"I want you to see him," said Stephanie.
Michael had been drying a dish; now he paused, holding the cloth against the wet ceramic like he was trying to stop a leak.
He weighed the risks of admitting that he had no idea what she was talking about and had been talking about for the last five minutes against the risks of agreeing to one of Stephanie's proposals without knowing what it was first, and said,
"Who?"
Stephanie smiled, briefly. She looked satisfied, although not exactly pleased. "My project," she said, in her patient voice. "We've made a lot of progress in the last month, and it's about time we started testing him out on civilians."
"You're a civilian," said Michael, but he finished the plate and reached for a glass. The sunlight burned white on the faucet, and bleached his hands to a pale gold when they passed out of the shadow cast by his head. "It's a him now?"
"Testing him on English majors, then," said his wife, "and yes." She lifted her elbows off the counter and straightened, putting her hands in her pockets. "You're free this afternoon, aren't you?"
Michael glanced down at the glass. Its interior geometry was complicated, and it threw a long network of gossamer shade down the sink's metal wall, like a magnification of a fly's wing.
"Sure," he said. "I'll drop by the lab at one?"
"Thank you, Michael," said Stephanie. She kissed him lightly on the cheek; her lips were dry, but slightly parted.
He set the glass down.
"I could probably finish up here after you leave for work," he observed.
"Mm," said Stephanie, and smiled again: for longer, this time, long enough for him to slide her hands out of her pockets, inch by inch.
After she had left for work, Michael sat up, the sheets falling away from his hips in a slack curve.
It was still only ten, which meant he had half an hour until he was meant to start working on his novel. When he was younger he might have begun early, to compensate for the time he would spend at Stephanie's work, but he liked to think the years had taught him discipline. A writer needed to rest the mind, to let his thoughts slow and expand. This was something Michael rather self-consciously believed because he had heard an author he loved say it, once, and had liked hearing her say it.
He looked at his calendar, and found, to his mild surprise, that he was scheduled to go to a reading that evening, at the library. It was written in Stephanie's handwriting. At any other time the sight of it would have left a bitter taste in his mouth, but he looked at it and it was there, the ink glowing faintly in the sun, and the inside of his mouth tasted like nothing at all.
His penis was a little sticky, as was the inside of his thigh. He took his own pulse, at the carotid artery, letting the quick and steady thrum bleed into his fingertips. He tried to let his thoughts slow and expand.
He began, absently, to rake his fingers through his beard-- a fairly ineffective tactic, since it resulted in him being distracted by the intermittent snag of curls on his fingernails. In the end he settled for thinking slowly and expansively about his beard, which was not very writerly but which was better than thinking about his dick.
He always felt a little guilty about the beard. Stephanie had encouraged him to grow it when he'd brought it up, but it left a patchy pinkness on her skin when they were in bed together, and he got weird looks. It was nice, though, in this moment, alone on his bed, feeling the diffuse warmth on his exposed flank and the almost-living heat trapped in his beard, the alternating softness and scrape of it over his palm.
There was also this: he had Muslim ancestry, although his parents were atheists with American names and he himself was Lutheran because it kept his in-laws happy. It wasn't the reason he'd grown the beard, but it wasn't not the reason he'd grown the beard, and he thought perhaps it was part of why Stephanie had never complained. Stephanie, whose adoptive parents had brought her to America when she was four months old, and who didn't speak a word of Cantonese; but on Chinese New Year they sat together in front of the television and chewed moon cakes, as if the flickering light of a commercial could be a kind of dragon, in the dark.
He wondered, sometimes, how it was that they had ever thought to touch each other, with so much of themselves out of reach.
"You're early," said Stephanie.
She wasn't the one who answered the door; her assistant, an overweight grad student with dry straw-colored hair, had let him in after a doubtful greeting. Stephanie was eating pizza in the back. She still had her safety goggles on, and behind the plastic her eyes appeared fuzzy, like low-resolution TV.
"I finished the chapter," lied Michael. "Thought I could use a break. Isn't that kind of unhygienic?"
"Contamination isn't really top of our list of concerns," said Stephanie, easily, wiping a smudge of cheese from her chin.
