“That’s a bad word, Mom,” Abigail said. “I’m gonna debit your account.”
Brigid sighed. She forced a smile. “You’re right, honey. I’m sorry. Let’s go say hi to your dad.”
At the door, Kevin was a round guy with thinning hair and very flashy-looking augmented lenses—the kind usually marketed at much younger humans. He stood on the steps with one arm around a Japanese-model vN wearing an elaborate Restoration costume complete with velvet jacket and perfect black corkscrew curls. They both stepped back a little when Javier greeted them at the door.
“You must be Javier,” Kevin said, extending his hand and smiling a dentist smile. “Abigail’s told me lots about you.”
“You did?” Brigid frowned at her daughter.
“Yeah.” Abigail’s expression clouded. “Was it supposed to be a surprise?”
Brigid’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “Of course not.”
The thing about the failsafe was that it made sure his perceptual systems caught every moment of hesitation in voices or faces or movements. Sometimes humans could defeat it, if they believed their own bullshit. But outright lies, especially about the things that hurt—he had reefs of graphene coral devoted to filtering those. Brigid was lying. She had meant for this moment to be a surprise. He could simulate it, now: she would open the door and he would be there and he would make her look good because he looked good, he was way prettier by human standards than she or her ex had any hope of ever being, and for some reason that mattered. Not that he couldn’t understand; his own systems were regularly hijacked by his perceptions. He responded to pain; they responded to proportion. He couldn’t actually hurt the human man standing in front of him—not with his fists. But his flat stomach and his thick hair and his clear, near-poreless skin: they were doing the job just fine. Javier saw that, now, in the way Kevin kept sizing him up, even when his own daughter danced into his arms. His jetlagged eyes barely spared a second for her. They remained trained on Javier. Beside him, Brigid stood a little taller.
God, Brigid was such a bitch.
“I like your dress, Momo,” Abigail said.
This shook Kevin out of his mate-competition trance. “Well that’s good news, baby, ’cause we bought a version in your size, too!”
“That’s cute,” Brigid said. “Now you can both play dress-up.”
Kevin shot her a look that was pure hate. Javier was glad suddenly that he’d never asked about why the two of them had split. He didn’t want to know. It was clearly too deep and organic and weird for him to understand, much less deal with.
“Well, it was nice meeting you,” he said. “I’m sure you’re pretty tired after the flight. You probably want to get home and go to sleep, right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Momo said. Thank Christ for other robots; they knew how to take a cue.
Kevin pinked considerably. “Uh, right.” He reached down, picked up Abigail’s bag, and nodded at them. “Call you later, Brigid.”
“Sure.”
Abigail waved at Javier. She blew him a kiss. He blew one back as the door closed.
“Well, thank goodness that’s over.” Brigid sagged against the door, her palms flat against its surface, her face lit with a new glow. “We have the house to ourselves.”
She was so pathetically obvious. He’d met high-schoolers with more grace. He folded his arms. “Where’s my son?”
Brigid frowned. “I don’t know, but I’m sure he’s fine. You’ve been training him, haven’t you? He has all your skills.” Her fingers played with his shiny new belt buckle, the one she had bought for him especially. “Well, most of them. I’m sure there are some things he’ll just have to learn on his own.”
She knew. She knew exactly where his son was. And when her eyes rose, she knew that he knew. And she smiled.
Javier did not feel fear in any organic way. The math reflected a certain organic sensibility, perhaps, the way his simulation and prediction engines suddenly spun to life, their fractal computations igniting and processing as he calculated what could go wrong and when and how and with whom. How long had it been since he’d last seen Junior? How much did Junior know? Was his English good enough? Were his jumps strong enough? Did he understand the failsafe completely? These were the questions Javier had, instead of a cold sweat. If he were a different kind of man, a man like Kevin or any of the other human men he’d met and enjoyed in his time, he might have felt a desire to grab Brigid or hit her the way she’d hit him earlier, when she thought he was endangering her offspring in some vague, indirect way. They had subroutines for that. They had their own failsafes, the infamous triple-F cascades of adrenaline that gave them bursts of energy for dealing with problems like the one facing him now. They were built to protect their own, and he was not.
So he shrugged and said: “You’re right. There are some things you just can’t teach.”
They went to the bedroom. And he was so good, he’d learned so much in his short years, that Brigid rewarded his technique with knowledge. She told him about taking Junior to the grocery store with her. She told him about the man who had followed them into the parking lot. She told him how, when she had asked Junior what he thought, he had given Javier’s exact same shrug.
“He said you’d be fine with it,” she said. “He said your dad did something similar. He said it made you stronger. More independent.”
Javier shut his eyes. “Independent. Sure.”
“He looked so much like you as he said it.” Brigid was already half asleep. “I wonder what I’ll pass down to my daughter, sometimes. Maybe she’ll fall in love with a robot, just like her mommy and daddy.”
“Maybe,” Javier said. “Maybe her whole generation will. Maybe they won’t even bother reproducing.”
“Maybe we’ll go extinct,” Brigid said. “But then who would you have left to love?”
Our Candidate
ROBERT REED
Robert Reed (www.robertreedwriter.com) lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, with his wife and daughter, and is a Nebraska science fiction renaissance of one. He is perhaps the Poul Anderson of his generation. He is certainly the most prolific SF writer of high-quality short fiction writing today. He has had stories appear in at least one of the annual Year’s Best anthologies in every year since 1992. He is perhaps most famous for his Marrow universe, and the novels and stories that take place in that huge, ancient spacefaring environment. A new Marrow book, Eater of Bone, collecting four novellas, is out this year. His story collections, The Dragons of Springplace (1999) and The Cukoo’s Boys (2005), skim only some of the cream from his body of work. He is overdue for another substantial collection. He had another excellent year in a long line of them in 2011, and could easily have had three or four stories in this volume.
“Our Candidate” was published at Tor.com, and this is perhaps its first time in print. It is a story about how the illusion of political participation and democracy can pave the way to fascism. We offer it for what it is worth in an election year during hard times in the U.S.
Their first candidate was a youngish fellow with a list of minor achievements and small qualifications, plus a handsome wife willing to attend some portion of the rallies and fundraising events. He was the brave soldier who stepped forward when the state’s less-popular political party couldn’t find anybody who might win. The conservative opponent was unbeatable. Even agnostic voters considered the current governor as being Chosen. Once the invisible lieutenant governor, he stepped into the office when his predecessor’s Blackhawk went down in a freak hailstorm. Proper words and a few strategic tears at the funeral cemented the man’s rule over the sprawling state, and the new chief executive had served twenty-two months without scandal, scrupulously accomplishing nothing that tested his base supporters while avoiding becoming the enemy of those inclined to stand against him.