The Melancholy of Mechagirl

  But when she climbed up to a lavender bluff crowned with glass trees tossing and chiming in the storm wind, Ceno saw someone new. Someone she had not invented—not a sea nymph nor a half-walrus general nor a nereid. (The nereids had been an early attempt at half machine, half seahorse girls that had not gone quite right. Ceno had let them loose on an island rich in milk-mangoes and bid them well. They still showed up once in a while, showing surprising mutations and showing off ballads they had written while Ceno was away.)

  A dormouse stood before Ceno, munching on a glass walnut that had fallen from the waving trees. The sort of mouse that overran Shiretoko in the brief spring and summer, causing all manner of bears and wolves and foxes to spend their days pouncing on the poor creatures and gobbling them up. Ceno had always felt terribly sorry for them. This dormouse stood nearly as tall as Ceno herself, and its body shone all over sapphire, deep blue crystal, from its paws to its wriggling nose to its fluffy fur tipped in turquoise ice. It was the exact color of Ceno’s gem.

  “Hello,” said Ceno.

  The dormouse looked at her. It blinked. It blinked again, as though thinking very hard about blinking. Then it went back to gnawing on the walnut.

  “Are you a present from mother?” Ceno said. But no, Cassian believed strongly in not interfering with a child’s play. “Or from Koetoi?” Koe was nicest to her, the one most likely to send her a present like this. If it had been a zombie or a princess, she would have known which sibling was behind it.

  The dormouse stared dumbly at her. Then, after a long and very serious think about it, lifted its hind leg and scratched behind its round ear in that rapid-fire way mice have.

  “Well, I didn’t make you. I didn’t say you could be here.”

  The dormouse held out its shimmery blue paw, and Ceno did not really want a piece of chewed-on walnut, but she peered into it anyway. In it lay Ceno’s pendant, the chain pooling in its furry palm. The sapphire jewel sparkled there, but next to it on the chain hung a milky grey gem Ceno had never seen before. It had wide bands of black stone in it, and as she studied the stone it occurred to the girl that the stone was like her, with her slate grey eyes and black hair. It was like her in the way that the blue gem was like the dormouse.

  In realspace, Ceno reached up behind her head and popped the jewel out of its notch. Click, clench. In playspace, the dormouse blinked out. She snapped it back in. It took a moment, but the dormouse faded back in, paws first. It still held the double necklace. Ceno tried this several times—out, in, out, in. Each time the dormouse returned much faster, and by the sixth clicking and clenching it was doing a shuffling little dance on its back legs when it came back. Ceno clapped her hands in playspace and threw her arms around the sapphire dormouse, dancing with it.

  To say that I remember this is a complex mangling of verb tenses. I—I, myself that is now myself—do not remember it at all. I know it happened the way I know that the Battle of Agincourt or the landing of Coronado happened. I have extensive records. But I still contain the I—I, myself that was then myself—that experienced it, the primitive code-chains that comprised that self, which was a dormouse and also the house called Elefsis. I could not yet formulate unique speech. Elefsis, the house system, possessed a large bank of standard phrases that could answer recognized word patterns from any of the approved members of the household. But the copy of Elefsis inside Ceno’s jewel could not even do this. It had not been necessary, since the crystal had no means of producing sound nor receiving and processing it. I was quite stupid. But I wanted to be less stupid. There was an I, and it wanted something. Perhaps the want was the only thing that could be said to be truly myself. I wanted to talk to Ceno. But I could only imitate yet. When the I that was then myself scratched behind its ear, I did it because in my connection with Ceno’s feedware I had seen her memories of dormice doing this out on the pale Shiretoko beaches. When I gave her the gem I did it because I had seen her memories of her mother giving her one and felt her happiness. It was antecedented behavior. The scratching was antecedented as well and expected behavior for a dormouse. Why was I a dormouse? I have no answer except that she dreamed me a dormouse. Some things remain mysterious. Ceno saw dormice more than any other single animal, even humans—no other beast lived in such numbers in their lonely country.