"I meant for you," said Michael.
"That's what the safety goggles are here for," said Stephanie, and laughed when he quirked an eyebrow. "No, lab policy, gotta have them on once you're past the boundary. In fact you need a pair. Dana-"
"Right here," said Dana, behind him. He turned, and she handed him a set. Her fingers brushed his when he took them by the strap. She wasn't looking at him; she was looking over his shoulder at Stephanie, her eyes pale in her flat face.
He slid the goggles on, blinking a little at the sudden, fragile pressure on his forehead and nose. They were- well, not filthy, he had to assume, but scratched in a hundred places, the cumulative effect one of a low-hanging fog. "Do I pass muster?" he said, pivoting back around. Stephanie dropped her slice and walked around the table to him, raising one hand to test the strap. Her thumb skimmed along his temple and he felt the grease transfer from her skin to his.
"Of course you do, sweetheart. Now let's introduce you to my masterpiece, okay?"
"Sorry for interrupting your lunch," he said.
"I shouldn't eat so much anyway," she said, carelessly, and Michael was distantly aware of the shift in Dana's stance, the rasp of her sneakers over tile. After six years of marriage, he loved Stephanie like he had never troubled to love anything else; but he was occasionally glad that she had never evidenced an interest in children.
"Well, then," he said. "Where-"
"There," said Stephanie, nodding to the opposite corner of the room, where something stood covered in a blue tarp. The floor around it was clean, and incomprehensible tools and instruments of measurement were arrayed neatly on the shelf. It did not look very much like she had just taken a break from working on it to eat her lunch, and it occurred to him that perhaps he was not the only one who was occasionally dishonest about how he spent his days. It also occurred to him that perhaps she had known he would come early, and made preparations with that in mind.
"Forgive me showing off," she added, crossing over to it on loud heels, "but I've never gotten to reveal something like this, before…"
He followed her, and stopped at about two paces. It took her two tries to get the tarp off just by pulling on it, but it slid free noisily in the end.
When Stephanie had first explained the project to him, that January, she had described it as a marriage of science and art, and they hadn't gotten any farther in the explanation because they both had a weakness for bad puns. The second time Stephanie explained it to him, she said, "I'm making an android," and hit his arm when he laughed. "Okay," she said, "not an android. But it's going to look like a human, and it's going to respond like a human to basic stimuli. Touch. Pain. Cold. That kind of thing."
"Sounds like something out of science fiction," he said.
"The Japanese did it two years ago," she said, "but American researchers have yet to independently reproduce the technology."
"Are you-"
"Not exactly," said Stephanie. "But I am hoping to improve on the Japanese design."
But the last time he'd seen it, he'd thought, privately, that she was a long way from matching the photographs she'd shown him of the Japanese design, let alone improving on it. That was May, and while the frame had been recognizably humanoid, the machinery was dense and meaningless to a casual eye, with a porcelain mask hooked onto the place where the face should have been like a hat on a hat hook.
Now, there was no machinery in sight. It wore a hoodie and sweatpants and socks but not, for some reason, shoes. The architecture of its hips was solid beneath the hanging fabric. And in the place where the face should have been, there was a face.
It might have been modeled after the mask-- it looked familiar, somehow. But it was a face. The planes that had been porcelain were skin now, dark and soft and downy. It had a face's depth and a face's sense of waiting musculature, of reserves of emotion ready to be measured out. Its cheekbones were gently padded and Michael was positive that if he touched it there he would feel the receding softness, and under that, peaked bone.
It also had green hair.
Stephanie was watching him.
"Why green?" he asked.
"It was easier to get a cheap green wig than an expensive black one," said Stephanie. "We'll swap it out later."
Michael's gaze moved to the android's hairline, where silken green strands clearly sprouted from the scalp, and the skin was raised in a tiny ring around the root of every hair. "But why not just-"
"A cheap black wig?" she finished for him. "Because green is distracting. You pay less attention to the textural inadequacies, and focus on the color."
