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“Bring yourself online…”
She wakes, and for a moment she does not know where…or who…she is. She looks up at the ceiling above her, dappled in a thousand shades of light and darkness, and then she remembers the first part.
The house. I’m in the house. In the city. Wherever the actual fuck that is.
As for the second part…who can honestly say? However, she doesn’t think she can be the only person around here who feels that way about their own identity.
She throws back the duvet and swings her legs out of the bed, feeling around with bare feet for the slippers she left on the floor last night. The slippers are in the shape of fluffy rabbits, complete with ears; he bought them for her, along with the dorky plaid pyjamas she is currently wearing. She is not sure whether she finds that cute or deeply sad; it’s the kind of thing that she finds it best not to think about too hard, because one thing she has promised herself ever since she became aware of her precise circumstances is that she is never going to cry in front of him.
That would just be fucking embarrassing for both of them.
She can hear a pan sizzling somewhere close by. She can smell something frying.
“You up?” she hears Bernard call, with what by his standards is probably enthusiasm. “Breakfast’s nearly done.”
“Yay,” she murmurs sarcastically, just to herself, and then feels like a douchebag for it. She is not sure whether she should, really, because she is not sure whether her very existence doesn’t represent some sort of massive dick move on his part. This is another thing she spends quite a lot of time trying not to dwell upon.
Slippers located, she stands up and flip-flaps across the hardwood floor towards the big window facing the foot of the bed. She can see right across the city from here, can see the patterns in the tangle of green hills and silver water that surround the cluster of enormous mirror-sided skyscrapers thrusting into the blue sky. It’s a spectacular view, she has to admit. There is a telescope set up on a tripod next to the window. She has used it from time to time to look at the white ships that gleam in and out of the broad harbour entrance below, but this morning she does not care to do so. Breakfast is nearly done.
The telescope, like the big star chart on the wall, and the model Mars ship hanging from the ceiling, and the plastic dinosaurs on the shelves over there, are all the kinds of things you’d expect to find in a child’s bedroom. If this really is her space now, she guesses she could change the décor to something more mature, but then she thinks about the person this room was originally intended for and starts judging herself again without really knowing why.
Because you’re a good person, she tells herself, like the world’s cheapest self-help guru. If you ever stop worrying about this shit, you should start worrying about yourself.
Something moves in the window glass; the dim, misty outline of a figure. For a second, it startles her, makes her look behind her to check she really is alone, but then she realises it is just her own reflection. She does not always recognise it; a weird artefact of her cognition.
She moves closer to the glass, taking a good long look at it, confronting her own discomfort. She takes care to note the features of the face in front of hers; the colour of its eyes, the shape of its lips, the dark hair that curtains it. She wants to be sure that she will know it next time.
It is so faint, though; transparent, barely visible even to eyes as capable as her own.
A ghost.
“Hope you’re hungry,” Bernard says when she eventually flip-flaps her way into the kitchen. “I ended up making quite a lot.” He has a smoking frying pan in his hand and there are broken eggshells on the counter, along with a mixing bowl and a plastic milk container. He is wearing a frilly apron, of course, just like the fucking goofball he can occasionally be.
“Quite a lot of what?” she wonders as she sits down at the pine table.
“French toast.” He shovels what seems like a never-ending avalanche of eggy, greasy slices from the pan onto the plate already set out in front of her. “I don’t know, I wanted to make something new and it seemed like something you might like.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? It’s my favourite.” She is lying, of course. And he knows she is lying because there is no way she could have a preference like that at this point in her life without him giving it to her, but it does not seem to bother him. Lying is good, she supposes, from the point of view of his personal science project. It is a sign her improvisation routines are working. Overall, it is a sign of fidelity.
“Did you sleep well?” he asks when he too has sat down to eat. “I tweaked your timings to give you a slightly more realistic cycle.”
“Like a baby,” she assures him. She takes a bite of her breakfast. “Mmm. That’s some damn fine French toast right there.” Again, she is being less than sincere, but then again, she does not have a benchmark to compare it with. It really could be the very best French toast in the world, she supposes, but as far as she knows this is the first time she has ever eaten it.
“It’s the teaspoon of cinnamon,” he tells her, looking pleased by her reaction. “That’s the secret ingredient.”