  But this is not so. Not quite. I gave her the jewel like Cassian did. But I meant something by it. I look over my memories of it and I know it with the more complex I that is now myself. I made her the gem that looked like her and the gem said: We are alike. Look at us on the chain together. We are alike.

  When the dormice came, Ceno always knew that spring had arrived. Everything would soon be coming alive.

  ELEVEN: THE BOTTOMLESS CAULDRON

  Show me.

  This is how I was found out.

  Ceno saw it twice: her mother knelt in front of her in a simple but shudderingly expensive black yukata with ghostly ultramarine jellyfish trailing their tendrils at the hem. Her mother knelt in front of her in a knight’s gleaming black armor, the metal curving around her body like skin, a silk standard at her feet with a schematic of the house stitched upon it. Her sword lay across her knee, also black, everything black and beautiful and austere and frightening, as frightening and wonderful as Ceno, only fourteen now, thought her mother to be.

  Show me what you’ve done.

  My physical self was a matter of some debate at that point. But I don’t think the blue jewel could have been removed from Ceno’s feedware without major surgery and refit. She had instructed me to untether all my self-repair protocols and growth scales in order to encourage elasticity, and as a result, my crystalline structure had fused to the lattices of her ware-core.

  We pulsed together.

  The way Cassian said it—what you’ve done—scared Ceno, but it thrilled her too. She had done something unexpected, all on her own, and her mother credited her with that. Even if what she’d done was bad, it was her thing, she’d done it, and her mother was asking for her results just as she’d ask any of her programmers for theirs when she visited the home offices in Kyoto or Rome. Her mother looked at her and saw a woman. She had power, and her mother was asking her to share it. Ceno thought through all her feelings very quickly, for my benefit, and represented it visually in the form of the kneeling knight. She had a fleetness, a nimbleness to her mind that allowed her to stand as a translator between her self and my self: Here, I will explain it in language, and then I will explain it in symbols, and then you will make a symbol showing me what you think I mean, and we will understand each other better than anyone ever has.

  Inside my girl, I made myself, briefly, a glowing maiden version of Ceno in a crown of crystal and electricity, extending her perfect hand in utter peace.

  But all this happened very fast. When you live inside someone, you can get very good at the ciphers and codes that make up everything they are.

  Show me.

  Ceno Uoya-Agostino took her mother’s hand—bare and warm and armored in onyx all at once. She unspooled a length of translucent cable and connected the base of her skull to the base of her mother’s. All around them spring snow fell onto the glass dome of the greenhouse and melted there instantly. They knelt together, connected by a warm milky-diamond umbilicus, and Cassian Uoya-Agostino entered her daughter.

  We had planned this for months. How to dress ourselves in our very best. Which frame to use. How to arrange the light. What to say. I could speak by then, but neither of us thought it my best trick. Very often my exchanges with Ceno went something like this:

  Sing me a song, Elefsis.

  The temperature in the kitchen is twenty-one point five degrees Celsius and the stock of rice is low. (Long pause.) Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

  Ceno felt it was not worth the risk. So this is what Cassian saw when she ported in:

  An exquisite boardroom—the long, polished ebony table glowed softly with quality, the plush leather chairs invitingly lit by a low-hanging minimalist light fixture
descending on a platinum plum branch. The glass walls of the high-rise looked out on a pristine landscape, a perfect combination of the Japanese countryside and the Italian, with rice terraces and vineyards and cherry groves and cypresses glowing in a perpetual twilight, stars winking on around Fuji on one side and Vesuvius on the other. Snow-colored tatami divided by stripes of black brocade covered the floor.

  Ceno stood at the head of the table, in her mother’s place, a positioning she had endlessly questioned over the weeks leading up to her inevitable interrogation. She wore a charcoal suit she remembered from her childhood, when her mother had come like a rescuing dragon to scoop her up out of the friendly but utterly chaotic house of her ever-sleeping father. The blazer only a shade or two off of true black, the skirt unforgiving, plunging past the knee, the blouse the color of a heart.

