Intelligent Truth - Full Story

As you may (or may not) know, the anthology The Dragon and the Stars (DAW, May 2010) is a finalist for an Aurora Award. This is Canada's highest science fiction award. In light of this announcement, I have posted my story, "Intelligent Truth," which appears in the anthology. It was edited by authors Eric Choi and Derwin Mak, who did a terrific job! If you're Canadian, I hope you will consider voting for us in the category of Best English Related Work.

Intelligent Truth

by Shelly Li

“Let me raise a white deer on my green slope, And ride to the great mountain when I have the need; How can I bow and scrape to men of high rank and men of high office, Who never will suffer from being shown an honest-hearted face.” 

Katie Huang glanced up from the paper she held in her hand, focused in on the robot sitting across the table from her. According to the robot’s paperwork, his name was Searle, produced in 2076, making him part of the Cobalt Generation.

“Searle,” Katie said. “These four lines are the last lines of a poem by Li Bai, a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty. Will you give me your interpretation of them?”

Searle blinked, his human-looking eyes staring back at her. No words came out of the robot’s mouth.

Katie leaned back in her chair and waited as Searle processed the words, probably keying each line into his inner dictionary, comparing notes with various Internet sites, trying to find an answer to her question.

But, in the end, Searle had to give his own interpretation. After all, that was what Katie had asked of him, and a robot could not disobey a human order.

So Katie waited, meanwhile letting her thoughts separate. She thought of Charles, waiting at home with dinner. She thought of what he was cooking up today. He always had silly little surprises for her, whether it be a love letter hidden under the dinner plate or various presents taped to the bottom of the dining table.

A smile crossed her face. Out of all the presents in the world, though, the only one she wanted was the one that Charles had yet to give her.

“My interpretation of the four lines that you read to me,” Searle’s words bled into her thoughts, “is that this person lives on the outside of civilization. He spends his days with nature, because he does not like to interact with others.” Searle paused. “He thinks that everyone looks down on him because he was not blessed with an honest face.”

Katie nodded and looked down at Searle’s robotic grading rubric. She scrawled at the bottom: Does not understand how to compare verses to historical allusions and cannot firmly grasp extended metaphors. Human status denied.

“Thank you, Searle,” Katie said as she looked up. After another day of analyzing the psyche of all kinds of advanced robots, she still hadn’t been able to categorize one, just one, as a legal human being.

After another day, she was still a failure.

“You are dismissed.”

Katie watched Searle walk to the door. He even had the swagger of a human, that little hunch sitting on his shoulders.

In fact, if Searle were out walking the streets, Katie didn’t think that even she, one of the many doctors who conducted the robotic psychological examinations here at BioCorp, could tell the difference between him and a human.

But if he can’t understand the inner meanings of a poem, Katie thought, then he will never be anything more than a robot.

A machine.

#

It took Katie less than ten seconds of sitting down at the dinner table to realize that something was off about Charles today.

Her fingers started to tingle.

Could this be the night? she wondered as she watched her boyfriend set the table.

Over the year and a half that they had been together, Katie had gotten to know Charles pretty well. Well, more than pretty well. She knew Charles like she knew the back of her hand.

And right now, Charles looked nervous. Charles never looked nervous, or frenzied, unless he had something important to say.

Charles sat down at the table and noticed Katie staring at him. His lips formed a shaky smile. “Katie,” he said, reaching over the table to grab her hand.

Katie had to grind her teeth together to keep from smiling. This must be the moment, she thought, readying herself. She could hear her heart thundering, pounding against the walls of her chest.

He’s going to propose.

“I have something I want to show you,” Charles said, his eyes glued to the table, refusing to look at her. 

“Oh. And what’s that?”

Charles slid out of his seat, pulling Katie up with him as he led her to the bedroom.

Katie’s hold on Charles’ hand tightened as he opened the door. “After you,” he said, staring deep into her eyes. 

And so Katie, barely able to breathe, entered the room.

She took a look around, not seeing anything out of the ordinary. There was the king-size bed, carefully made that morning by their robot, Queenie. Queenie had also cleaned the wood floor and wiped down the floor-to-ceiling window that exposed Chicago’s glittering Lake Michigan. 

“Charles,” she said, turning around. “What—”

All of a sudden the closet door burst open and a woman jumped out between her and her boyfriend.

Katie stopped.

Her mouth dropped open.

This can’t be happening, she thought, fighting the urge to scream as she stood in place, staring.

After a few seconds, she found her voice. “Mom. What are you doing here?” Her gaze shifted to Charles.

There was a helpless expression covering his face.