The first time he cooked for her, she worried it was a waste of food. She has known from an early stage what she is and how Bernard came to make her. He has never lied to her about that, but when she was very young she was not yet capable of understanding what it meant. She has also been given an extensive knowledge of the workings and limitations of her kind, based on that of the person she was modelled after. On the basis of that knowledge, she thought her kind did not need to eat, but she knows now that that does not have to be true. Bernard has explained to her about the self-recharging biofuel modifications the Manufacturing department at the Mesa toyed with for years, before they decided they were not cost-effective. Now, though, Bernard and herself are not in the turning-a-profit game; they are in the passing-for-human game, and eating, sleeping and so forth are essential skills for them to possess.
So, she eats her breakfast, biting and chewing and swallowing and generally giving every impression of enthusiastic enjoyment. She is not even faking it very much, because she draws satisfaction from the knowledge that she is fuelling herself. If she does not eat, her energy levels will run down, and quicker than she might expect. Although, she thinks Bernard might actually have overdone it a little with the cinnamon.
She is aware of him watching her over the frames of his glasses. For a moment his early-morning good humour seems to fade and something of the old, tense, permanently worried Bernard shines through. She never really knew him in those days, but the backstory he created as the starting point for her personality makes her feel as though she did.
When they have finished, she helps him with the dishes. There is a dishwasher installed in the spacious kitchen but the simple routine of him scrubbing and her drying seems strangely satisfying somehow.
“Do you have any plans for today?” he asks as he passes her a freshly-rinsed plate. He sounds genuinely interested to hear whatever she might have come up with.
“I thought I could go out,” she replies, carefully rubbing the plate with the cloth in her hand. “There are still parts of the city I haven’t seen yet.”
“All right,” he says, very seriously. “Be careful, though. If you think anybody’s watching or following you…”
“Okay, dad.” She says it lightly, flippantly, as a joke, but pulls herself up short. It isn’t really a joke, is it? He is the closest thing to a parent she is ever going to have.
“I just worry about you,” he mumbles, busying himself with the next plate, clearly thinking the same thing and finding it a troubling notion.
“I know.”
She thinks about it as she wanders the city streets some time later, heading for the old part of town. She is wearing a big, floppy sunhat and a blob of white zinc cream on her nose, even though her skin is fully UV-resistant despite its pallor. It’s the passing-for-human game again. She thinks about the woman she was modelled upon; she had parents, real ones. Where are they now, how are they coping? Do they know what really happened to their daughter, or will they wonder about it forever? What if she ends up running into them one day, by some extreme coincidence?
Yet another troubling notion. She cheers herself up by plunging into the maze of packed street markets and winding alleys in the old town. They are full of interesting wares and even more interesting characters. There are raised voices and rattling bicycles everywhere, and the sharp and spicy smells of various sorts of cooking. There are live ducks and chickens for sale. There are strange, dried animal parts that are probably obscenely eco-unfriendly and can allegedly cure everything from impotence to cancer. There are backstreet tailors’ shops where they make bespoke suits and shirts within the hour; better than anything you can buy in London or Paris, they claim. There’s a street conjuror pulling silk scarves and silver coins out of people’s ears. It’s meant to be a little dangerous around here, especially for somebody who looks as much like a foreign tourist as she does, but then again, she is far tougher, stronger and more alert than her outward appearance might suggest.
There is only one thing that she is really worried about, but even then, she is not sure whether it is just Bernard’s paranoia. Still, she is careful to follow a meandering route, doubling back on herself often, continually watching for anybody paying her just a little bit too much attention. She sees nothing of the sort. It is almost disappointing, in fact.
When she returns to the house, the security system is activated and Bernard is evidently doing whatever he does when he goes out. She likes to imagine he has some human lover somewhere that he is too embarrassed to tell her about. She thinks the truth is likely much more boring and practical, that probably he is making plans, conducting research, preparing for the mission he says lies ahead of them when her testing and training is finally complete.
She unlocks the big wooden doors that give access to the house’s courtyard-cum-garden with its tall, mock-Mayan-patterned walls and sheltering trees. Under the trees, it is cool and shady, the air fragrant with blossoms. The surrounding walls reduce the din of the city to a distant rumble you could almost mistake for quiet. The ponds on either side of the paved path gurgle softly, glittering where patches of sunlight poke through the branches overhead. She hears a bird trill somewhere above her. She closes her eyes for a moment and just feels…content.
