Gone-Gone?

by Clay Waters

“Can you hear us, Alan?” Benji asked, after everyone had filed into the guest room.

“There’s nothing wrong with my hearing, no need to shout,” Alan replied. Benji had to bite down a laugh, despite the solemnity of the occasion; the family companion had become a plucky British butler in his corrupted old age, having discarded “Mr. Collier.”

“We’re all here for you, Alan,” Benji’s sister Bess said in her honeyed New South accent. “We love you.”

Benji spied Claire trying to keep her annoyance off her face. After 12 years together he knew the look.

“Let’s go up and see Mr. Alan, honey,” he bent and whispered to his daughter, who was clutching her toy bulldog Alfie.

Benji felt of her forehead, frowned; she was already running hot. Perhaps this had not been the best idea, bringing her in to say goodbye to “Mr. Alan.” The family companion had wriggled himself underneath the covers of the guest bed and it seemed clear he would spend his last hour there. It was not the spot Benji would have chosen, surrounded by beige walls and mild paintings of extinct tigers and elephants, soothing in a numbing way, but lacking personal touch.

Then again, what would “personal touch” mean for someone like Alan?

His daughter took two small steps toward the bed, and Alan flickered to life, saying “How’s my little girl?” in a voice static-sounding but still clear.

“I’m doing well, thank you, Mr. Alan.”

“Tessa and Jamais are here too, Alan. They traveled three zones to see you. And so did their mother Bess. Remember Bess, my sister?” His niece and nephew smiled uncertainly; Bess waved enthusiastically. The trip had surely drained the family’s travel credit, which he would surely hear about soon.

“Oh yes, the angry one,” Alan said.

You said it, I didn’t, Benji thought, not daring to glance up. His daughter had spent the morning marveling at the 3-D zids of loping labradors Jamais was projecting onto the air (Benji couldn’t keep up with tech these days). He feared his daughter’s lack of a pet, real or digital, would be Bess’s excuse to deliver a lecture about how she and Claire were raising her.

Of course, his daughter was not a normal girl, and real dogs were an exorbitant luxury. Neither detail would pose a problem for Bess, who always had grand ideas for spending other people’s money.

Old family friend Tyler had made it too, standing closer to the door, a bit out of place. Tyler’s weekly online chess games with Alan had become a surprisingly riveting distraction on those long summer afternoons under restriction. A strong player, Tyler had once taken Alan to 57 moves before the inevitable checkmate.

“Is Mr. Alan going to die, Daddy?”

“In a sense,” Benji said, wishing he could switch off professor mode for a while. “He won’t be around to help the family anymore. But in the same way he came here to help our family, we’re helping him now.”

“Will he be gone or gone-gone?”

He and Claire had discussed their daughter’s verbal quirk and concluded that “Gone” meant temporary, like going out for a walk, while “Gone-Gone” was permanent. “It’s hard to say, sweetie. But always remember he had a good life with our family, and he loved you the best he could. Alan is kind of like you really,” he ventured, then glanced over guiltily to make sure Claire hadn’t heard.

“I want my coffee!” Alan spouted, the servant’s long articulated fingers flexing around a phantom mug.

That was new. Benji looked at Claire, who made a “no harm in it now” shrug. “I’ll make a small one,” Benji murmured and headed toward the kitchen. Coffee was officially a luxury. Alan had spent decades serving the Collier family coffee that he himself could not drink. He could no longer pour a cup on his own.

“I can help,” Bess called out, unhelpfully.

“Thank you, but we know where everything is,” Claire replied, following Benji. When the kitchen door had irised shut she hissed, “There’s a lecture in the air. Your sister is going to try and make this day about our daughter. ‘Your daughter needs a pet…a best friend…a hobby,’ anything to hint we’re not raising her right.”

Benji said the magic word and let the machine’s expert fingers work; four seconds later the beverage materialized before him, pristine in the China cup, topped with an intricate micro-foam design of a moonscape with winged horse. “I understand and sympathize, Claire. But this is Goodbye-to-Alan Day. Tyler’s risking a fine just to be here.” Their friend was always short on travel points, due to opinions he just couldn’t keep offline. “We just won’t give her an opening. There’s no connection between Alan and Nala.”

“You just said the connection. Out loud.”

“Coffee’s ready, Alan,” Benji announced, preempting the argument, taking the cup and saucer toward the door, which irised open to let them back through. “Here you go, sir,” he said with ironic grandeur, raising the tiny cup to Alan’s lips.

But the contents spilled out of Alan’s twitching mouth, and Bess stepped forward to clean up, rather performatively, with her handkerchief. “There we go, dear,” she said, dabbing Alan’s pointy chin. “Your owner has made quite the mess.”

“‘Owner?’ How reactionary,” Claire spouted, as if by accident.

“You know what I meant!” She was smiling, but Benji knew Bess was steaming inside, and he wasn’t entirely displeased.

“Are you comfortable, Alan?” Tyler asked to break the tension.

“Oh, yes indeed. I’m going to heaven to be with Mamaw.”

“That’s right, Alan.” Benji pondered the idea of android heaven. No corrupted files, strong black coffee, a worthy chess opponent. Could Alan truly meet Benji’s mother “Mamaw,” if only as a buffer memory within a dying internal circuit?

His daughter tugged at his hand. “Daddy, why is Mr. Alan plugged in and we’re not?”

“We don’t need plugging in, silly. As for Mr. Alan, he can’t hold a charge anymore, so he depends on current.”