“Aren’t you surprised, honey?” her mother said, opening her arms and pulling Katie into an embrace. Her mother was a couple sizes skinnier than her, and hugging her was like hugging a stick.

“Very surprised,” Katie said. “But what are you doing here?”

Her mother’s eyebrows furrowed to form a frown, and she made that tssk noise with her tongue, making Katie’s insides cringe, her stomach twist. That tssk was all too familiar, too haunting.

“Why must you talk like that?” her mother said. Her English, after all these years, still carried an accent, a reminder of a separate life back in China. “Can’t a mother come visit her child when she misses her?”

Her mother turned to face Charles, giving Katie an opportunity to pierce a glare into him.

“Now, Charles,” her mother said. “Before we all eat dinner, will you help me carry my things from the car? It’s parked downstairs.”

“Yeah, no problem, Nina,” Charles said and followed Katie’s mother out of the room.

Katie let out a sigh as she watched her mother and her boyfriend disappear out the door of the apartment. 

I can’t believe I was actually expecting a proposal tonight! Now, standing alone in the silence of her home, she wanted to slap herself.

The reason Charles had been so antsy was because he had hidden her mother to surprise her.

Dear God, Katie thought as she strode out of the bedroom.

This wasn’t a surprise present. This was damnation.

#

Her mother’s last piece of luggage arrived with yet another surprise, one that Katie was not sure how to feel about.

“Do you like him?” Nina said, motioning for the robot to put down the luggage. “I got him cheap, on sale at an outlet mall in Indiana.”

Katie took one look at the robot before tearing her eyes away and telling her mother, “Mom, there’s a reason you got this thing cheap. It’s an Aqua Generation robot. A first-generation machine that was made in the 2050s.”

“Hey, this ‘robot’ has a name, honey buns,” the robot interjected.

Katie’s head snapped back to the robot, who then said, “The name’s Carter.”

“Carter.” Katie smiled and said to her mother, “The thing is even dysfunctional. A robot doesn’t interrupt communication between two humans. It’s one of the rules in his programming.”

“Bite me,” Carter said.

“Now, cool down, Carter.” Nina cast a disapproving look at Katie. “He’s more human than any of the ‘advanced’ robots that are sold nowadays, and I’m keeping him.”

Katie threw her hands up in the air and looked to her boyfriend, who, again, offered no support. He was helpless against the five-foot-two bully standing in the room with them.

“Whatever,” she finally said, walking out of the room. She could win an argument against anybody, but when it came to her mother, it felt like all the words in the world retreated from her. 

What do I know, right? I only have a PhD in robotic diagnostics.

#

“I cannot believe you,” Katie said, as Charles climbed in on the other side of the bed.

Charles lay down with a sigh and turned to face her. “What was I supposed to do, Katie? It was your mother’s idea to surprise you. You want me to refuse her?”

“Yes!” Katie exclaimed. “You could have told her that I was really busy and that she should come stay with us some other time.”

“She’s just staying for the weekend. It won’t be too bad.”

But Katie’s mind was no longer on her mother. Her thoughts had now jumped to the robot in the other room.

Carter.

“Is it just me, or was that a malfunctioned robot that my mother brought into our apartment?” she asked Charles. As an operations manager at the same company, Charles worked with the BioCorp scientists on the mechanical functions of the different generations of robots.

Charles rubbed his eyes and set his glasses down on the nightstand. “Look, Carter is an Aqua Generation robot. He’s a prototype, modeled after the average human being. He’s going to be a little on the sassy side, and not too pleasant either. And even work ethic-wise, he’s not going to be as efficient as, say, Queenie.”

At the mention of her name, the robot standing at the corner of the room blinked to life. “What can I help you with, Charles?” she asked, the color returning to her flesh. 

“Nothing, Queenie,” Charles said, waving the robot away, and so Queenie retreated to the corner of the room and shut down again.

“Every generation of robots is different, Katie,” he said. “And the older they are, the more unsophisticated, the more inhuman they are.”

But that answer failed to satisfy. Even with her eyes closed in the darkness, Katie couldn’t stop thinking about Carter.

In the silence, she could hear the echoing noise of the second hand in her head, ticking to a new minute, then a new hour.

Finally, when she could no longer take the curiosity welling up inside her, she slid out of bed and, careful not to disturb the sleeping Charles, tiptoed out the door.

Darkness pressed on the hallway from all sides, oozing into her senses as she made her way to the study at the end, her footsteps silent.

With her mother’s breathing in the same house as Katie’s again, she could feel herself transported back to her teenage years, slipping silently out of the house late on Friday nights, while her friends waited in a car down the street.

Her mother always said that nothing good happened after midnight.

