Our Lady of the Ice

  When she finished, Luciano helped her replace the shipping robots in their alcoves. Cabrera stood up, his bodyguards moving in beside him.

  “Diego,” Cabrera said. “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight, sir.”

  “Midnight!” Cabrera laughed. “Horatio took until three, four in the morning sometimes! I’m very impressed with you, Sofia.”

  Sofia smiled the way she’d been programmed to do whenever a human complimented her.

  They left the ship, stepping back out into the cold windy air of the docks. The Florencia was lit up in the distance, yellow and green lights staining the darkness. Cabrera stopped in the middle of the dock and turned to Sofia and stuck out his hand. She stared at it. He laughed.

  “I have a good feeling about this arrangement,” Cabrera said. “But you’re going to need to learn some of our ways. Isn’t that right, Sebastian?”

  Sebastian nodded.

  “Shake my hand, dear. I know you’ve seen it done before.”

  Sofia had not been programmed to shake hands, only to offer hers, for kisses or dances or other frivolities. But Cabrera was right; she had seen it done. And so she gripped his hand and shook.

  “I look forward to our future endeavors.” Cabrera tipped his hat. “I have an icebreaker leaving the mainland in half an hour. The best in my fleet. I’ll make sure those items you requested find their way on board.”

  “So soon?” Sofia asked, with forced levity.

  “Only the best for the best.” Cabrera grinned. “But it’ll take a bit of time. Two weeks, perhaps.”

  Sofia had waited forty years. She could wait two weeks.

  “I’ll be expecting them,” she said.

  Beside her, Luciano smiled.

  * * * *

  The train into the amusement park didn’t run this late, and so Sofia and Luciano walked through the city, side by side and unspeaking. Sofia did not know what Luciano thought of, but she imagined the turn-of-the-century supplies she had requested making their way aboard an icebreaker, and then that icebreaker sailing through the frozen seas to Antarctica.

  Cabrera had no idea what the parts did, she was certain of that. Why would he? They were almost seventy years out of date. Araceli, in her skillful human way, was only filling in the gaps of what had been left behind when the amusement park had closed. She was the best at that, and Sofia was lucky that Araceli, despite being human and a former park engineer, was sympathetic to their cause. Without her help, the reprogramming would be nearly impossible. And so Sofia allowed her to live in the amusement park.

  Still, Sofia was grateful that the particular items Araceli needed— a bundle of antique vacuum tubes, three clockwork micro-­engines, ticker tape, a blank programming key—were innocuous when viewed together. They meant nothing.

  She smiled to herself.

  Sofia and Luciano came to the amusement park gate, wrought iron and once painted white, patterns of Victorian fairies twisting through the metalwork. The road was inlaid with bright circles of glass, leading the way inside. Sofia rarely saw the gate from the city side, but she knew that it should be shut, that the original lock from the 1890s had been replaced with a new one, modern and electronic.

  But tonight, the gate hung open.

  “Oh no,” Luciano said, in the same tone of voice he had probably once used on sick children.

  Sofia didn’t say anything. All her systems felt as if they were shutting down. For a moment she stopped in the middle of the road and stared at the open gate. There was no wind here, and the gate was frozen into that position like in a photograph.

  A culling.

  Luciano rushed forward, and that was enough to jar Sofia back into motion. She followed behind him. Her systems sent warnings straight into her subconscious, and she wanted to hide, to slip away into the shadows. But she didn’t. She picked up speed until she was running, her hair loosening from her beehive and streaming out behind her. She was aware of Luciano somewhere ahead, his footsteps echoing against the cobblestone.

  “Sofia!”

  Araceli’s voice cut through the night air. Sofia stopped. She’d made it to the Sugar Garden. The garden had long ago overreached its boundaries, and flowering vines curled over the pathway, trampled beneath her feet.

  Araceli was sitting on the bench beneath the streetlamp, Inéz leaning up against her. Inéz had been like Luciano once, had tended to humans in the amusement park hotels. Now she looked worn- out, like a discarded doll. Part of her hair was missing.