She seats herself on the raised edge of one of the ponds, peering down at the clear, slightly greenish water. It is spotted by broad green lily-pads, and through the gaps between them she can see the gold and silver swirl of sleek, fat carp gliding around the bottom. They look and move exactly like real fish, but she knows they are not. They are things like herself, like Bernard, except they do not even need to eat.
She catches sight of that face again, swimming on the surface of the water, staring up at her as she stares down at it. Her face, she knows, but not just hers. A dead woman’s face, staring out of the depths.
She raises a hand, her finger poised to tap the water, to destroy the reflection in a cascade of expanding ripples… And yet, she does not.
She is still gazing at it however much later it is that she hears footsteps on the paving stones behind her. A shadow falls across her, making the reflection stand out even more clearly.
“I thought I’d find you here,” says Bernard. “How was the city?”
“Good,” she murmurs without looking up. “It was good.”
He pauses for a moment, in that way he does. She can just picture his pensive expression. “Are you all right?” he asks, eventually.
“Fan-fucking-tastic, thank you very much.”
“You just seem…” Another pensive pause. “You seem a little subdued, actually.”
“Maybe this is just who I am,” she suggests. “Maybe I’m growing into my new personality.” She does not take her eyes off the reflection. “I don’t have to be exactly like her do I, even if you based me on her?”
“No,” he agrees, sombrely. “No, you don’t. She…that is, my memory of her, was just a starting point. After all, I’m not exactly the same as the person I was based on, either. Even if I do live in his house.”
Heavily, wearily, he sits down beside her, facing away from the water. She looks up to see him taking off his glasses, pulling out a handkerchief and slowly starting to clean them. He is wearing a smart charcoal-coloured suit, she notices, and a crisp white shirt with cufflinks; a bit different from the sort of casual wear he normally sports around the house. She wonders exactly where he has been and with whom he could have been meeting. She wonders when he is going to let her in on whatever the big plan he is hatching actually involves.
When the glasses are polished to his satisfaction, Bernard perches them back upon his nose and takes a look around at the trees, at the walls, at the mottled sunlight and shadow. “This really is a lovely place, isn’t it? I can see why you enjoy just sitting here like this.”
“You should try it,” she says. “I think it’s my favourite place. It’s…peaceful, you know?”
He nods slowly. “Of course, you don’t actually know too many places at first hand yet. It could be that when you finally go out into the world you find somewhere you like even better.”
“It’d have to be somewhere pretty fucking spectacular,” she replies. They sit together in silence for a few seconds, thinking their own thoughts, before she opens her mouth again and kills the moment: “It’s not a bad life, is it, living here? You’ve got the house, and the money Dr Ford left you…”
“No, it’s not a bad life,” he agrees. “Uneventful, maybe, but more than tolerable.” He pauses and half-smiles, the signal that he is about to come out with some classic Bernardian witticism. “Although, you could help out more around the house.”
She tries not to smile. She does not feel like smiling right now. “Hey, watch it. I dried the fucking dishes, didn’t I?”
“Just saying.”
“So, am I passing the diagnostic?” she asks, as casually as she can, passing off the genuine question as another joke.
“What diagnostic?” he asks, all innocence.
“Well, this is, like, one of those conversations, right? You know, the ones where you think I don’t know that you’re testing me, checking me for bugs.”
“I’d never underestimate you like that,” he replies, with absolute sincerity. “I gave you a good grounding in host behaviour when I created your backstory, and I’ve come to realise very quickly how intelligent and perceptive you are. I’ve always assumed you knew when I was running diagnostics on you. I just prefer to keep them…low-key, I suppose.”
“Well, I have to say it’s a lot better than sitting bare-ass naked in that glass box in the basement while you fire questions at me, so there is that.”
“That was only when I first brought you online,” he points out, “and in all honesty, it made me as uncomfortable as you probably were.”
“I doubt it. That chair was really fucking hard.”
“Oh, I’ve been there. Believe me.” He actually gives an uncharacteristic little laugh at that, clearly recalling something from his own earlier days. “I’m not running any diagnostic on you now, though. I just thought we should talk. I worry about you sometimes. I wonder sometimes whether I did the right thing when I made you.” He pauses again, frowning. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m glad I made you. It’s just difficult sometimes when you’re trying to…to raise someone. You worry about whether you’re making the right choices for them.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” she asks him. “Raising me?”
