“The next time you touch me,” Arturo began, then stopped. The next time the robot touched him, he would come out the worse for wear, same as last time. Same as the sun rose and set. It was stronger, faster and smarter than him. Lots.
He climbed to his feet and refused Natalie’s arm, making his way back to the sofa in the living room.
“What do you want to say to me, Natalie?”
She sat down. There were tears glistening in her eyes. “Oh God, Arturo, what can I say? Sorry, of course. Sorry I left you and our daughter. I have reasons for what I did, but nothing excuses it. I won’t ask for your forgiveness. But will you hear me out if I explain why I did what I did?”
“I don’t have a choice,” he said. “That’s clear.”
Ada insinuated herself onto the sofa and under his arm. Her bony shoulder felt better than anything in the world. He held her to him.
“If I could think of a way to give you a choice in this, I would,” she said. “Have you ever wondered why UNATS hasn’t lost the war? Eurasian robots could fight the war on every front without respite. They’d win every battle. You’ve seen Benny and Lenny in action. They’re not considered particularly powerful by Eurasian standards.
“If we wanted to win the war, we could just kill every soldier you sent up against us so quickly that he wouldn’t even know he was in danger until he was gasping out his last breath. We could selectively kill officers, or right-handed fighters, or snipers, or soldiers whose names started with the letter ‘G.’ UNATS soldiers are like cavemen before us. They fight with their hands tied behind their backs by the three laws.
“So why aren’t we winning the war?”
“Because you’re a corrupt dictatorship, that’s why,” he said. “Your soldiers are demoralized. Your robots are insane.”
“You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt? Arturo, what happened to you? You weren’t always this susceptible to the Big Lie.”
“And you didn’t use to be the kind of woman who abandoned her family,” he said.
“The reason we’re not winning the war is that we don’t want to hurt people, but we do want to destroy your awful, stupid state. So we fight to destroy as much of your materiel as possible with as few casualties as possible.
“You live in a failed state, Arturo. In every field, you lag Eurasia and CAFTA: medicine, art, literature, physics; All of them are subsets of computational science and your computational science is more superstition than science. I should know. In Eurasia, I have collaborators, some of whom are human, some of whom are positronic, and some of whom are a little of both—”
He jolted involuntarily, as a phobia he hadn’t known he possessed reared up. A little of both? He pictured the back of a man’s skull with a spill of positronic circuitry bulging out of it like a tumor.
“Everyone at UNATS Robotics R&D knows this. We’ve known it forever: when I was here, I’d get called in to work on military intelligence forensics of captured Eurasian brains. I didn’t know it then, but the Eurasian robots are engineered to allow themselves to be captured a certain percentage of the time, just so that scientists like me can get an idea of how screwed up this country is. We’d pull these things apart and know that UNATS Robotics was the worst, most backwards research outfit in the world.
“But even with all that, I wouldn’t have left if I didn’t have to. I’d been called in to work on a positronic brain — an instance of the hive-intelligence that Benny and Lenny are part of, as a matter of fact — that had been brought back from the Outer Hebrides. We’d pulled it out of its body and plugged it into a basic life-support system, and my job was to find its vulnerabilities. Instead, I became its friend. It’s got a good sense of humor, and as my pregnancy got bigger and bigger, it talked to me about the way that children are raised in Eurasia, with every advantage, with human and positronic playmates, with the promise of going to the stars.
“And then I found out that Social Harmony had been spying on me. They had Eurasian-derived bugs, things that I’d never seen before, but the man from Social Harmony who came to me showed it to me and told me what would happen to me — to you, to our daughter — if I didn’t cooperate. They wanted me to be a part of a secret unit of Social Harmony researchers who build non-three-laws positronics for internal use by the state, anti-personnel robots used to put down uprisings and torture-robots for use in questioning dissidents.
“And that’s when I left. Without a word, I left my beautiful baby daughter and my wonderful husband, because I knew that once I was in the clutches of Social Harmony, it would only get worse, and I knew that if I stayed and refused, that they’d hurt you to get at me. I defected, and that’s why, and I know it’s just a reason, and not an excuse, but it’s all I’ve got, Artie.”
Benny — or Lenny? — glided silently to her side and put its hand on her shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze.
“Detective,” it said, “your wife is the most brilliant human scientist working in Eurasia today. Her work has revolutionized our society a dozen times over, and it’s saved countless lives in the war. My own intelligence has been improved time and again by her advances in positronics, and now there are a half-billion instances of me running in parallel, synching and integrating when the chance occurs. My massive parallelization has led to new understandings of human cognition as well, providing a boon to brain-damaged and developmentally disabled human beings, something I’m quite proud of. I love your wife, Detective, as do my half-billion siblings, as do the seven billion Eurasians who owe their quality of life to her.
“I almost didn’t let her come here, because of the danger she faced in returning to this barbaric land, but she convinced me that she could never be happy without her husband and daughter. I apologize if I hurt you earlier, and beg your forgiveness. Please consider what your wife has to say without prejudice, for her sake and for your own.”
Its featureless face was made incongruous by the warm tone in its voice, and the way it held out its imploring arms to him was eerily human.
Arturo stood up. He had tears running down his face, though he hadn’t cried when his wife had left him alone. He hadn’t cried since his father died, the year before he met Natalie riding her bike down the Lakeshore trail, and she stopped to help him fix his tire.
“Dad?” Ada said, squeezing his hand.
He snuffled back his snot and ground at the tears in his eyes.
“Arturo?” Natalie said.
He held Ada to him.
“Not this way,” he said.
“Not what way?” Natalie asked. She was crying too, now.
“Not by kidnapping us, not by dragging us away from our homes and lives. You’ve told me what you have to tell me, and I will think about it, but I won’t leave my home and my mother and my job and move to the other side of the world. I won’t. I will think about it. You can give me a way to get in touch with you and I’ll let you know what I decide. And Ada will come with me.”
“No!” Ada said. “I’m going with Mom.” She pulled away from him and ran to her mother.
“You don’t get a vote, daughter. And neither does she. She gave up her vote 12 years ago, and you’re too young to get one.”