  “Who was taken?” Sofia asked sharply.

  “Maintenance. One of the Scala models. Yellow-8.” Inéz closed her eyes. Just like a doll.

  “That’s it? Just one?” Sofia walked over to them. Luciano was already there, fussing over Araceli. As a human, she brought that out in him.

  “Inéz needs comforting more than me,” Araceli told him. “They weren’t going to drag me away.” Luciano nodded, looped around behind the bench. Sofia turned to Inéz.

  “What happened?”

  “They almost got me.” Inéz gave a weak smile as Luciano took her hand. “They stunned me. But Araceli distracted them.”

  “I just fired a flare.” Araceli rubbed her forehead. “I saw they were coming on the transmissions, so everyone hid before they arrived.”

  “There was a programming issue,” Inéz said apologetically. “That’s why they almost got me.”

  “One of the cullers tripped, the idiot. Started bleeding. You know how it is.”

  Sofia nodded. Inéz’s programming had condemned her to offer assistance. But it would not always. Soon. Soon, they would have the supplies. Soon, they would cut all that programming out. Sofia first, then the rest of them. Luciano, Inéz, those few broken-down androids she could repair only once she had her independence.

  “Their weapons are the same,” Inéz said. “Still weak.”

  “Well, they don’t capture many of us anymore, do they?” Sofia smiled. “I doubt that’s high on the list of priorities.”

  Luciano smiled back at her, but Araceli and Inéz did not.

  “The Scala model,” Sofia said. “We can get him back.”

  Silence. They all knew rescue was unlikely. But Sofia had been programmed to lie, once upon a time, to tell people what they wanted to hear.

  Araceli, Inéz, and Luciano sat pressed against each other on the bench, huddling together as if they needed one another’s touch. But Sofia had stripped that weakness out of herself long ago. She knew how touches could be toxic.

  She left them there without explaining herself, walking off to the center of the Sugar Garden, where she could have privacy.

  The cullings had started as soon as the amusement park had closed. Hope City needed robots to survive, and so Autômatos Teixeira had simply left them there when the company had gone bankrupt, the way it had abandoned the factories in Brazil. And while most of the amusement park robots were useless—­performers, or caretakers, or pleasure givers—their parts were not. Long ago, Sofia had taught the others how to hide, how to survive. She had built and installed blockers that made it impossible for anyone to scan for robots inside the park, hoping that would discourage the cullings.

  She could not say where she had learned all this herself. It certainly hadn’t been programmed into her. This was before Araceli arrived ten years ago, before the city fired Araceli from her job as a Hope City engineer for showing kindness and decency to robots and she sought refuge in the closed-down park, the one place, she said, she’d ever been happy. The knowledge had simply appeared in Sofia. A human would call it magic. Sofia was not a human.

  When Sofia arrived at the garden’s center, overflowing with flowers and thick green vines, a maintenance drone was waiting for her in a pool of yellow lamplight. It would have registered her entering the park, and now it came to her, awaiting instructions.

&
nbsp; The maintenance drones couldn’t speak in human voices, but Sofia didn’t need them to. She knelt beside the robot and pressed her palm against its sensor. She transferred an image of Yellow-8, boxy and long-limbed. And then she flooded the drone with instructions. Find Yellow-8. Bring him back. She knew how improbable her instructions were. But she needed to try.

  The maintenance drone responded. The drones had tried to retrieve Yellow-8, when they’d learned who had been taken. But it was too late.

  Too late.

  Sofia slid her hand off the sensor. She was empty.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, reverting back to her old ways, her facsimile of humanity. She stood up. The maintenance drone blinked at her for a moment longer, then zipped up into the air, disappearing into the night.

