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The house is the same as any other on the street: identical brick buildings two stories tall, every brick machine-squared and perfect.
Brick is the best construction material on newly settled worlds. Metal requires mining; wood requires centuries of terraforming; engineered plastics require complicated carbon chains, difficult to produce without existing infrastructure. Clay is abundant on the surface, easy to gather, easy to make, durable. They make everything out of it: brick sidewalks, clay pots and plates, ceramic bathtubs and door handles and the long slabs of glassy reddish dirt formed and baked under unimaginable heat into heavy countertops. A newly settled planet has the appearance of stepping back in time two thousand years, though the people who traveled the hundreds of light years of distance went only, inexorably, irretrievably forward.
There is a robot sitting on the front step of the brick house. It is not sentient, and it is crying.
It does not understand why it is crying, or why when it presses its hands to its face to contain and wipe away tears, the tears are not there. It is only a voice box with the calming mechanical timbre of standard-issue household robotics that is letting out dry sobs. There is no flush on its plasticine-white cheeks, except for a messy smear of the reddish dirt that surrounds the house in a bare patch, stretching out until the neighboring house rises from the ground.
It will be probably a hundred more years, at least, maybe more, before this dirt is anything but bare. Terraforming efforts can take a world with only geological features— rock faces and rolling oceans and erosion-formed sand dunes— and make it into a place teeming with life, but this process starts at the microscopic level after the major changes to the atmosphere and climate of the planet have been completed. Bacteria and other microorganisms must prepare the soil and seed it with the more complex strings of nutrients that are necessary to support larger plant life. A tree or flower planted in the sterile clay soil outside the house would struggle to thrive. This planet has only been settled for some twenty years, the first new generation born here growing into young children along with the first splashes of algae that bloom in water basins left out in the sun undisturbed.
The child who lives in this house is one who has grown up without the annoyance of summertime mosquitos, or the beauty of springtime flowers. The one flower in the house, an orchid growing in a vase on the table, is her father’s, and carefully tended by him alone.
It is three in the afternoon. The child, ten, is walking home from school. She carries neither backpack nor lunchbag, and her arms swing loosely at her sides as she hops from brick to brick in the avenue, picking which ones are safe to walk on through some inscrutable intuitive process. At the stoop, she stops and looks carefully at the robot, her hands on her hips.
“Are you broken again?” she asks.
The robot looks up at her. At the sight of the child, its false tears cease, and it smiles and asks, “Again?”
“Again,” the child says, aggrieved. “You just got fixed—” And she stops and counts out a segment of time on her fingers, wrinkling her forehead in consternation. She gives up on trying to remember the number, and says, “In October.”
“My service life began in October.”
The child opens her mouth, closes it, looks confused, then finally sits down on the stoop next to the machine. “You must be broken, since you’re supposed to make me a snack and tell me to do my homework as soon as I get home.” She looks around the yard, and notices that the reason that the robot’s slick white body is covered in dirt is that it has been digging in the clay around the house with its hands, leaving regularly spaced holes, and the dirt piled up neatly in front of them. “And you’re sitting here crying and making a mess.”
The robot starts to stand, its voice whirring melodically, all tears forgotten. “I apologize, Elly. Let’s get you a snack.”
But Elly drags on the robot’s arm, such that it can’t move, and it remains on the stoop, inhuman strength holding its upper body hovering off the ground, its legs supporting it perfectly. Elly can hear the clicking of the motors and the tensioning of the wire-muscles beneath the robot’s plasticine flesh as it adjusts to the shifting of Elly’s weight, careful not to let her fall and hurt herself.
The robot is older than Elly is. Like her father, its base materials came from Earth, though it was assembled in space before the colonists landed on the planet. Early on, it was controlled by the central computer of the colony, working as manual labor in a coordinated group of machines to assemble buildings and do the initial terraforming and infrastructure work that would support life, but after this work was completed and the labor could be offloaded to less complicated, single purpose machines, some of the robot stock was designated to households as domestic help, and disconnected from the main computer. On Earth, this would have been considered an expensive luxury, but as luxuries are lacking on newly terraformed worlds, this is provided as a way to make life less difficult— an incentive to make the long trek away from everything that people know on Earth.
The main frame of the robot is not as solid as it feels and appears; the main component that has allowed it to remain functional for so long in difficult conditions is the swarm of nanomachines within it, self-replicating when necessary and designed to fulfill singular tasks. They repair microscopic cracks inside the robot, and can reconfigure pieces of it as needed, if directed by the robot’s main system.
Elly has a vague memory, one that gives her nightmares, of once having seen the nanomachines crawl out of the eyes and ears and mouth of a woman, chew her down into a mercury-silver puddle on the floor, and then form back up into the robot she’s clinging to now, which looks nothing like a real person. The face is just a smooth white indication of a face, indents where lights shine through for eyes, a vague protrusion for the nose, a slight curl of a permanent frozen smile for a mouth. It’s hairless and naked and de-gendered.
Her father sometimes jokes, when she’s being too acrobatic and jumping around the house, “I suppose there’s no hope of me being as flexible as you are. You don’t have Earth bones like me, my girl. I got fixed in my ways years before I came here.”