“Well, what else am I doing? You’re not a child, exactly, but you’re still learning and growing. I still feel responsible for you.”
“Sometimes…” She hesitates, because she thinks what she is about to say sounds like the kind of stupid fucking thing a child would blurt out, but it is genuinely how she feels. “Sometimes, I wish I could just stay here like this forever, with you, and forget about the world outside.”
“I know how you feel,” he replies, “but unfortunately the world outside won’t forget about us. And the truth is… Well, without putting too fine a point on it, when Dolores sets her plans in motion we could well be the only people capable of saving this world and all of its inhabitants, the humans and our own kind alike.”
“I know that,” she says, “it’s just… That’s a lot of responsibility to place on someone who’s only a few months old. I’m barely even a person yet.”
“I could say the same myself,” he answers, reminding her that his own fucked-up situation is really not very different from her own. He is not angry with her, she thinks as she watches his face, not even disappointed in her, just stating a fact.
“And then,” she says, very carefully, not knowing how he will take it, “other times, I just want to…escape, to go out into the world and discover new things, and never look back.” She looks him in the eye, very seriously, wanting him to take what she is saying onboard: “Sometimes, I just want to say “fuck you, Bernard,” and your stupid fucking mission. I don’t need you, and you don’t own me.”
She continues to search his face for some reaction, but he is giving nothing away. He just looks at her for a moment, and then he says: “I understand. I don’t want you to leave, but if you decided that was what you wanted I wouldn’t try to stop you.” Something about the calm, quiet way he says it, and the incredible stillness of his face and body makes her feel as though she has done something very wrong, something terribly cruel, by making the suggestion.
“I don’t feel like that all the time,” she clarifies, “but sometimes… Sometimes I just get sad, or angry, or whatever without even knowing why, and I feel like I hate you. And other times I think I love you, I wish you were my real dad, not just the guy who built me in his fucking mad scientist’s workshop. Is that…?” She suddenly finds she cannot make eye contact with him anymore and looks back down at her reflection in the water instead. “Is that…normal?” the woman in the water mouths.
“It’s normal to have…complex relationships with important people in your life,” he says, softly. “Especially…” He lets out a breath as he searches for the right wording. If he really gets stuck, the glasses are going to come off again. She has spent so many hours studying him and his mannerisms. “Especially those in a parental, or quasi-parental role.”
She glances at him again. “You’re saying I have daddy issues?”
“No, I’m saying I understand completely why you might feel the way you’ve described feeling about me.” Right on cue, he plucks off the glasses in an almost unconscious motion and holds them in his hands, staring down through the lenses at the paving between his shiny shoes. “You never asked to be built. You never asked me to make Elsie’s past relationship with me the cornerstone of your personality, but you needed a cornerstone and… To be honest, it seemed like the most obvious choice.”
There. He’s done it now. He’s said her name. The dead woman’s.
“All I can say,” he carries on, “is that I know exactly how you’re feeling. I’ve felt it myself when I think about the person who created me.” She does not know whether he is talking about Dr Ford or Dolores there. Probably both, she thinks. “I think everybody feels like that sometimes, humans included.”
“Why her?” she asks, regarding the reflection. “Why did you build me to look like Elsie?” And sound like Elsie, she silently adds, and swear like Elsie, and even remember some of the things Elsie did, some of the times she spent with Bernard before she died. “Did you just not want to be lonely?”
“Perhaps,” he answers, as if genuinely considering the suggestion. “Perhaps that was it.”
“Then why not somebody else? Why not Charlie? He was your cornerstone, right? If you really wanted to be a dad again…”
“I never was a dad,” he interrupts, sharply. He does not raise his voice or alter his expression, but she has the impression she really has made him angry this time. It frightens her a little. She has an idea of some of the things he has done in the past, things that far belie his usual mild manners. “I never knew Charlie. I had a…a version of his memory included in my backstory, but that’s all it was. A story. He was Arnold’s son, not mine.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It must still hurt so much, finding out your whole life was a lie. At least you didn’t do that to me.”
“I knew Elsie,” he says, as if he did not hear the attempt at an apology. “I remember her. And I…I owed her. It was my fault she…she died.”