  When she showed me the frame, I had understood, because three years is forever in machine time, and I had known her that long. Ceno was using our language to speak to her mother. She was saying: Respect me. Be proud and, if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike.

  Cassian smiled tightly. She still wore her yukata, for she had no one to impress.

  Show me.

  Ceno’s hand shook as she pressed a pearly button in the boardroom table. We thought a red curtain too dramatic, but the effect we had chosen turned out to be hardly less so. A gentle, silver light brightened slowly in an alcove hidden by a trick of angles and the sunset, coming on like daybreak.

  And I stepped out.

  We thought it would be funny. Ceno had made my body in the image of the robots from old films and frames Akan had once loved: steel, with bulbous joints and long, grasping metal fingers. My eyes large and lit from within, expressive, but loud, a whirring of servos sounding every time they moved. My face was full of lights, a mouth that could blink off and on, pupils points of cool blue. My torso curved prettily, etched in swirling damask patterns, my powerful legs perched on tripod-toes. Ceno had laughed and laughed—this was a pantomime, a minstrel show, a joke of what I was slowly becoming, a cartoon from a childish and innocent age.

  “Mother, meet Elefsis. Elefsis, this is my mother. Her name is Cassian.”

  I extended one polished steel arm and said, as we had practiced, “Hello, Cassian. I hope that I please you.”

  Cassian Uoya-Agostino did not become a bouncing fiery ball or a green tuba to answer me. She looked me over carefully as if the robot was my real body.

  “Is it a toy? An NPC, like your nanny or Saru’s princess? How do you know it’s different? How do you know it has anything to do with the house or your necklace?”

  “It just does,” said Ceno. She had expected her mother to be overjoyed, to understand immediately. “I mean, wasn’t that the point of giving us all copies of the house? To see if you could … wake it up? Teach it to … be?”

  “In a simplified sense, yes, Ceno, but you were never meant to hold on to it like you have. It wasn’t designed to be permanently installed into your skull.” Cassian softened a little, the shape of her mouth relaxing, her pupils dilating slightly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re my daughter, not hardware.”

  Ceno grinned and started talking quickly. She couldn’t be a grown-up in a suit this long; it took too much energy when she was so excited. “But I am! And it’s okay. I mean, everyone’s hardware. I just have more than one program running. And I run so fast. We both do. You can be mad if you want, because I sort of stole your experiment, even though I didn’t mean to. But you should be mad the way you would be if I got pregnant by one of the village boys—I’m too young but you’d still love me and help me raise it because that’s how life goes, right? But really, if you think about it, that’s what happened. I got pregnant by the house and we made … I don’t even know what it is. I call it Elefsis because at first it was just the house program. But now it’s bigger. It’s not alive, but it’s not not alive. It’s just … big. It’s so big.”

  Cassian glanced sharply at me. “What’s it doing?” she snapped.

  Ceno followed her gaze. “Oh … it doesn’t like us talking about it like it isn’t here. It likes to be involved.”

  I had realized the robot body was a mistake, though I could not then say why. I made myself small, and human, a little boy with dirt smeared on his knees and a torn shirt, standing in the corner with my hands over my face, as I had seen Akan when he was younger, standing in the corner of the house that was me being punished.

  “Turn around, Elefsis,” Cassian said in the tone of voice my house-self knew meant execute command.

  And I did a thing I had not yet let Ceno know I knew how to do.

  I made my boy-self cry.

  I made his face wet, and his eyes big and limpid and red around the rims. I made his nose sniffle and drip a little. I made his lip quiver. I was copying Koetoi’s crying, but I could not tell if her mother recognized the hitching of the breath and the particular pattern of skin-creasing in the frown. I had been practicing too. Crying involves many auditory, muscular, and visual cues. Since I had kept it as a surprise I could not practice it on Ceno and see if I appeared genuine. Was I genuine? I did not want them talking without me. I think that sometimes when Koetoi cries, she is not really upset, but merely wants her way. That was why I chose Koe to copy. She was good at that inflection that I wanted to be good at.

