On a bright, crisp morning, Cat’s father’s lawyer came to the house. He had called a few days after the funeral about the will, and Cat had asked him to drive to meet her, because she had a young child and it was difficult for her to get away. In truth, she was too exhausted to drive into the city.

  After he arrived, Cat set him up at the dining room table. She lit a cigarette without asking if it was okay.

  “Ms. Novak, I’m sorry for your loss.” The lawyer was small and wiry with bland, beige features. He addressed her cigarette. Cat blew smoke toward the ceiling. “However, before we can get started, we’re going to need . . .” The lawyer glanced down at his tablet. “Finn? The, ah, the android? I’m going to need him.” The lawyer pursed his lips.

  “Oh,” Cat said. “Of course.” She was surprised—not that her father wrote Finn into his will, but that he was allowed to do so at all. Times were changing. Times had changed.

  Cat stood up and walked to the intercom. Finn was down in the lab. He was always down in the lab, when he wasn’t out in the woods.

  “Yes?” he said, his voice caught in the intercom’s static.

  “You need to come upstairs,” Cat said. “For the will.”

  There was a long pause. “I’m on my way.”

  Cat slid back into her seat. She smoked, and the lawyer tapped against his reading tablet. The dining room doors slid open, and Finn stepped inside. He sat down, a chair between him and Cat. To Cat, it felt like a gap of miles.

  The lawyer stared at Finn for a moment, eyes wide. Finn gazed back levelly. Then the lawyer blinked, and said, “Very good. Let’s get started.”

  Cat lit another cigarette.

  “I’m just going to read this out loud,” he said. “Dr. Novak didn’t go in for anything elaborate, no videos or what have you. Made it simple.” He cleared his throat, leaned back in his chair.

  “To my daughter,” he began, and the sound of his voice—thin, high-pitched, not at all like her father’s—jarred Cat out of her haze. She closed her eyes. “To my daughter, Caterina Novak, formerly Caterina Feversham, I bequeath all my possessions, including the house at 487 FM 5001 in Angelina County and the laboratory contained therein. In addition I grant her the total sum of my earnings at the time of my death.” She could almost hear her father’s voice, overlaid with the lawyer’s. “To my grandson, Daniel Novak, I bequeath a trust fund to be held by his mother until he reaches the age of eighteen, at which point all funds will default to his person.”

  The lawyer paused. Cat had expected all of this. She looked at Finn out of the corner of her eye. He stared straight ahead.

  “To Finn Novak, formerly Finn Condon, despite his status as an android, I bequeath three billion dollars, the total sum of money paid to me by Selene Technologies, Limited, upon his purchase for the Lunar Exploration and Settlement Project, and any interest accrued.”

  All the breath left Cat’s body. She swiveled her head toward Finn. His eyes looked dark and liquidy. He looked as though he might start crying.

  Cat reached out, across the chasm of that one chair, and put her hand on his upper arm. He glanced over at her, and then froze in place. For a moment it was as though they were alone.

  “Do you have any questions?” The lawyer shifted awkwardly in his seat.

  “No,” said Cat, still looking at Finn. Finn shook his head, still looking at Cat.

  “Very well. I’ll just need your electronic signatures here.” He slid the tablet across the table. Cat dropped her cigarette in the ashtray, pressed her thumb against the screen. The lawyer pushed the tablet toward Finn.

  “Does he have . . . fingerprints?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Finn. He did the same as Cat and then shoved the tablet back at the lawyer. He stood up and stalked out of the dining room. The lawyer watched him.

  “Is he all right? He does . . . understand, right?”

  “He’s fine,” said Cat. “Thank you for coming out here. I know we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Of course.” The lawyer nodded. “I’ll be contacting you shortly with more details about the financial transfers and so forth.”

  He gathered up his things, and Cat led him out the front door. The tires of his car spun out against the gravel driveway, and he drove too fast on the road into town. Cat took a deep breath. She leaned against the porch banister.

  Her father’s death was final now that all his things no longer belonged to him. A sudden surge of sadness welled up in the space behind Cat’s eyes, but she didn’t cry. Maybe she had cried too much. Instead, she went inside, into the kitchen, and pulled out one of the pies someone had brought over for the funeral. She sat down at the aluminum table and ate it straight out of the tin. It was key lime, drenched in green, sour syrup.

  The screen door slammed. Finn appeared in the kitchen, haloed by the sunlight streaming in through the windows.

  “Hey,” said Cat. “Do you want to talk about it? The will?”

  “No.” But he came and sat down across the table from her. Cat took another bite of pie. He was watching her eat. He’d watched her eat before, but never with this intensity.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I tasted that one,” he said. “It was rich.”

  “You taste things now.” Not a question.

  Finn looked away, toward the old refrigerator rattling and moaning next to the kitchen counter. “I always could. I just had no interest in it. Now . . . things are different.” He paused. Cat took another bite of pie, slowly dragging the fork out of her mouth.