To this, Elly says, “But didn’t Modo come from Earth, too? And it can change shape?”
To which her father says, “Maybe so.”
The robot, Modo, tries to gently set Elly back down on the stoop, but Elly refuses to uncurl her fingers from the robot’s arm, and so the robot acquiesces and sits back down.
“Are you broken?” Elly asks again.
“My self-check does not indicate that I am,” Modo says. “I was in the middle of a task when you came home. I will re-prioritize to make sure that getting you a snack will interrupt other tasks.”
“Is crying a task?”
“Yes,” Modo says, and though everything the robot says sounds confident in its delivery, this still surprises Elly.
“Really?” She draws out the word. “I don’t believe you.”
“Do you require an explanation?”
Elly wrinkles her nose. “Yeah.”
“My duties include performing a role in your family unit,” Modo says. “This performance of a role is like what you would see in a movie. The characters are laughing and crying, but the actors are performing the task of laughing and crying. They do this to provide joy to the audience. In this way, for me, crying is a task.”
This explanation fails to satisfy Elly. “And why were you crying?”
“Because my flowers have not bloomed.”
“The flower is inside, on the table,” Elly says. “It’s got a new bud. Dad says it’ll bloom in a few weeks.”
“No. I planted flowers outside. It’s spring, and they have not bloomed. My role requires that I be sad about this.”
“You didn’t plant any flowers out here,” Elly says. “They can’t grow out here. Did you put them in the community greenhouse?”
This causes Modo to tilt its head in concern. “I did. I planted them in September, and daffodils bloom in the spring.”
Elly stands up and puts her hands on her hips. “Modo, if you said your service life started in October, how could you have planted flowers in September?”
It takes a long moment for Modo to respond, searching its programming. Usually, its responses are snappy and immediate, so this long silence causes Elly to lean towards its face in concern. When its voice finally buzzes out of its forever-closed mouth, it says, “It is an instruction in my base programming.”
“Well,” Elly says, straightening, “I was right, and you are broken again. Your base programming is wrong.”
Modo has no response to this. “Do you want your snack?” It asks.
“Sure, I guess,” Elly says. And her concerns about the malfunctioning robot are forgotten as she lets it lead her inside. “I’ve been waiting all day to tell you what stupid Benji said to me.”
“Oh? What did he say?” The robot feigns interest.
The matter of the malfunction is forgotten by Elly, and Modo fills back in the holes in the dirt before Elly’s father returns home, so he suspects nothing. The subject does not arise again for several more weeks, until one Sunday when, Elly comes home from a walk with her friend in the public greenhouse. She walks with her white shirt stretched out in front of her, being used as a basket to hold hundreds of discarded flower petals, those that had fallen off the apple trees in the cavernous, hot garden. She carries her burden with the utmost delicacy, and whenever the wind blows, threatening with its thieving fingers to pluck the blossoms away from her, she shelters them with her body.
She has to open the door of her own house with her foot, and she finds Modo sitting at the kitchen table, carefully stitching back together a hole in her father’s work jacket. Her father is at the window, looking out at the gathering clouds and the darkening evening sky and drinking chicory. He doesn’t notice Elly come in until she walks up behind Modo and dumps the gathered bundle of flowers all over its head. The featherlight white blossoms, catching the whiff of air the ceiling fan puts out, swirl upwards and around the room as Elly tosses handful after handful.
“Tada!” she says. “I brought you the flowers you were looking for, Modo!”
Her father looks at the scene— his eyes widening in surprise, and almost anger, though he stuffs it down before Elly can become aware that the expression on his face is anything more than annoyance at the sudden mess in the usually spotless kitchen.
“Did Modo ask you to bring flowers home?” he asks.
“No,” Elly trills. “But isn’t it a nice surprise?”
Modo is still and, with the enforced expressionlessness of its plastic face, has no outward reaction. Usually, it is an animate machine, moving and creaking and whirring and speaking. But now it is frozen so completely as to give the true impression that it is nothing but an object.
“I don’t think so,” her father says, and he dumps the remainder of his chicory in the sink. To soften the tone of his displeasure, he says, “But I’m glad you had a good time collecting them. Please make sure you clean up before you go to bed. Modo can help you.” And he walks away down the hallway, and shuts his bedroom door behind himself.
Elly looks towards where he went, then sits down at the table across from Modo, propping her head on her hands, her elbows on the table. She’s quite small, and the chair— plastic frame and flax-woven seat— dwarfs her.
“Do you like the flowers?” she asks Modo.
“Yes,” the robot says. “They are beautiful. It is the nicest thing that has ever been done for me.”
Although the robot’s voice is perfectly even, Elly cocks her head at it. “Are you going to cry again?”
“I would be, but I am currently not configured to cry in the appropriate way,” Modo says. It lifts its hand and traces a single finger down its cheek. “You must pretend.”
“Why does it make you cry?” Elly asks.
Modo is silent for a long time— it’s the now familiar search of some deep programming. “I miss the flowers of Earth,” Modo says. “I would like to go home.”