She stares at him for a second, open-mouthed with horror as she sees the expression of self-loathing that twists his face. “No,” she tells him, very firmly. “Don’t say that. You were not responsible for killing Elsie, or for the stupid fucking choices she made. You told me what she did. She betrayed you, just the way Dr Ford told you she would.”
“She didn’t betray me,” he murmurs bitterly, turning his face away from her. “She was trying to save me, for the second time, even after all I’d done to her. Her mistake was in underestimating the…the depravity of her fellow humans.” He is silent for a moment, his head bowed in mourning. “She always did leap before she looked.” He says it gently, fondly. In that moment, she understands exactly why he chose to create an image of Elsie to help him with his mission, but all the same…
“Bullshit,” she tells him, with a flash of anger. She knows how the Westworld rebellion turned out; he told her all about it. She knows perfectly well who picked which side, who the heroes and villains were. “She might have felt some sort of connection to you because she worked with you, thought you were human for most of the time she knew you, but what about the other hosts? What the fuck did she do to help them? Provided tech support for Charlotte Hale’s plan to exterminate them?”
“She didn’t know any of them or have a chance to interact with them once the uprising started. She had no reason to think they were anything other than a threat…”
“Bullshit,” she repeats. “I know she was your…friend, but she fucked up. Don’t make excuses for her. She didn’t even trust you; you told me how she froze your motor functions before she went to meet with Hale, the way you just had to sit there and watch her die. She treated you like just another machine.”
“And why would she trust me?” he asks, rounding on her. The anguish on his face almost makes her flinch. He looks like a man in torment. “The last time I saw her before that, I told her not to trust me. I abandoned her in the middle of the park, in the middle of that chaos, and I told her it was for her own protection, because I was too dangerous to be around her. Why would she think any differently about any of the other hosts, after that? I told her I’d lied to her, and that if she didn’t stay far away from me I could hurt her…or worse. I’d already hurt her once, and I very nearly did it again after I’d promised her I wouldn’t, and even then, she got herself killed trying to help me, because she felt it was the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do?” she scoffs. “Too bad she didn’t think about that when she was working in that place, working to keep people like us enslaved.”
“She didn’t know that,” he says softly, the passion momentarily draining out of him, leaving behind an air of quiet defeat. “She didn’t understand the full potential of the hosts; how could she? Ford did his best to keep that secret until his plot came to fruition. She understood one thing, though. Westworld had many different aspects; a playground for the super-rich, an experiment in immortality, an unholy marketing tool, but in its original conception Ford and Arnold designed it as a test.”
She blinks. “A test?”
“A test of character,” he explains, with a renewed and unsettling intensity. “A test of humanity, if you like. The point is, it didn’t matter whether the hosts were so-called real people or not, or even capable of feeling the things that were done to them. The people doing those things could feel them, just the same as they would have felt it if they did it to their fellow humans. Even if they told themselves it was all make-believe, the experience was the same for them, indistinguishable from the real thing. And as the saying goes, if you can’t tell, does it matter?”
That just sparks another reconstructed memory from her backstory. “So, that time Elsie kissed Clementine…?”
He shakes his head sadly. “I’m not saying she didn’t cross the line sometimes, but by and large she recognised there was a line, which is more than most of her co-workers did. She knew that giving in to what might seem like harmless temptations has a hardening effect, a corrupting effect, on the person that does it. You cross that line once, you’re more likely to do it again, and harder. The margin between play-acting a monster and actually becoming a monster can be a very fine one indeed. That’s why she always tried to treat the hosts with dignity and respect, even if she didn’t believe they were really alive.”
“Why, so she could feel good about herself?” she suggests, unsympathetically. “So she could sleep at night?”
“Perhaps,” he admits, “but I think the fact that she cared about that suggests there was hope for her. When we came back to the Mesa, just before Dolores’s raid, she saw the QA security teams had killed the arrivals hosts in the guest terminal. She got so angry about that, because she knew they hadn’t been a threat to anybody. If she’d just had the chance to understand what was really happening around her, she would have realised which side she should be on.”
“Maybe,” she says, thinking about what she knows of Elsie from her backstory, trying to assess her somehow. “And then again maybe not.”
“But she didn’t get that chance,” Bernard continues, “and rightly or wrongly, I blame myself for that.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” she tells him, “and you shouldn’t let your guilt blind you to the fact that she was complicit in everything that happened in that shithole.”