  “However, I can still only have a taste. If I ate too much, the results would be disastrous.” He shrugged. Cat scooped up some of the syrup from the bottom of the tin. The sadness was still there, weighing her down like water.

  “I missed you,” she said. “I missed you so much—” But Finn held up his hand.

  “Please. Don’t.”

  “Why not?” Cat threw the fork into the half-eaten pie and pushed it away. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You won’t tell me anything. You won’t talk to me.”

  “Your father just died.”

  “Is that what this is about, really?” She pulled at her hair. “Finn, he’s been dying for years. Which you knew about, by the way. And didn’t feel the need to tell me. So don’t act like this was unexpected.”

  Finn’s mouth pressed itself into a thin line. “It was still unexpected.”

  “Because you ran away. If you had been here, if you’d stayed behind—”

  “I couldn’t stay,” Finn snapped. “Not after what happened. He told you what he did, I’m assuming? You haven’t seemed particularly fazed by my new manner since I got back.”

  Cat didn’t say anything. Finn was angry, and that had heretofore been unimaginable to her.

  “Well?”

  “He allowed you to feel,” Cat said weakly.

  “He shut me off,” said Finn. “He removed programs from my system without my permission. A
nd when he turned me back on, I felt everything. Everything I ever experienced. The person who created me abandoned me. As you know. I was abandoned and then betrayed.”

  “Betrayed?” whispered Cat. “He was trying to help you—”

  “I wasn’t talking about him.” Finn’s eyes bored straight into her.

  Cat choked. Richard’s face flashed unbidden in her mind. She gasped and then she began to weep.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t—” She shook her head. “No. There’s no excuse for what I did. I’m sure you hate me. But I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t hate you.” He leaned away from the table. Cat wiped her hand across her eyes. Snot dripped from her nose. She waited for Finn to leave the room but he didn’t. She waited for him to speak but he didn’t say anything.

  “Do you know why Daddy did it?” she asked. “In the first place?”

  “Of course I do,” said Finn. “He told me afterward.”

  “It was a good reason, right?”

  “It was a stupid reason. What use do I have for love? I’m a fucking robot.”

  Cat was crying so hard she couldn’t respond.

  “I’m a robot that is supposed to be human. That’s why she made me in the first place. That was my purpose. My specialization. Not to assemble cars or rebuild civilization or even help run an outpost on the moon. Just to bestow meaningless affection upon her.” Finn spat out the words. “And that’s why I went away. To show her, to show your father, to show you—I’m just a machine. And I wanted to be owned like one.” He paused. When he spoke again, his voice vibrated. “I refuse to be something I’m not.”

  Cat looked up at him then, through the net of her tears. She wiped at her nose. “I love you,” she said, with a thrill of masochism.

  “I know.” But he seemed to falter.

  “I don’t care what you are,” said Cat. “I used to, even though I didn’t realize it. But I don’t care now.” She hesitated. “I saw the inside of you. It was beautiful.”

  “The inside of me?”

  Cat nodded. She pushed her chair away from the table and walked over to where he was sitting and knelt down beside him. She put her hand on his chest. All her tears had evaporated, condensed into steam in the warm kitchen air. He didn’t push her away.

  “I want to show you something,” Cat said.

  “You’re not opening me up,” he said. “I don’t care how beautiful you thought it was.”

  But she didn’t open him up. She touched him. She touched the left side of his neck, his sternum, his forehead. When she had seen the pattern at Dr. Condon’s house, she had memorized it immediately, without even realizing until now. “What are you doing?” Finn asked, watching her with suspicion.

  Cat didn’t answer. She grazed the back of her hand along his right cheekbone and pressed her palm against his left shoulder. Then she stood up and walked behind him and lifted his hair away from the back of his neck. She saw the switch, glinting in the lights. Finn jerked away.

  “I’m not turning you off,” Cat said. “Trust me, okay? For five seconds, will you just trust me?”

  A moment’s hesitation, and then Finn leaned back in the chair, falling into her touch. His hair was silky in her fingers, too soft for human hair. She used one hand to hold it out of the way and with the other she pressed the switch. She held her breath: but when she touched him he shook beneath her. The chair rattled against the kitchen tile. He grabbed at her hand tangled in his hair and held it tight. Tighter than was comfortable. The bones in her fingers pressed together, but she didn’t stop touching that place on the back of his neck.

  Finn cried out. Then he fell forward, his limbs twitching, his eyes flashing black and silver, and for a moment Cat stared at him in horror, afraid that it had been a trick, that she had done irrevocable damage. But no. It passed. His eyes faded to normal. He sank down against the table. He stared at Cat.

  The air hummed.

  He didn’t stop staring at her. She was burning up. Her skin flushed. Her clothes felt thin and transparent. He looked straight through her.