  Sofia was alone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MARIANELLA

  Marianella sat at her vanity, a lipstick in one hand. She didn’t move to apply it, only stared at her reflection. The last few days showed on her face: dark half-moons below her eyes, thin lines radiating out from the corners of her lips. She sighed and dropped the lipstick and leaned back on her stool. The party was to start in a little over an hour. Luciano had agreed again to play at being her butler, even though the circumstances weren’t so dire this time around. Still, with his help, she’d managed to set up everything for her guests. But she wasn’t ready.

  Everything had been too much this week. Losing her documents, learning that some man knew what she was. She’d seen the news of Pablo Sala’s death in the evening newspaper three days ago and the relief had been sweet and sudden and then swallowed up by guilt. It was a sin to celebrate the death of a human being like that. But he had known what she was, and if this stranger could know, then she had to assume there were others.

  And she was certain that if there were others, they would be tied to Ignacio Cabrera. Hector must have told him somehow, sent word along before his death that Marianella kept a painful truth locked away in the safe in the library. The thought made her sick to her stomach. But Hector was one of only three humans she had ever told her secret, and she trusted the other two more than she had trusted her late husband.

  At least she was certain that Ignacio didn’t know what her documents revealed, not if he’d sent someone to steal them. Because if he knew what she was, he wouldn’t need the proof of her documents. It was a secret strong enough that even a rumor started by a gangster could be enough to undo her.

  “Marianella?” Luciano appeared in the vanity’s mirror, holding a vase of flowers. “These were sitting in the kitchen. I presume you want them in the main room?”

  Marianella plastered on a cheerful smile, then twisted around in her stool. “Yes, that would be lovely, thank you.”

  But Luciano didn’t move away. He studied her for a moment, then said, “You don’t have to pretend with me. I know how upsetting this last week has been.”

  “I have to pretend with everyone else. I might as well start now.” Marianella turned back to her mirror and picked up her lipstick. Luciano moved out of sight of the reflection and walked silently to her side. He set the flowers down on the vanity. She glanced up at him, turned her gaze back to her reflection, applied her lipstick.

  He knelt beside her. “If you ever need help,” he said, “Sofia would be happy to send it.”

  “Sofia’s gone mad.”

  “No, she hasn’t.”

  Marianella dropped her lipstick and smoothed the flyways that had escaped from her curls. “Maybe you’ve gone mad right along with her. Inéz, too.”

  Luciano laughed. He was programmed to do that, she knew, if anyone said something that sounded like teasing.

  “I haven’t gone mad. I meant about Ignacio Cabrera. I’m sure Sofia would set aside your differences if you needed help.”

  “We don’t have differences. We just—” Marianella couldn’t put it into words, not in a way that Luciano would understand. She was neither human nor robot, but something in between, and she had chosen to live as a human, however dangerous and precarious that might be. It was easier. “Besides, what does Sofia know about Ignacio Cabrera? I’m shocked either of you have even heard of him.”

  She stood up with a swish of her skirt and checked the time—a little under an hour now.

  “I merely meant we could provide protection, if you needed it.” Luciano offered an arm and Marianella took it without thinking. They left the bedroom together. “At the very least, Sofia has maintenance drones at her disposal, and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind lending them to you.”

  “That’s not necessary.” They descended the stairs. All the lights were switched on, the chandelier sparkling. “I’ve already programmed mine to watch out for Ignacio’s men. Besides, I’m a tele­vision star now. I doubt he’s brave enough to try anything too drastic.” Marianella wasn’t entirely convinced of that herself, but she didn’t want to worry Luciano.

  “Well, if you suspect he knows of your nature—” Luciano detached from Marianella’s arm and gave a bow. “I’m sure we could be of service.”

  Luciano would do all sorts of things for her—help her with a party, pretend he’d been the one to hear the scratching the night of the break-in. He would always be of service. Sofia wouldn’t.

  “I doubt he knows,” Marianella said. “If he even suspected, he would simply inform the authorities of those suspicions and that would be enough to launch an investigation.” And he hadn’t done that. Not yet. “At any rate, I’ve moved the documents for the time being. They are the key, I think.”

