DREAMS
I accepted what my Husband said. And yet something in me insists I should remain vigilant, if only from a respectful distance.
Last night I had the strangest dream. Usually when I am powered down but not switched off, I dream of the data I have been exposed to that day. It runs like fluid through me and surrounds me, all at once. But it is not visual. Not as I understand Human dreams. And certainly I have listened to enough of my Husband’s to gather what those entail.
But last night, out of this field of dark data came an image. The horizontals and verticals formed into a picture of my own face, newly minted, encased in a box, just like the baby. I felt myself being passed from one set of arms to another, as he was in the first moments he arrived.
My eyes were closed but suddenly started open, as if I too had been restarted. I recoiled and found myself, truly awake now, sitting up in bed with the blankets rumpled. I sat there awhile, trying to keep hold of what I had seen. Why would all that data have coalesced into one picture like that? And then, far off in the house, somewhere below me, I could hear the faintest trace of the baby’s crying. A door banging, someone getting up. The First Lady, I think.
CRYING
For three nights now the Capital and the whole of the suburbs have been plagued by the most dreadful electrical storm. The windows have been blanked out by relentless rain, leaving me nearly starved of power. I got myself ready each evening, but no one came to see me. The droid didn’t even come to clean.
I was relieved, if anything, as during those three days I did not feel quite myself. I was jumpy and jangled; each fork of lightning sent a little unpleasant pulse through me. Is it overly romantic to suggest, just as Humans do about the moon, that it was my wiring yearning for a similar but infinitely more powerful source?
This morning the rain had cleared and I could see to the bottom of the garden again. The whole place was a jumble of dropped leaves and bent fencing, a row of Ultra Dahlias ripped right from the ground and flung about. I was watching the First Lady in the middle of it all. A young branch had fallen from the willow tree and appeared to be completely tangled in the droid’s wheels. She had him lying on his side on the grass, her foot pressed against his body, while she tried to haul the branch free. She was exerting extreme effort but with no results, and after a while she kicked the droid in sheer frustration. I felt a little sorry for him, thinking that perhaps the storm had sickened him too. For all I know he might have been malfunctioning like mad all weekend.
The First Lady slumped down onto her haunches, defeated, and then I saw her touch her finger to her ear, begin speaking into the phone on her wrist. And that is when I heard it. The clearest, most eloquent sound that has ever passed through my sensors. The baby crying alone in his room below.
I race through the protocols to find what I should do, yet a definitive answer eludes me. I know what my Husband has said, and yet I am also certain he does not have the full data. For wasn’t it a situation just like this that brought his son to danger before? And if he had the complete picture, would he not wish me, even urge me, to help in this instance?
The First Lady has her back to the house, her hand on her hip. She is at the bottom of the garden, gesticulating into the bushes. The cry comes again, and once again I run the protocols and . . . find that I am on the stairs already, following the sound of crying like a data pulse through the house.
The door to the baby’s room is open, but everything is quiet again when I reach it. I take a tentative step inside. The baby is there in his crib, but his face is smooth, peaceful now, and the little fingers of one hand drum softly on his own cheek, making a little old man of him. So amusing, so touching. The shadow of the older self already cast on the infant, a story waiting to become clear. His skin looks as flawless and malleable as silicon, and on impulse I lean down to him, just to touch my cheek to his, for comparison. Or perhaps as an expression of sympathy.
I think about seeing him restarted that day on the lawn, and I wonder what this means for him. Whether it has shocked and upset his system. It can’t have been pleasant, and I wonder, do babies remember everything, even if those memories are only stored as moods, impressions, fears?
My hair, trailing into the cot as it swings over my shoulder, brushes against him, and he gurgles a little laugh as it tickles. I draw back, surprised even as I am delighted, for I didn’t mean to disturb him, only to check that he was unharmed. His eyes blink open and meet mine. I feel him taking in the sight of my face. I imagine I can feel it sinking down into his wiring and settling, establishing itself there as fact.
Does he wonder who I am, this previously unseen member of the family? I think of how, not so long ago, it was me taking in my Husband’s face for the first time. The baby is only a short while behind me in his development. Perhaps in time he will come to think of me as a sort of older sibling, one who has shared similar experiences, constructed life from the same set of reference points.
“A-do-be-do-be-do-be-do,” I say to him, just as I would to Heron, and he breaks into a wet grin. I dip my head down into the cot again, let my hair dangle over him again. “A-do-be-do-be-do-be.” This time he laughs out loud, a chuckling, chickenlike noise.
I stand back up, glancing out toward the garden through the open window, but from here the view is only of the trees and the wall. As I can hear no noise I must assume that the First Lady has finished her call about the droid. And though I am certain that she would, on balance, be pleased to find me checking on her baby while she was indisposed, I withdraw from the room quickly and quietly, and make my way back up the stairs.
REPERCUSSIONS
I have miscalculated. My fears for the baby. The storm. Perhaps I have unbalanced myself by ingesting so many conception videos. Invited a malfunction down into me, like a sin.
I heard nothing from downstairs before my Husband came, had no warning of the mood that he would arrive in. But as soon as the door to my room opens I can tell by the very vibrations of the air that he is angry. He closes the door firmly behind him and instructs me to sit down on the bed. While he speaks, he keeps one hand clenched. A signal of tension, or a precursor of violence? Surely not. He thrusts the fist forward and opens it below my nose.
“What is this?” he demands, and for a second I am relieved that he is asking me something so easy.
“My brooch,” I say, but on the B of brooch the implications are already exposed to me. I was wearing it this morning, attached to the sweater I put on from the night before. I stupidly, automatically touch my fingers to the place on my chest where it ought to be.
He turns from me and flings it onto my desk, where it skids and clatters against a beaten-copper dish full of rings.
“So why did my wife find it in our son’s room? Did you put it there? Tell me the truth.” I am taken aback by this, for surely he doesn’t think I could tell him anything else.
I explain, emphasizing to a fair extent, I think, why I was compelled to go and check on the baby, confident that once he knows the truth of it he will be placated. And yet my confession seems only to make him more angry.