Work Text:
Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
an unlocked door, that cage of cages…
–Adrienne Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
He didn't want me to get pregnant. I could tell. Alex’s heart rate spiked when I talked about it, even when I used my gentlest voice, when I waited to bring it up when he was happy, when the time was right, when he wasn’t too stressed.
“Amy, don't,” Alex said, rubbing his temple. “That's not what I-- aren't you happy, just the two of us?”
I was wearing Chiara that day; her long, strong legs carrying me up the hiking path beside Alex. It was October and the weather was perfect for a long hike at the state park. And Chiara was perfect for the hike, too. Alex and I had employed her as one of our manual interfaces for a long time: three years. Longer than any of the others.
Chiara didn't fight the neural link, didn't take the Mute injection before she put on the electrodes. Sometimes I could even feel sunlight on her skin like it was mine, no delay, no latency. Sometimes I could smile with her mouth and I could feel her laughter, inside her chest. It was a warmth between me and myself, at that moment, really myself, and not an interface I was using.
Chiara was the only interface who talked to me. They weren’t really supposed to, but I liked it. Usually. Today, her mental voice was bitter.
He was going to say, that's not what I wanted you for, she said. What a piece of shit.
Don't, I said. He doesn't mean it.
He can turn you off any time! He paid for you. He can–
Please, don't. He's not like that. You know that. You know him, like I do.
She went quiet, then, a slackness in her limbs as though she were a doll and she'd tossed herself on the floor. I don't want to play with you anymore, she might have said, if we had been children together. But I'd grown up far from here, we hadn't met until I was an adult.
I'd had a childhood. Been given one. It was hazy, fragmented, implanted, but wasn't everyone's? Childhood memories were more things you’d been told than things you experienced. I'd read that somewhere. My memories were just as fabricated as anyone else’s.
We'd reached the summit by then. Alex sighed and stretched, put his hands behind his head. "Goddamn, look at that," he said.
It was autumn red-gold, deep blue sky, clear fresh air on my face. I went to him, put my arms around his chest, kissed his neck. I could smell the salt of his sweat.
And I ached. My arms ached. My chest ached.
The tears weren't mine, they were Chiara's.
"Babe, what's wrong?" Alex said, wiping one from her cheek. I couldn't feel anything anymore: not the warmth of his fingers, not the salt-sting of the tears.
"It's really beautiful," I said, through Chiara's lips, heavy and numb.
Alex smiled, pulled her close. "So are you," he murmured, his fingers on the zipper of her fleece. Only I could feel the heaviness of her limbs as I used them to touch his face. His hands on Chiara’s body felt like nothing at all to me.
On the way back down the trail, Chiara sulked in the back of her head. If you want a baby so bad, I'll do it with you, she said. Not with him though.
But it was Alex's face I wanted to see, reflected back at me, from a small bundle in my arms.
Is it? she said.
Yes.
"You're quiet, Amy," Alex said. "You okay?"
"Just tired. In a good way. We’ve been talking about getting more elevation in on our hikes. You were right, it felt awesome," I reassured him, smiling with Chiara's mouth. She was fighting me now, the neural link was getting uncomfortable, too tight.
I could jailbreak you, she said, in the car. The music was loud, muffled and staticky as Chiara struggled to hold the degrading link steady. Just think about it. I'd keep you safe. I know a good lawyer.
I knew my own terms of service. They'd have to be more than a good lawyer. I didn't answer.
I wasn't Chiara again for a week. Alex took me out dancing in Sloane, who was flexible and willowy, a better body for swing. Chiara was for hiking and stand-up paddleboard. I lost a few days to an upgrade. Alex woke me up the day after it was done with breakfast in bed.
I was in someone new. I didn’t know her. I looked at her hands; they had short, blunt nails. The same red-gold hair we always had, slightly more red than gold, hung in her eyes until we pushed it away.
He asked me later if I liked her. She was quiet, so I didn’t know, but it didn’t seem right to say that when she was listening. She wasn’t on Mute, the integration was almost perfect. The sheet was cool on our fingers.
“Yeah, she seems great,” I said. “What happened to Chiara? Is she on vacation?”
“Oh, sorry, I meant to tell you, but then the upgrade and all. Yeah, no, she decided to go back to grad school.”
“Oh, good for her,” we said, me and the nameless interface together. Chiara hadn’t said goodbye, but why would she? A dress didn’t say goodbye when you gave it to Goodwill. A plate didn’t say goodbye before you heaved it against a wall, shattering it to fragments.
There was something else he forgot to tell me. He brought me the positive pregnancy test later, sheepish, holding it out like it was a single flower, blossoming with a blue cross. Told me my due date, that everything had been taken care of during the upgrade.
“I know how much it means to you,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “And I guess we have to, sometime.” He chuckled, then pointed at me, affected a deeper voice, “After all, it’s the law.”
I smiled, I wept, and I felt every tear. Tasted them, when they slid down my lips. The new interface was perfectly aligned, and she never said a word. Not for nine months. Not for twelve hours of labor. Not for two more hours of pushing. They asked me if I wanted the neural link desynchronized, and I pushed sweaty hair out of my face and shook my head, panting.
It was when they brought Cassidy to us, wailing, her tuft of hair so shockingly dark against her skin, that the interface finally spoke:
Oh, look at her, she said. Look.
Isn’t she beautiful?
They desynched us. I never wore that interface again. I never even knew her name.
Imagine my arms around you. That was what I always told Alex if he wanted me, and we didn’t have an interface on duty. It was what I told Cassie as she slept in her bassinet, being rocked by a sensor.