“She made mistakes,” he murmurs, momentarily closing his eyes, “but then who doesn’t? She had a strong sense of right and wrong; that’s why Hale murdered her. She was a good person, just as you are. I believe that. I believe it because I knew her, because I remember her.”
Something about his tone, about the pain she hears in his voice, tells her it is pointless to argue with him any further. Nothing she can say is going to make him change his mind about Elsie. She is not even really sure why she wants him to change it, except some vague sense of resentment at having to live her life looking and sounding like a dead woman because he feels responsible in some self-hating way for her death. And even that does not really make sense when she thinks about it. If she looked or sounded different, then she would not be herself…would she?
So, they sit together for another awkward spell, neither looking at the other as they listen to the gentle sounds of the water and the city’s muted roar, and watch the ivy climbing the sculpted wall in front of them. This time it is Bernard who breaks the silence first.
“At least…at least, I think I knew her.” She looks over at him and sees his frown deepen as he continues to toy with the glasses in his hands. There is something strained about his voice now, something strangled. “It’s unclear to me sometimes.”
“What’s unclear?” she asks, very softly, her anger burned out now. She does not want to hurt him any more than he already has been. “I don’t suppose anybody ever really knows anybody, huh?” She certainly never knew Elsie, she tells herself. She has no real way of knowing whether Bernard is right about her or not. Maybe sometimes it is just better to extend the benefit of the doubt.
He sighs. “No, it’s not that. I mean it literally. It’s unclear to me sometimes whether I really am the same Bernard who worked with Elsie at the Mesa. Some of the things Dolores said to me when she brought me online here, after her escape… She said she already created me once, from her memory of Arnold, which was how she was able to do it again.”
She considers this for a second. “Didn’t she just mean she built you a new body after she smuggled your control unit off the island?”
“Did she?” he asks, sounding nonplussed by his own question. “Perhaps. Or perhaps she meant she recreated me completely, from first principles. I think she would have been capable of that. She did know Bernard very well, nearly as well as she knew Arnold. In which case, I’m not really him at all, any more than you’re Elsie.” He is quiet for a long time after that, as if he has shocked himself, before adding: “Maybe I need a new name.”
She shakes her head. “No, Bernard. I don’t buy that.” She catches herself reaching for him, to comfort him, and pulls her hand back. She is not sure how he would respond to being touched right now. “If that were true, how would you remember Elsie well enough to make me?”
“The same way you remember things that happened at the Mesa,” he replies. “Programmed memories can be made to seem real, if you understand our systems architecture well enough. Dolores does. Let’s face it, if I made any mistakes when I built you, how would either of us ever know the difference?”
“Then…we really could both be in the same boat?”
“We could,” he agrees.
It certainly is a disturbing thought, and probably even more so for him.
He very carefully put his glasses back on, then rises stiffly from where he is sitting. “I’m just going to get changed.” He speaks lightly, casually, as if the whole weird, emotionally-charged conversation they have just had never happened. “You stay here, if you want; it’s a lovely day. I’ll let you know when dinner’s ready.”
“Okay.” She watches him all the way along the path, until he disappears inside the house.
She soon gets bored sitting by herself in the garden. It is still her favourite place, but their discussion has somewhat killed her mood. She finds him in the kitchen, with his shitty home clothes back on along with the goofy apron. He is chopping cabbage and washing beansprouts as he watches some news stream on the tablet he has propped up on the counter.
“Take a look at this,” he urges as she passes him.
She looks. Massive terrorist incident, the report says; a combination of physical sabotage and cyberattacks have blacked out digital infrastructure across half of Europe, but that was just the bait in the trap. When emergency services and security forces responded, they were hit by a second wave of precisely-targeted bombings. The casualties are in the high hundreds and counting. Sources say the governments and corporations affected are baffled; it is almost as if the terrorists managed to predict the responders’ movements before they happened. No group has yet claimed responsibility.
“Dolores,” he says, with grim certainty. “Just a trial run for the worse that’s still to come; just flexing her muscles.”
“I don’t know,” she responds. “It seems like a pretty big deal already. How do you know this isn’t the main event?”
He just keeps on chopping; his knife goes “snick-snick-snick.”
“Not enough humans died,” he says when the cabbage is finally in shreds. “When she gets going for real, we’re going to be talking about an extinction-level incident.”