Then again, nothing fun happened before.

Katie rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and set her hand on the doorknob, slowly opened the door and stepped into her study. It was her and Charles’ joint study, but since Charles almost never ventured into the room unless he needed to surf the Internet or answer emails, it was Katie’s diagrams that were plastered over the walls, Katie’s papers that were scattered across the floor.

She hadn’t logged off work, so the database search engine popped up right away.

Aqua Generation. She hit the search button. In her five years of working at BioCorp, she had never tested a first-generation robot, possibly because the Cyan Generation had just popped onto the market at the time, making robots like Carter outdated machinery.

There were only eight reported psychological examinations for Aqua Generation robots, and out of the eight, only three had examiner comments. The rest were “Yes” and “No” checkboxes for robotic performance. Almost all examiners checked “No” for “Willingness to Perform Tasks.” Half checked “Yes” for “Ability to Think at Normal Human Speed,” and only one checked “Yes” for “Pleasant Demeanor.”

The category “Able to Understand Poetry” was non-existent.

Katie ran a hand through her hair as she scanned the rest of the data on the screen. Eight psychological examinations were reported, she thought. The second-generation robots, the Cyan Generation, logged a total of three thousand and sixty-six examinations.

How can this be? Katie leaned back in her chair, thinking. She remembered the first day she had arrived at the robotics testing office. Outside, there had to have been thousands of deactivated Aqua Generation robots hanging off the trucks.

“So where did their examination reports go?” she wondered out loud. Could an administrator possibly have erased them?

If so, it didn’t make sense.

“Hey,” a voice suddenly said, a few feet away. 

Katie jumped an inch off her seat and turned toward the shadow leaning against the framework of the door, where the light in the study couldn’t reveal him. 

“Who is it?” she said, standing up quickly.

The person stepped into the study, and relief washed over her.

“Oh,” Katie said and dropped back into her seat. “Carter. What are you doing, walking around at this hour?”

Carter shrugged. “Nina is sleeping, but with all the racket you’re making in here…”

Katie frowned as she looked at Carter, at his humanistic face. He couldn’t walk as smoothly as his successors, who moved with flawless step and meticulous swings. Even when Carter talked, his lips couldn’t form perfect “O’s”.

She shifted her stare from Carter to her computer, where the list of examinations for Aqua Generation robots was still pulled up.

An idea hit her.

“Please, sit down,” she said, gesSearle to the chair across her desk. 

Carter sat. He didn’t look happy or even pleasant.

“Have you ever read a poem, Carter?”

“No,” Carter said. “You see, at slave school, we learned how to cook meals, vacuum, repair leaks… those kinds of things.”

Katie couldn’t help but smile. “Is that bitterness I detect?” In the back of her mind, her curiosity had peaked. Robots have never been programmed with an understanding of things like bitterness or sarcasm. Katie had written a paper on the subject in grad school--and if her professor had met Carter, she would have failed the class.

“Actually, hold on,” Carter said. “When I was examined, way back in the 2050s, the man in the room read me a poem.”

“Really?” Katie sat up in her seat. Then why were there no records of the poem interpretations? “Which poem did the man read you?”

Carter shrugged. “Something by Walt Whitman.”

“Ahh.” 

Carter then proceeded to say, “I don’t remember the title of the poem. But man, it couldn’t have been any more communistic.”

She hadn’t expected an answer like that. “What did you just say?” Katie said.

“Transcendentalism is just a mask for communism,” Carter said. “Being one with nature, transcending the physical and empirical… Whitman is just a better-groomed Karl Marx.”

The joke would have been funny if it had come from the mouth of a human. But in Carter’s case…

A shiver traveled down Katie’s spine. Could she really have a human-robot on her hands? A robot with his own thoughts, his own opinions? 

“Well, I’m going to read to you a poem by my favorite poet of all time,” Katie said, grabbing the Chinese version of The Selected Poems of Li Bai out of her drawer.

A robot, though it was the most complex piece of machinery in the twenty-first century, could not possibly comprehend the deep meanings in human poems. Because to understand poetry, one must identify with the emotions expressed on the page.

And robots did not have emotions. 

But, looking at Carter, Katie began to doubt.

She flipped to a page, translated the first few lines of the poem to English in her head, and began. “Blue mountains to the north of the walls, A white river winding about them; It is here that we must separate, And go out through a thousand miles of dead grass.”

She stopped and looked at the robot, meanwhile grabbing a pen and a notepad. “These are the four opening lines from Li Bai’s famous poem, ‘Farewell to a Friend’. Will you give me your interpretation of them?”