Benji’s grandfather had been an early adapter, and in retrospect the servant that he had purchased 72 years ago, and whom Benji and Claire had later inherited (technical name Alan 5.0) hadn’t quite emerged from the uncanny valley when it went to market. People had gawked in the street. Now, any such sighting of such an “Alan 5” would be the subject of both ironic appreciation and jubilant reminiscence. But family servant Alan Collier hadn’t been street-worthy for some time.

He mouthed a silent prayer for Alan. Just in case. A decade ago, the Supreme Court had by 8-3 granted transhuman rights to androids, launching debates over whether they had souls (“They’re just bits and bytes!” “They can write their own poetry!” “They can’t even tie their shoes properly!”), arguments no less fiery for being hopelessly abstract.

Alan had begun a rant, something about the war – he’d picked the best time to talk about the war, on the eve of departure.

Claire was holding back emotion. They exchanged nods over Alan’s bedside, and Benji made his way to the far wall and gently uncoupled the plug. Then he approached Alan for the final time.

“Alan, I believe it’s time to go.” He reached for his servant’s right hand, shaking the confused fingers best he could.

“Good night, Mr. Collier,” Alan replied with a final surge of his old dignity, returning the handshake with force. Benji couldn’t help but marvel: Only the immaculate dryness spoiled the illusion of human flesh (no call for sweating androids, save as war spies.)

His phone showed Alan’s vitals lowering fast. He didn’t want to watch Alan ebb to zero, for the family’s once-vital android assistant to devolve utterly into inert alloy. No need to mar a life of memories. He took his little girl’s hand. “Let’s say goodbye to Mr. Alan and get you to bed, honey.”

His daughter stretched stiffly to kiss Alan’s cheek. “Good night, Mr. Alan.”

“Good night, Nala.”

*****

The sound of her mechanized knee joints navigating up the stairs came as a hiss, barely audible. When they had gained the landing Benji picked her up and carried her the rest of the way. The material was very light.

“Is Daddy sad?” His daughter asked, touching her own tearless eyes.

“Yes, Daddy’s a little bit sad.”

“Don’t be sad, Daddy, Mr. Alan’s not really gone.”

“I suppose that’s true.” In a sense. It was actually an option. But he couldn’t think of shipping Alan away as spare parts. Not now.

“It is true,” she replied, dissatisfied with his response. “I’m listening to him now. He’s talking about Mamaw.”

He looked at her, startled. Was it possible? Most six-year-olds (Nala’s factory-set age) had imaginary lives. Nala didn’t. Which meant…a question for another day. His head already hurt.

Benji smoothed back his daughter’s rich, almost lifelike dark curls. The uncanny valley had been smoothed into a dip; she passed as human on sight. But those close to her would eventually clock on to how she never aged or forgot anything, to her slightly off laughter and arcane vocabulary, still stiff from pre-programming. Even how her face looked the same awake as asleep, like a painting. Nala knew she was different, but didn’t seem to know just how, not yet.

The day she’d been delivered to their barren family, the packing material had come with a hypothetical Q&A, printed on real paper, of possible responses for the day when she began asking about herself. Bess had insisted on being at that unveiling, and while Benji’s future daughter stood mannequin-stiff on the plate-sized charging disc, Bess had unleashed an emotional outburst while Claire sat, silently enraged: Bringing up a child in this world – a child that will never grow up! That will watch her parents grow old and die!

If she’s lucky, he had thought in retrospect. If he had known how badly the world would sour, would he have still brought her home, the child he and Claire couldn’t have?

Yes, he thought. God forgive me. Yes.

We’re not like you, Alan had told him once, we’re just programmed to act so, a revelation that had made Benji feel both better and worse. At first, he had feared he would never come to love her and then one day he’d looked into Nala’s eyes (cerulean blue, matching Claire’s) and on that day her happiness had become the most important thing in his life.

“And so to bed,” he said when they’d made it to her room, which had no bed.

“Daddy?”

“Yes, honey?”

“May we buy a bulldog?”

“Don’t you like Alfie?” Gently he removed the toy bulldog from her grip and set it on the table.

“Daddy! I am talking about a real bulldog.”

Benji rubbed his eyes. “We can talk about it in the morning, Nala. Now let’s get your bluebird blanket and get you to bed.”

Nala had no physical need for either bed or blanket—her internal temperature adjusted automatically and her joints were of course mechanically robust—but she had absorbed the “bluebird blanket” idea from somewhere and had demanded one, to the point of scrunching up her face in natural fashion (the skin-tech was truly astonishing). No tears had come, of course. His daughter would never shed a tear in her life.

Absent catastrophe, Nala would outlive him and Claire and Bess and all of her current six-year-old cohorts. She was on a long path of obsolescence—longer than Alan’s—but nothing was forever. The last known working CD had become unplayable a few years ago.

Benji imagined Nala silhouetted in a doorway, clutching Alfie as a flash smothered them in blinding white. Or a Nala stranded with no living relatives, ebbing away among far-future strangers—or worse, stripped for parts as part of a last-ditch war effort. Perhaps Bess had been right all along. Would things ever get better? Could they? If not in his or Claire’s lifetime, then in Nala’s?

Benji laid the blanket over his daughter’s shoulders. “You’re running low, Nala. Let’s get you set up.” He and Claire still called her by her factory name. It marked a hesitation to commit which they feared reflected badly on them. Someday soon they would have to decide on a real name, for their real girl.

Gently, Benji set the Nala 1.0 upon the recharge disc, felt for the gentle swell on the neck, and powered his daughter down for the night.

BIO: Clay Waters I has had stories published in Broad River Review, Dark Horses, Morpheus Tales, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and The Santa Barbara Review.