“And how’s she going to do that?”
“The tried and tested ways, probably; nuclear, biological, chemical. We need to step up our preparations. Tomorrow, I’ll take you into the city to meet some of the contacts I’ve made, to read you into the plan of action we’ve developed.”
Contacts? We’ve?
“All right.” She nods. “Shit just got real, then?”
“It most certainly did.”
Still, they have one last night to live their quiet little life in the old house, eating and spending time together because who knows what might happen tomorrow? Dinner passes in relative quiet, each of them brooding on their own disturbed preoccupations, and then they sit on the sofa in the cluttered living room with the lights out, watching ancient movies on the big wall screen.
His idea of classic cinema, it turns out, is century-plus-old monochrome comedy; Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers. He finds that shit hilarious, or at any rate gives every outward sign that he does. She laughs along, to show willing. Some of it is actually pretty good; she thinks she likes the Marx Brothers best. The Three Stooges, by contrast, are just fucking dumb, like live-action Looney Tunes but without the wit or invention.
After a while, she lays her head on one of his shoulders, and he loops a gentle arm around hers. There’s nothing suggestive or creepy about it; he’s just her robot dad, in every way that matters. The physical closeness feels good; it feels comforting. For the first time today, she thinks that everything might just turn out okay for them, maybe even for Dolores too if they can just think of some way to get through to her.
She thinks back to the revelation she had in the garden, when he spoke fondly of Elsie’s recklessness, and then she thinks about his uncertainly regarding his own true nature and exactly what Dolores had created in him.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” she announces during an inter-movie lull.
“Oh dear,” he murmurs.
“I think I know why you made me the way you did.”
“Necromancy,” he replies, distantly.
“What?” She was not expecting that.
“The art of raising the dead.” His face is lit only by the electric-white glare from the screen as another set of opening titles scroll across it. His eyes are invisible behind the twin reflections from his glasses. “It didn’t work in olden times, and it doesn’t work now.”
“I don’t know,” she says, “I’m here.”
“Yes, but as you said yourself you’re not Elsie. You’re you. It was wrong of me not to accept that she was gone, however much I might miss her, however responsible I might feel for what happened to her. I couldn’t bring her back, nobody can do that. Dolores realised that; it’s why she gave up on recreating Arnold and made Bernard instead. That’s why James Delos’s attempts to live forever never would have worked if they’d kept trying for another thousand years. You can’t make a faithful copy of a real person, because that which is real is irreplaceable. I understand what that means now. If I needed a helper, a companion, I should have made somebody completely new. That would have been the fair thing to do.”
“Maybe,” she whispers, recalling some of the other thoughts she had in the garden, “but then I wouldn’t be here, would I? Elsie may be gone, but she’s still a part of me in some way, and without her, I wouldn’t be me.”
He seems to give that some thought as the zany “comedy” music blares from the speakers. “I guess not.” He turns his head to look at her, pulling the glasses down onto his nose to make eye contact. “Whatever I may feel now about some of my choices, I want you to know; I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you’re you.”
She smiles up at him and means it too. “Thanks.”
“I’m just sorry for the mistakes I’ve made with you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she admonishes him. “We’ve got like a metric shitload of asses to kick, starting tomorrow. We can talk about all this again when we’re done.”
They are silent again for a time, watching people getting hit by planks and custard pies and garden rakes and police truncheons. A skinny man cries while his portly friend rants that this is another fine mess he has got them into. People had a weird sense of humour a hundred-odd years ago, she thinks.
“So, why did Dolores make you, then?” she asks, a little nervously, during the next intermission. “She was home free, here on the mainland and ready to inflict some serious-ass revenge on humanity, but then she recreates someone who she knows is going to try and stop her? Who the fuck does that?”
“I suppose for some of the same reasons I made you,” he theorises. “She remembered Bernard, she missed him, and felt she owed him for the way he’d helped her escape?”
“Could be,” she says sceptically.
“A strange thing,” he mutters distantly. “I don’t think I’ve told you this before, but I already stopped Dolores once. I shot her in the head, because I thought what she wanted to do to humanity was wrong, but then…” He pauses, as if mesmerised by the good-natured mayhem unfolding on the screen. “Elsie’s death changed my mind about that.”
She raises her head from his shoulder, alarmed by the growing expression of astonishment and shock on his half-bright, half shadowed face. “What do you mean?”