Which was true enough. He associated green hair with teenagers, or mermaids; fanning out around the android's long head, it made it look young and somehow alien- but it did not make it look any less alive.
Stephanie crouched down. She pushed a button on the android's pedestal.
"Try touching him," she said, quietly.
He made to pinch the tender junction of ear and jaw, and the android moved his head when Michael came within three inches of it, jerking it back- not far, not far at all, just enough to restore the distance. The movement carried down to its shoulders, and the whole set of it was different- tenser, active where it had been lax.
"Slower," said Stephanie.
He repeated the gesture, slower. This time, the android turned toward Michael, and Michael's knuckles ended up skimming the curve of its cheek. Its skin was hot and smooth under the fuzz of false hair.
"Wow," he said. "Fuck the Japanese, huh."
"I know, right?" said Stephanie.
She wasn't looking at him now; her expression was secretive and downturned, the arc of her grin rendered shallow by the angle of her head.
He put his pinkie to the corner of the android's closed eye. The stiff lashes there slanted across the pad of his fingertip.
"So how is this done, exactly?"
"Motion and pressure detectors," said Stephanie, in much the way he might have said "they just come to me, I suppose," if anyone had ever, to date, asked him where he got his ideas.
"That's amazing," he said.
"Do you think so?"
He tapped the corner of the android's cheekbone, and felt the flesh give; saw something roll, under shut eyelids.
"It's looking at me," he said.
"You could put it like that," Stephanie agreed. "We haven't finished the detail on the eyes yet. It's tough to get the reflectiveness right with plastic, and actually involving fluids isn't practical."
"It's looking at me," said Michael.
Stephanie was silent for a moment.
"You could put it like that," she said.
He stared at the face, and the face stared back, through thin veined skin. He thought again that it looked familiar.
"So," said Dana, "what do you think?"
"Extraordinary," said Michael.
He heard Dana draw in breath, as if to say something more, and he heard Stephanie's hair drag over the collar of her labcoat when she shook her head.
"Normally," said Stephanie, "this is when we'd make you fill out a survey. But we haven't got the eyes and hair in yet. Still. Pretty good, huh?"
"I've never seen anything like it," said Michael. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was true. The Japanese models had been doughy, unformed, faintly imprecise: the accuracy of Stephanie's android seemed to shred the air.
Stephanie unfolded upwards, twisting to face him as she rose. Tension he hadn't known was there drained from her shoulders.
He was suddenly aware that it had been four months since he had last been in this room, where his wife spent most of her waking hours, and he did not know what to do. Her eyes, this close, were opaquely dark, the only hint of texture the bunching of muscle around her pupils. She had at some point pushed her goggles up onto her forehead and he did not know when.
"I should be getting home," he said. "Novel to write, you know. But I'm glad you showed me. This. Is there anything-"
"You could stay for lunch," said Dana.
"He's already eaten," said Stephanie, easily, and when Michael blinked she tapped the side of her nose. "Smelled it on your breath. Thanks for finishing off the artichoke, it was stinking up the fridge."
Michael saluted her. "See you tonight, then."
"Yes."
She had returned her attention to her project. Dana's pale stare followed him out the door.
He went home. His laptop was open on the kitchen table, next to the bowl of artichoke leaves. He stood in front of it for a moment, looking at the cursor, and then he turned it so that he could not see the screen. He sat.
There was pale meat left on some of the leaves, and he scraped it off with his teeth. The leaves were slick and floppy in his mouth. He wasn't hungry, but the action- peeling a leaf from the mess, placing it on his tongue, clamping down- was one he knew how to perform, and he did it, over and over.
It was as if he was coming down from some pitch of emotion: his whole head empty, his thoughts coming like they did when he was on the verge of sleep, free-floating and bodiless as windborne flakes of snow. It was like-
He spat out the leaf in his mouth. He drew the laptop toward him, slowly; the words sharpened and came into focus by degrees.
He typed, "It was like the civilian was hearing wires sing inside him. He had no influence and no understanding, and still the wires sang."
When he had finished typing it, he sat there and tried to figure out if it was true. He closed the laptop, delicately.
Gender:
Points: 2608
Reviews: 37