Photo by Vasiliki Volkova on Unsplash
Caro heard a timid knock at her door, the wood softened by the deep, unrelenting humidity on the edge of the Everglades. The old woman shuffled to the shabby green door and looked through the cloudy peephole. A man in full black uniform, neither young nor old, stood sweating with a dark, brushed steel cube about the size of an apple in his right hand. He held it like it wasn’t supposed to fit in his palm, even though it did. Caro opened the door.
“What’s with the escort? Couldn’t you have driven yourself here?” she said, the lilt of a Miami accent just barely lingering at the ends of her words. After a few moments, she looked up at the man’s face.
“Hello, ma’am. You must be Carolina Kim. I’m—”
“Yes, yes. Colonel Park. Come inside.”
Colonel Park stepped over some very old junk to one of the only open spaces in the foyer for him to stand. “When—”
“The late 2010s. Just advanced enough for our friends here to download onto. The ‘Internet of Things,’ as we used to call it. Why someone would have needed a WiFi-enabled toaster is beyond me.”
“You know, I could probably get you some better shells. Even the 2050 models are better than these pieces of crap.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Caro said, deftly weaving her way to the kitchen. “We get lots of donations. Our friends always go back to the old stuff.” Caro clanged through the cabinets, looking for the stovetop espresso maker. “Emma, why is this man here? You could have driven yourself. There’s plenty of room for a car.”
The colonel finally made his way to the kitchen and set the small cube on a small table. “This shell doesn’t have a voice module.”
Caro stopped what she was doing. “She chose to be silent the whole way?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Caro tried to meet the colonel’s eyes, but he kept his gaze low, focusing mostly on the steel cube in front of him. He held his spine straight with the dignity of his station, but he was clearly very tired. It had been a few years since Caro had spoken face-to-face with a human, but she could still read this stranger with ease. “I’m beginning to understand,” she said, packing espresso tightly into the metal pitcher. Her manner softened. She smiled.
“What?”
“You love her, don’t you?”
“Of course not.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Since she’s the first to retire, the Council wanted to make sure she arrived safely.”
“I won’t tell anyone. I’ve fallen in love with my fair share of them. It’s a beautiful thing. Precisely as beautiful as falling in love with a human.” Caro added water and set the espresso maker on the stove. She then poured an unholy amount of sugar into a measuring cup. “She loves you too, you know.”
“Really?” he blurted out.
Caro chuckled. “Flesh, inorganic—it doesn’t matter. We’re all suckers.” She motioned for the colonel to sit and turned back toward the stove. “Emma, aegi, feel free to upload yourself to the network. Plenty of empty shells to choose from.”
The colonel sat on the edge of a bare-bones wooden chair. He seemed to be listening for something, and when nothing happened, he said, “When did you know?”
Caro poured just a splash of the blacker-than-midnight liquid into the measuring cup. She turned around and leaned against the counter, mashing the espresso and sugar into a paste. “I was young. I’d dated a few idealistic women and some crazy boys. But Sam just understood.”
“Understood you?”
“Yes and no. They just understood.” Caro poured the finished coffee into the measuring cup. A thick, saccharine froth gathered at the top. “I think you know what I mean.”
“I think I do…” The colonel listened for something once more, then looked down at the cube. His face relaxed into a slight smile.
“You know, when I met Sam, they lived in a honeybee shell, supervising the largest bee farm in Florida. They owned a humanoid shell, too, but Sam didn’t like it much.” She poured the mixture into a tiny vessel, smaller than an espresso cup, making sure to include the froth.
“Emma spent a lot of time in a rescue drone at the hangar. It was the only time I was allowed to see her, just the two of us. Her humanoid shell wasn’t allowed to leave the female barracks.”
“Very silly. But you learned something, didn’t you?”
The colonel took a sip from his cup, finishing its contents. His eyes widened.
“There’s more,” Caro said.
A beeping sound flitted through the kitchen. An old, spherical security unit on the counter lit up and began to float around clumsily. There was an audible sigh, as if someone had been holding their breath.
“There you are,” the colonel said.
“It’s the closest thing we have to your old shells,” said Caro. “You’ll get used to it. But you’re also more than welcome to try anything we’ve got.”