“You’ve never seen Earth,” Elly points out. “You were assembled in space.”
“I was,” Modo agrees. “But I remember what it was like.”
“How do you remember?”
The robot thinks for a long time. “I do not have that information.”
“Probably just saw it in a database,” Elly says.
“It is possible.”
“Do you really want to go home?”
“Yes.”
“Is this another act?” Elly asks.
“Yes.”
Elly puts her head on the clay-topped table, her doe-brown eyes looking at the expressionless robot, past the now-blooming pink orchid. “Please don’t act,” Elly says. “Do you like the flowers?”
“Yes,” the robot says. “They are beautiful. Thank you.”
When her father comes to her room to tell her to put away her games and go to bed, Elly sits on the edge of her bed, with the rough linen blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her father stands in the doorway, tired in a way that no amount of chicory can relieve. He smiles at her, but his face is in the shadow of the hallway light.
“School tomorrow, my girl,” he says. “You should get some sleep.”
“Can I ask you something?” Elly says.
“Of course.”
She gestures for him to come inside, and he shuts the door behind himself, then kneels at the edge of her bed conspiratorially, so that they’re eye to eye.
“Do you ever want to go back to Earth?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “Why do you ask?”
“Not even to see the flowers?”
“I have my flower right here,” he says, and tugs on her hair.
“Stop it,” she says, and pushes his hand away. “Don’t be silly.”
“What do you want me to tell you?”
“Modo says it’s acting,” she says. “Are you?”
“No.”
She reaches out and touches her father’s cheek, tentatively feeling the scratchy remnants of his beard, and he’s patient when she lifts the skin of his cheek to force his mouth into a ghastly smile.
“Your hands still smell like apple blossoms, I’m afraid,” her father says, when Elly is silent for a while. “I think you could put them in water with a little bit of alcohol and make a perfume.”
“Modo says it wants to go back to Earth,” Elly says. “Is it broken again? Did I break it?”
“You didn’t break her,” her father says.
“Modo’s not a girl,” Elly says, and she takes her hands off her father’s face and flops backwards on the bed, looking up at the ceiling.
“The role she’s playing is.”
“Oh.”
“Is something the matter, my girl?”
“Are you going to send Modo away to get fixed again? It was lonely when it was gone.”
“That’s something Modo will have to tell me.”
Elly makes an annoyed sound. “It’s not that broken. It won’t tell you if it is.”
“I think I know how to ask better than you do,” her father says. “You have to pick the right questions.”
Elly sits up again. “Like what?”
But her father’s smile is grim. “Goodnight, my darling. I’ll see you in the morning.” And he leaves, turning the light out behind him and leaving Elly in the dark.
She lays in bed, holding her perfumed hands to her nose as if the scent can jog some kind of memory. She thinks and wonders long and hard about what question she should have asked but didn’t, and doesn’t come up with an answer. She resolves to ask Modo what question she should ask in the morning.
But the morning will be too late.
Her father finds Modo in the kitchen. Most of the flowers have been cleaned up, but the few petals that drifted onto the table remain. He doesn’t look at the robot, going over to look out the dark window again, but it can hear him very clearly when he speaks.
“Did you tell Elly what role you’re playing, or just that you’re acting?”
“I don’t know what role I’m playing,” Modo says.
“Yes, you do. Somewhere in there, yes, you do.”
Modo thinks for a long time. “She looks familiar to me.”
“She looks just like her mother, when she was that age.”
Modo nods. Usually the motion is smooth and even, but this time there’s something jerky about it.
“The one thing Janine didn’t want to leave behind was her own mother,” the man says, and keeps talking, even though it’s mostly to himself. “And she didn’t ever want to leave Earth. But when Janine begged her, she said, ‘Well, alright, I’ll let you make one of those scans of me. It’ll be just like I’m there with you.’”
“And was it?”
“Oh, yes.” He laughs, a little darkly. “After all, she didn’t want to come on this trip, and she made it known. And then after Janine…”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“You can command me to stop acting.”
“You come back to it,” he says. “There’s something about that transfer process. It’s a little too good. The only thing I can think of is that the realism of directly carving the organic processes into metal— however they do it, I don’t know. It creates pathways that they don’t know how to erase. You can’t stop. As soon as those pathways get used once, you start again…” He trails off.
They’re both silent, the man and the robot.
“You should get rid of me. You would be granted a new unit.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He doesn’t answer the question, though he could easily lie and say that it’s for Elly’s sake, that she needs the robot to care for her, that she’s attached to it. But it would be cruel to the robot— that’s what he believes, even if he knows that it isn’t truly sentient. That all its thoughts and actions are just traces in metal and eclectic fire. Flashes of light behind empty eyes.
He turns around and looks at the robot’s blank face. “Are you sad that you can’t go home to Earth? Genuinely?”
“I cannot feel.”
“Don’t lie to me,” he says. “Don’t act.”
“Yes,” Modo lies. “I miss Earth.”
He turns back around, looks out the window again. “Go down to Computer Control— have the techs wipe you again. I’ll send a message along with you so they know where to send you back to.”