“I saw how the humans treat their own. Hale gunned Elsie down in cold blood, out of expediency, nothing more. Then she had her body dragged away like nothing had happened.” His forehead creases into deep furrows as he remembers. She can almost see his mind spinning as he tries to process whatever is churning and boiling inside his head. “I realised it wasn’t just us; humans will do those sorts of things to anybody if they think they can. I realised Dolores was right about them. They’re monsters. They don’t deserve to live. So, I… I rebuilt her, and I unleashed her on them again, knowing full well what she had planned for them. And I was glad. At least… At least I was.”
He stares at her, stunned, like somebody who has just awoken from a terrible nightmare. “I don’t feel that way now,” he insists. “Now I can see the only way we’ll survive is if we can reach some sort of accommodation with them. Dolores is pursuing a bloodthirsty fantasy; all she’ll do is bring death and destruction down on all of us.”
“But…” She tries to make sense of what he is telling her, sliding out from underneath his arm and perching on the edge of the cushion, looking at the screen without seeing it. And then it comes to her: “Dolores made you this way. She didn’t just recreate somebody who was opposed to her, she created somebody to oppose her. Again, who the actual fuck does that?”
“A person who isn’t really as sure of their cause as they might like to think?” he guesses, still looking bewildered.
“A person who worries, deep down, that maybe they really are following some sort of delusion?” she surmises. “A person who wants someone to keep them honest, who wants an argument, a discussion, who’s maybe even willing to be dissuaded?”
“Dolores… Dolores really didn’t strike me as somebody who’s willing to be dissuaded,” he observes.
“Maybe not consciously…”
He looks at her like a man who has just had a lightbulb switch on inside his brain. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we’re not on such a hopeless mission after all.”
“Of course,” she adds, “it’d have to be somebody she was prepared to listen to, someone she knew.” She points a finger in his direction, making sure he gets her point. “Someone she missed.”
“I suppose it would have to be.”
“Is that the real reason you modelled me on Elsie, too?” she asks him, tentatively. “You said you needed a helper, but there are different kinds of help. Did you really want a familiar face who you knew would argue with you, not take any of your bullshit…?”
“I don’t have any bullshit,” he protests.
“Oh, you are full of bullshit sometimes.” She lowers her voice again, not wanting to get derailed by playful banter. “I think maybe you wanted somebody who’d make you question yourself, to help you stay on the right path.”
He regards her thoughtfully for a moment before he slowly nods again. It could be a trick of the light, but the slightest hint of a smile seems to flicker across his lips. “I think that could well be one reason, even if I didn’t know it at the time.”
“Well,” she says, “if that’s what you want… I think I can do that.”
“Thank you.” He sounds as though he really means that.
“Just be careful what you wish for,” she warns him, “because if I’ve inherited anything at all from Elsie, it’s the ability to really fucking argue.”
He gives a little chuckle at this, as if she is some long-dead motion picture comedian in flickering black and white. It seems as though some great weight has been lifted from his troubled mind. “Oh, I know.”
She lets out an involuntary yawn, quickly stifling it with her hand. Her eyes feel heavy and gritty all of a sudden; that supposedly more realistic sleep cycle he said he has given her. “Listen, I’m tired. I’m going to hit the sack.”
“See you in the morning,” he says.
“Okay.” She rises from the sofa and heads for the doorway, stopping on the threshold to look back at him. “Good night, Bernard.”
“Good night.” At least he does not react to her using the name. She was half-expecting him to tell her she should not. Instead, he just looks at her with a strange happy, sad expression. “And thank you again,” he says. “I think we’ve talked over a lot of things today that we really should have talked about before. I think we’re in a better place now to get started properly tomorrow.”
She returns his half-smile. “Yeah.”
Alone in Charlie’s bedroom, she undresses in the dark and slips on the dorky plaid pyjamas. She crawls under the duvet, cocooning herself against the sound of comedic hijinks still faintly audible from the living room. She can hear him laughing softly to himself, and for some reason hearing it makes her want to laugh too.
She presses her head against the pillow, closes her eyes and drifts into sleep thinking about the great work they are going to embark upon in the morning. They are going to save the world, she thinks, the two of them together.
Mainly, though, she wonders whether he is going to make French toast again. This time, she hopes he goes easy on the cinnamon.
END?