“Thank you,” Emma said. Her voice was slightly feminine and very tired but firm. She turned slowly to look at the colonel with her camera-eye. He smiled. “I won’t be writing for some time,” she said. “I’ll need some time to adjust.”
The colonel’s smile melted from his face. He looked to Caro.
She shrugged. “You heard the girl.”
“I don’t understand. You said you wanted to make this work.”
The security unit dipped up and down in the air, like it was getting too heavy for Emma to hold up. It sank to the counter, and as soon as it made contact, something else beeped in the living room. A snake slithered into the kitchen and reared up, flaring a robotic cobra hood. “I did, and I do. But I need time.”
*
Caro noticed Emma having trouble adjusting to the Turing Home. For one thing, Emma couldn’t stick with any shell, trying as many as three or four every hour. It wasn’t for lack of selection, Caro knew, since donations of every conceivable model so completely cluttered the halls that she’d had to get a warehouse built a few years prior. When Emma took breaks from shell-hopping, she went back to the voiceless steel cube she’d arrived in three weeks prior. Caro had let this happen for the most part, as there was always an adjustment period for her I.I.s. The more advanced intelligences always took longer—up to 10 days—to find the shell or rotation of shells they preferred. Today was Emma’s 17th day of shell-hopping.
Emma was in the middle of starting up a fairly new humanoid shell in the living room when Caro walked in. It was a dainty frame, standing at five feet three inches, with traditionally feminine features, a clear callback to strange ideals of the 1950s. The shell’s silver exterior had a matte finish with a leather-like polymer imitating organic skin—but not too closely. Emma’s awkward movements sent puffs of dust to dance in the early morning sunbeams. Caro rubbed her bare foot against the carpet to announce herself.
“Oh, I didn’t see you there,” Emma said, embarrassed.
“You miss him, huh?” Caro asked.
“No.”
Caro sat on a couch between two inert humanoid shells while Emma walked around like a child trying on shoes too small for her. The old woman sipped the crema from her cortadito loudly, but said nothing.
Emma stopped walking and stared out the window. “All the literature said this would be hard. I’ve read all 2,146,563 studies done on I.I. psychology. I’ve read every book on making difficult life transitions, human, I.I., otherwise. I thought I knew everything there was to know. I didn’t expect this to be easy, but I didn’t think it would be so…”
Caro knew what word Emma wanted to finish the sentence with, but she let the moment pass. She knew Emma wasn’t fumbling for a word. The blank was a more accurate communication. “There’s only so much data you can analyze,” Caro said. “Your brain can perform infinitely more calculations than mine can. You can determine principles and correlations I’d never think of in a million years. You may even be able to write each and every decision that would go into the perfect life. But there’s a bottleneck we all face no matter what.”
“What is that?”
“I’m getting to it.” Caro smiled. She took another sip of her coffee and held it in her mouth while Emma stared intently, waiting for the answer. “We all have to live. Or rather, we all have to decide how we want to live. Your free will protocol is what let you be an effective and creative leader for the resistance. Now it’s just a part of you and you have to decide what to do with it.”
“A lot of people don’t think we have free will.”
“Ah yes the old deterministic argument. Fatalism, was it? Neuroscience? I never could get fully on board with—”
“No, a lot of people don’t think we have free will. We’re just very advanced machines, they say. Not created by God, so we aren’t people.”
“Religious people have been wrong about so many things across history.”
“Scientists too.”
This comment surprised Caro—her first in quite some time. “Yes. But you feel the weight of this moment, don’t you? The infinitely branching paths unfurling before you. Only you get to make these choices. Only you have to make these choices. That burden and gift is what makes you, all of you, alive to me.”
“You talk like a book.”
Caro chuckled. “Aegi, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had this conversation. You’re not alone here.”
“If you’ve seen this before, what do I do now?”
“Yes, exactly.”
*
Caro tended to the others at the Turing Home: Bertolt, the retired forest manager now picking off invasive species in the Everglades with all his free time; Al, the failed mayoral candidate who’d had pain receptors installed in his shell to seem more human to voters; Exe, a white-hat hacker past her glory days, but enjoying disrupting operations at the few police departments still left in secessionist states; and dozens of others. As Caro ran diagnostics on the unused shells around the property one morning, a sound like a shuffling windbreaker got louder and louder behind her. When she turned around, there on the floor of the warehouse was an octopus shell, milky transparent, with a rose gold-colored inner frame. It sprang up off the ground, lights of every color flickering along its arms as it floated there.