  He sat up, his movements shaky. Then he stood up and he took a hold of her hips and pulled him to her. They kissed. Cat was dizzy with the force of that kiss. He ran his hand up the line of her thigh, pushing her skirt up around her waist. She was already gasping. His touch was so sudden after so long without it that she could barely register the world around her: the familiar kitchen, the beams of pale sunlight. He hoisted her up; she wrapped her legs around his hips.

  There, in the kitchen, Cat screamed to the empty house. She had forgotten the swell of desire until now. Eight years, five months, and forty-four days: that was how long she had gone without him.

  * * * *

  Afterward, they lay together on the couch, letting the day’s sunny minutes drip by. For a long time they didn’t speak, just let the frenzied air settle over their bodies. Then Finn shifted, turning onto his side. He touched her very lightly on the side of her face.

  “You know I’ll be leaving soon,” he said. Cat closed her eyes.

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “You meet the requirements now. They have to let you go if you want.”

  Finn didn’t respond. The scent of him was everywhere. She listened to the mechanical whir of the gears inside his chest. When he finally spoke, she felt the whispery movement of his mouth against the side of her neck.

  “For so long,” he said. “I could only understand desire.”

  “What do you mean?” She would have twisted her face to look at him but when he spoke it felt as though he were kissing her.

  “Desire is simple,” he said. “Desire is something even a machine can understand.” There was a stillness in the air that mirrored the stillness of his body. “But when I desired you I began to love you. You were the first being I ever loved. I didn’t know it, of course. I had no idea what it meant, no idea what I was feeling. Love was never something I was supposed to experience. I don’t think I was supposed to know desire, either, but she never expected me to meet you.” He laughed against Cat’s skin. “Later, after your father . . . when he took out those restrictions, I was finally able to understand the complexities of love. Even if I didn’t want to. At first.”

  Cat stared at the ceiling and reminded herself to breathe. The sun filtered through the leaves of the trees outside the window, and the shadows flashing through the room reminded Cat of static and white noise. She realized she had known what he just told her all along.

  Cat rolled over so that she could kiss Finn, and she kissed him again and again, until it was time for her to go into town to pick Daniel up from school. Even then she didn’t want to disentangle her limbs from his. It was painful to stand up alone. She smiled down at Finn and he smiled at her and Cat let herself luxuriate for a few moments in the flickering shadows of the living room before she dragged herself out into the world, an action as harsh on her system as waking up from a dream.

  * * * *

  Later that evening, Cat cooked a dinner of grilled fish and macaroni salad, and she and Daniel ate it at the dining room table while Finn joined them, his hands folded in his lap, making conversation as they ate. Daniel didn’t seem to notice anything different between Cat and Finn: he just ate his food in huge gulping bites before jumping up from the table and announcing that he was going outside to play with his fireflies.

  “Put your dishes in the dishwasher,” Cat said automatically.

  “Mom!” But Daniel still carted his plate into the kitchen. Cat tilted her head to the side, listening to the clinking of silverware as it was thrown into the dishwasher. The screen door slammed. “He’s been playing with those fireflies every night since Dad—” Cat stopped. “He made them for him. They’re little robots.”

  “Yes, I found the schematics in the laboratory.”

  “He never made me stuff like that when I was a kid. I’m glad he did it for Daniel.” Cat took another bite of her fish, and then set her fork down.
She didn’t have much of an appetite. Her body was too wound up with love.

  “He would have,” said Finn. “Made you toys. He was always drawing up plans. But he got distracted. We were very busy.”

  “I know.” Cat carried her plate into the kitchen and dropped it in the sink. Finn followed her. Through the window Cat could see the electronic fireflies flashing in the darkness. Every now and then Daniel’s laughter trickled inside.

  For a moment Cat allowed herself to be content. Because her son was happy, and Finn was home, and they had all eaten dinner together.

  “I’m going to go outside.” She turned away from the window without rinsing off her dish. She opened the door and held it open for Finn, and then she stepped out onto the porch. She could barely make out Daniel’s shadow in the yard. The fireflies flitted and bobbed. Cat sat down on the porch steps, and Finn sat beside her. The balmy night air shimmered in the moonlight. Cat lit a cigarette.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” said Finn.

  Cat laughed, but she didn’t put her cigarette out. “I quit when I was pregnant.”

  “Yes, I assumed so.” He paused, tilted his head as he looked out over the yard. “I hoped so.”

  They sat in silence while Daniel chased his firefly bots. There were no real fireflies this time of year.

  “I wanted to thank you,” said Finn. “For the tapestry in my room. I presumed that you made it.”

  Cat didn’t move. She felt his presence beside her. When she finally turned her face to him, he was looking back at her with his silver eyes.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “It took me a long time.”

  “It’s very lovely.”

  Cat smiled. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. She remembered how she wove their hairs into the fibers. She remembered the way her fingers ached after working on it.