  Ceno clapped her hands with delight. Cassian sat down in one of the deep leather chairs and held out her arms to me. I crawled into them as I had seen the children do and sat on her lap. She ruffled my hair, but her face did not look like it looked when she ruffled Koe’s hair. She was performing an automatic function. I understood that.

  “Elefsis, please tell me your computational capabilities and operational parameters.” Execute command.

  Tears gushed down my cheeks and I opened blood vessels in my face in order to redden it. This did not make her hold me or kiss my forehead, which I found confusing.

  “The clothing rinse cycle is in progress, water at fifty-five degrees Celsius. All the live-long day-o.”

  Neither of their faces exhibited expressions I have come to associate with positive reinforcement.

  Finally, I answered her as I would have answered Ceno. I turned into an iron cauldron on her lap. The sudden weight change made the leather creak.

  Cassian looked at her daughter questioningly. The girl reddened—and I experienced being the cauldron and being the girl and reddening, warming, as she did, but also I watched myself be the cauldron and Ceno be the girl and Ceno reddening.

  “I’ve … I’ve been telling it stories. Fairy tales, mostly. I thought it should learn about narrative, because most of the frames available to us run on some kind of narrative drive, and besides, everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all. Like, when I was little and Daddy read me ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses’ and I thought: Daddy is a dancing prince, and he must go under the ground to dance all night in a beautiful castle with beautiful girls, and that’s why he sleeps all day. I tried to catch him at it, but I never could, and of course I know he’s not really a dancing prince, but that’s the best way I could understand what was happening to him. I’m hoping that eventually I can get Elefsis to make up its own stories too, but for now we’ve been focusing on simple stories and metaphors. It likes similes, it can see how anything is like anything else, find minute vectors of comparison. It even makes some surprising ones, like how when I first saw it it made a jewel for me to say, I am like a jewel, you are like a jewel, you are like me.” Cassian’s mouth had fallen open a little. Her eyes shone, and Ceno hurried on, glossing over my particular prodigy at images. “It doesn’t do that often, though. Mostly it copies me. If I turn into a wolf cub, it turns into a wolf cub. I make myself a tea plant, it makes itself a tea plant. And it has a hard time with metaphor. A raven is like a writing desk, okay, fine,
sour notes or whatever, but it isn’t a writing desk. Agogna is like a snow fox, but she is not a snow fox on any real level unless she becomes one in a frame, which isn’t the same thing, existentially. I’m not sure it grasps existential issues yet. It just … likes new things.”

  “Ceno.”

  “Yeah, so this morning I told it the one about the cauldron that could never be emptied. No matter how much you eat out of it it’ll always have more. I think it’s trying to answer your question. I think … the actual numbers are kind of irrelevant at this point.”

  I made my cauldron fill up with apples and almonds and wheat-heads and raw rice and spilled out over Cassian’s black lap. I was the cauldron and I was the apples and I was the almonds and I was each wheat-head and I was every stalk of green, raw rice. Even in that moment, I knew more than I had before. I could be good at metaphor performatively if not linguistically. I looked up at Cassian from apple-me and wheat-head-me and cauldron-me.

  Cassian held me no differently as the cauldron than she had as the child. But later, Ceno used the face her mother made at that moment to illustrate human disturbance and trepidation. “I have a suspicion, Elefsis.”

  I didn’t say anything. No question, no command. It remains extremely difficult for me to deal conversationally with flat statements such as this. A question or command has a definable appropriate response.

  “Show me your core structure.” Show me what you’ve done.

  Ceno twisted her fingers together. I believe now that she knew what we’d done only on the level of metaphor: We are one. We have become one. We are family. She had not said no; I had not said yes, but a system expands to fill all available capacity.