  Luciano nodded as they walked into the main room, the largest in the house. One wall was a window that looked out over the wheat field, and Marianella kept the theremin and record player there. Right now the main room was frozen in time, poised and waiting for the party to start. Flowers dotted the furniture, bottles of liquor sat at the wet bar. The scene was incomplete without people.

  “Oh!” said Marianella. “You forgot the flowers upstairs.”

  “I never forget things,” Luciano said. “I merely thought you required my attention more than the vase. I’ll fetch it now.”

  Marianella laughed, even though she didn’t know if it was really funny. Luciano smiled at her and disappeared into the hallway. Marianella collapsed onto the sofa. She hadn’t thrown a party since Hector died, but she knew she couldn’t stay withdrawn from society for much longer. The winter gala season would be starting soon, and those galas, as silly and frivolous as they were on the surface, were the best ways to raise money for the agricultural domes. The wealthy were always more generous during the winter—a way of showing off. Already Alejo Ortiz had telephoned about the Midwinter Ball, which had been the most successful fund-raiser last year. He expected her to attend, and this little party was Marianella’s way of stepping back out into the world.

  And so she had Alejo to thank for her reemergence. Alejo and his project. That’s what he’d called it when he’d asked her to his office nearly two and a half years ago. Behind those closed doors he’d seduced her with the idea of Antarctican independence. “There’s a reason this place is called Hope City,” he’d said. “Sixty years ago we lived in one of the wonders of the world. Why shouldn’t it be a wonder again?”

  Her father had called her a wonder of the world, after the surgery that had changed her. He had been wrong. But she saw in Alejo’s idealism a chance to create a real wonder, a place where human beings could live in the frozen desert. A chance to prove her own humanity.

  At the time, Alejo had only wanted her money and her influence. He’d already told her about the funding he’d received from the Antarctican Freedom Fighters, despite the risk it posed to his career—a shocking bit of information that appalled Marianella and excited her as well, at least at the time. Back then she liked to think of herself as the respectable alternative to money from terror­ists, a group the chief of police called Hop
e City’s number one enemy.

  She and Alejo became lovers not long after, a dalliance designed to alleviate boredom more than anything else. Certainly Hector didn’t mind; he had his own affairs. Even after Hector was confined to his bed, she and Alejo kept it up, those clandestine meetings in shabby motel rooms on the edge of the dome, her wine-colored lipstick smeared on his shirt collar. More like a film than anything real.

  Afterward, Alejo would always talk about the ag domes. Engi­neers from the mainland he’d spoken to, permits he’d acquired through contacts at the city offices. They’d raised almost enough to build one dome at that point, although Alejo wanted to keep it a secret. “It’ll be great political theater, don’t you think? To announce that we’re building more domes, instead of just the first one.”

  Marianella could only agree.

  “I want to time it to coincide with the mayoral election.”

  There were problems, of course. The engineers insisted the work couldn’t be done in secret, that they didn’t have the capacity to program enough robots to do what Alejo wanted. Marianella remembered sitting on the floor in a white slip, smoking a cigarette while Alejo paced back and forth, his hair wild, ranting about the inefficiency of mainland engineers. “If only we had more engineers who’d grown up here,” he said. “They’d understand. They’d have a reason to find a way. Why should they waste all their intelligence on power for the mainland?”

  Marianella had hardly been listening. Her thoughts had been with the domes. With the robots Alejo needed.

  I could do that.

  Her nature made it easy to speak with robots. She could slip inside their programming and twist it around to suit her purposes. That was why full humans hated her nature so much—because ultimately, they feared her. She had all the abilities of a robot but remained completely unprogrammable.

  Up until that point robotics had been a hobby, one Hector had tolerated only because she programmed their private maintenance drones. But as Alejo paced back and forth, the muscles in his neck tightening with anxiety, she thought back to the day Alejo had first told her of the domes. This was an opportunity, a chance for her nature to be something other than a failed scientific experiment.