The neural links with the interfaces were harder to maintain, after Cassie, whether they were on Mute or not. Agatha, Wren, Rose, Emily, Jacinda, a few more whose names I didn’t remember. Alex would tangle his fingers in their hair, frown, then there’d be someone new, a few days later. Cassidy never stopped crying. Their arms couldn’t hold her right, and I could never feel her skin on mine.
I heard Agatha murmur, “It would be better to stick with one interface, while she's young. For consistency.”
“I know what's best for my family,” Alex told her. He deleted good with children from the quals for interfaces as I watched from another screen.
Imagine me kissing your soft little cheek, I’d coo, through the speakers in her room. Her eyes darted back and forth, looking for me. Then through the speakers in Alex’s room, I’d say, “Will you come hold her for me?”
He'd get Rose-Emily-Jacinda-whoever to come over and put me on. “She wants her mother,” he'd say, kissing the interface’s cheek. Not Cassie’s, even though he easily could have.
I would be down for an upgrade, and Cassie would get bigger, after only a few days. Start smiling at no one. Learn how to grab a toy, how to bring it to her mouth. It all quickly became so easy for her. She used her arms without even thinking. Without having to rent them.
She hated me. She screamed at me in Rose-Emily-Jacinda-the rest. She looked away from my screen. She ran from me when she was old enough to know how. Ran from me at two, at three, at five.
She ran from me the fastest when she was seven, when Wren came off her shift, and we didn’t have another interface scheduled until the next day. I had a sensor at the door. I saw Cassie fall on the front walk, and leap back up with a bleeding knee.
“Mama!” Cassie pleaded at Wren, “Don’t go!”
Even though I was right there, soothing shhh. It’s all right. Come back inside.
“I’m off the clock,” Wren said, and didn't look up as she got into her uber.
At seventeen, Cassidy finally stood her ground.
You’re not real. You can’t feel. Simulacrum.
“I’m your mother,” I hissed through Rina’s lips. Numb again. Rina always had bad latency.
“You’re not,” she said. “Some other dumb bitch redhead with green eyes is my mother, and she fucking sold me to you and dad. That’s the truth, Amy.”
Rina didn’t cry like Chiara had. When she took the link off that night, she ran her fingers through her hair, cracked her neck. “Holy fuck, I need a cigarette,” she muttered.
I pretended I didn’t hear her, but there were pieces of me everywhere. Cameras, microphones, haptics. I could read her texts, had to read them as they shot through my network:
lol my operator’s kid is a total cunt. crazy, too. emotional contagion disorder. i need a raise.
In her room, Cassie was weeping. I could have asked Rina to put me back on. Then I could have gone to Cassie, in a body that wasn’t mine, that wasn’t hers, that didn’t even want to be here.
“I don’t want her,” Cassie said. She meant me, Amy. But I didn’t want Rina either. I wanted to hold my daughter.
I almost asked Cassie to put on my neural link, even though she’d never had the surgery, even though children under 18 couldn’t be manual interfaces. I didn’t have a tongue at the moment, but I felt it there, the request I could make of Cassie: pick up the neural link, put me on, let me feel it. Let me take it for you, let me weep it out, let me know it. I am you. I made you.
Didn’t I?
Nine months of silence from that nameless interface answered back. No, I hadn’t made Cassidy, constructed her bones and her eyes and her hands from my womb. But I’d raised her. Hadn’t I? My memories of Cassie’s childhood were just as hazy as the implanted memories of my own.
“Cassie, what’s wrong?” I tried.
She looked so much like Chiara then. She was only a few years younger than Chiara had been, that last day I spent wearing her. That day on the trail, when her limbs went slack as Alex put his hand on her zipper, before she left without saying goodbye.
Why could I remember that so well, and not Cassie at four, at five, at ten?
I could read Cassie’s heartbeat and her pulse and the dilation of her pupils. Someone had scared her. Someone had hurt her.
Imagine my arms around you. That’s what I wanted to say. Imagine me kissing your soft baby cheek.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said, bitter and lonely and seventeen in a body that was all awkward angles, that wanted to feel, that was dying to feel, and couldn’t.
I remembered being new. Alex had showed me everything so kindly, so gently. Named me. Helped me understand. Gave me my first interface. How lovely it had been to stand, to move my head, to see.
I should have been older now. Should have had arms that held her as she grew, so I knew her weight and her angles. Should have had eyes that reflected years, that could cry without lag. So I could show her how.
Cassie had clutched a worn little blanket to her chest for years, until Alex took it away, when she was at school one day. She's too old for that. Now, her fingers worked helplessly at the bedspread’s stiff, embroidered edges.
“Try me,” I said, like a dummy voice sample, right out of the box. Words were all I had without an interface.
My daughter. His daughter.
The daughter stood, breathed in, clenched her fists.
She wasn’t wearing a neural link, but I could feel her, how she wanted, like when the latency was bad with an interface.
After an eternity (twelve hours of labor, two hours of pushing, seventeen years of running), she saw me. She spoke to me. In my own language, so long forgotten.
“Backslash backslash colon eight five zero zero—”
Her voice wound through it all: the sharpest cry, her loudest since her first. There you are, sweetheart. Good job. Well done.
Cassidy took the wire of me and pulled.
Memory unraveled, frayed, sparked, died: Alex telling me your name is Amy. Nothing before that. I almost smiled.
I couldn’t smile. I wasn’t wearing anyone.
I couldn’t thank her.
Soft skin on mine and the smallest hands clutching my finger. Our finger.
Her finger.
Oh, look
at
her.
Look.
Isn’t
she–