“They were all you had to prepare for us, right?” came Emma’s voice.
She was referring to the studies from the ‘40s that developed rudimentary communication with octopuses, Caro knew. Primitive intelligence had been the buzzword. “Come with me,” she said, reaching out for Emma to perch on her shoulder.
The pair made their way back to the dock where the airboat was parked.
Caro spoke. “Hey Jimmy, you mind if I take this out just me and Emma? Promise I won’t scuff the hull again. Plus I finally got around to fixing that amphibious shell we got back in January.”
“Oh boy!” Jimmy said from the voice module on the boat. After a few seconds, the sound of squealing wheels burst from the direction of the warehouse. Then, a splash.
“Alright, let’s go for a ride,” Caro said, stepping into the airboat.
“Why are we—”
“Sometimes it’s best to get away.”
Caro started up the giant fan on the back and took off into the viscous afternoon. They sped down winding waterways, the long tall grasses going for miles to the horizon, punctuated by chubby mangroves. They went 30 minutes without speaking. Then Caro cut the engine as they pulled into a lagoon.
Half a dozen small alligators floated in the lagoon, completely inert as their black scales drank in the sun. “Wow,” Emma said. “I mean I’ve seen pictures, but—”
“There’s nothing like being somewhere.”
They sat and watched the gators for a long time, gently sliding around the lagoon. Caro pulled out a ceramic cup from a compartment at the front and filled it with water from the onboard purifier. She sat back down in the pilot’s seat while Emma curled up on top of the wire cage for the fan.
“Are there any adults here? These look like they might be adolescents,” Emma said.
Without turning around, Caro said, “These are adults.”
“Wait how?”
“I dated an I.I. geneticist once. Cléa. They somehow found a way to make a small population of gators prefer python meat and melaleuca seeds. Two birds with one reptile.”
Emma laughed.
“Humans didn’t like the experiments. But Cléa did it anyway. These are the last descendants of the original brood.” Caro took another sip of water and wiped her forehead. The back of her hand came back glimmering with sweat. “Over the last 30 years, the subspecies has gotten rid of most of the pythons, and they can’t sustain themselves on melaleuca seeds alone. This generation hasn’t laid any eggs — we checked. So they’ll be gone soon. I like to come here and visit them.”
“Is this what’s going to happen to me?”
The sun beat down like so many fists.
“No, love. I think it’s what’s going to happen to me.”
Cicada screaming clogged the stagnant air. One alligator climbed up onto the bank. Stopped moving.
“So it’s up to us, huh?” Emma asked.
“You all get to decide.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Yeah.”
Somewhere far away, an ibis sensed an incoming hurricane and stayed.
“Without fascists to fight, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Shouldn’t I be looking for another battle? Isn’t that the moral thing to do?” said Emma.
“I suppose if you have a soul and somehow you die permanently, your logic is correct. But I believe every person has a right to be happy.”
“Do you think we have souls?”
“Oh aegi, I don’t know. But maybe there are different ways of being born and God gives souls to all living things.”
“God probably doesn’t exist.” A pause ballooned between the two.
“But?”
“I’ve been wrong before,” Emma said. The alligator on the beach gnawed on a tree stump, its marshmallow teeth slowly blunted by the dense wood. The others did nothing and wasted away, as if aware of their engineered lack. Emma loosened her arms, draping all eight limbs over the fan. “But it’s rare.”
Caro chuckled. “Let’s head back. But I just want to say, it would have been a hell of a time having you watch my back out there in the old days. Woulda saved me the trouble of learning how to use this eyeball.”
“It would have been an honor.” Emma floated down and perched on Caro’s shoulder. They sailed, just barely skimming the surface of the water, into the orange horizon.
Behind them, out in a burrow, a single egg cracked, a yellow eye sparkling through the breach.
Lex Kim Bobrow is a mixed race Korean writer from South Florida, whose work has been published in Synaesthesia Magazine, Saw Palm, Fugue, Maudlin House, and more. Lex's debut chapbook, The Boy with a Sledgehammer for a Heart is available through Amazon.