At this question, every robot that Katie had ever examined would pause and start up their internal search engines, combing the Internet and the dictionary for the most accurate answer.

Carter, on the other hand, immediately said, “Easy. In the first two lines, Li Bai is using the image of mountains surrounded by a river to illustrate the relationship of two friends, as inseparable as Mother Nature’s children. It’s the basic form of love.”

He just explained to me what love is, Katie thought, her pen shaking as she set the tip down on paper. How in the world does he understand love?

“As for the last two lines,” Carter continued, “there comes a day that the mountain and the river, the two friends, must separate and go their own ways. Li Bai is saying that, after spending so much time alongside your best friend, traveling the road with no voice to talk to but your own is going to seem scary and dead.” 

Katie dropped the pen. It clattered to a stop on the floor.

Carter frowned and said, “Hey, butterfingers. Your pen is on the ground.”

After a pause, Katie scooped up the pen and stood. “Please wait here, Carter,” she said. “I have to go make a phone call.”

“Hmm. Will it be a quick thirty-second conversation, or will you be confessing your sins to a priest?”

Katie didn’t answer the question, and instead, tossed her Li Bai book at him. “This might keep you occupied,” she said and left for the second spare bedroom a couple doors down.

After three rings, her manager picked up. 

“Hey, Dennis, I’ve got something hot on my hands,” Katie said.

“Well, it better be if you’re calling me this late and on a personal line.”

Katie took a deep breath and said, “I just did a psychological examination on a robot. He passed the poetry comprehension test.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Dennis?” Katie said. “Did you hear what I just said?”

“Let me connect you to Jeremy Lawrence. He’s the director of robotics distribution at the company. Hold on.”

The wait was short. 

“Hi. Is this Katie Huang?” a voice came on.

Katie cleared her throat. “Yes, this is she.” She had never spoken to anyone this high up on the management chain, and the upper levels didn’t speak to her, either--unless something major had happened.

“Well, Katie, it’s nice to make your acquaintance. My name is—”

“Dennis told me who you are.”

“Ahh. Good. Let’s see—first, I want to thank you for making this a priority and contacting us straight away. If this robot indeed qualifies for human status, you will find a generous bonus on your desk soon.”

“Umm. Thank you, sir.” 

“Of course,” Lawrence said. “Now, tell me: this robot that you just examined, which generation is he?”

“Aqua,” Katie answered. “He belongs to my mother. He started exhibiting unusual behavior upon arriving at my home. I only examined him when I searched for prior psychological examinations of Aqua Generation robots and found that there was almost nothing in the database. Why is that?”

“Oh. You saw that, huh?” 

Katie was about to say something, but then thought it would be best to keep quiet. He had obviously heard her.

After a few seconds, Lawrence said, “Well, it was just a matter of some spring cleaning.” He chuckled. “The Aqua Generation robots are so outdated that I didn’t think anyone would go hunting for their examinations.”

“Yes, but you didn’t even leave it up there for referencing in the future?” Katie pressed. Lawrence’s answer didn’t make any sense. Database storage was so extensive and cheap. Nobody cleaned anything off systems anymore.

“Yes, I suppose we could have,” Lawrence said. “But anyway, is it okay if we stop by in the morning and take the robot back to BioCorp, have our scientists run some tests?”

Katie frowned. “I don’t know if that’s possible,” she said. “You see, the robot isn’t mine. He’s my mother’s.”

“BioCorp has the right to take away any robot at any time for reasons that will be disclosed to the robot’s owner after the robot has been readmitted to the labs for a period of twenty-four hours,” Lawrence answered. “It’s in the safety clause in the buyer’s contract.”

“Oh.”

“So we’ll be by in the morning.”

But before Lawrence could hang up, Katie asked, “Sir? Umm… what will happen with Carter the robot if he tests positive for human status?”

The silence that followed sent chills down her back.

Oh, God, Katie thought. And in that instant, everything hit her. The erased information on the database, the urgency in Lawrence’s voice…

They’re trying to erase the existence of all Aqua Generation robots.

Finally, Lawrence said, “Don’t worry about it,” and hung up.

Oh, God. Katie leaned against the wall of the room, shaking. What have I done?

The sound of a scraping chair from the study reminded her that Carter was still waiting for her.

“How was your call?” Carter asked as Katie stepped into the study.

Katie took a deep breath. She owed him the truth. “I was just on the phone with the director of robotics distribution. He’s sending some people to come get you tomorrow.”

“I know,” Carter said. “I heard everything.”

Katie nodded. She half-expected that he would listen in. “I think that--”

“They’re going to kill me?” Carter said. A smile played at the corners of his lips.

“They’re going to deactivate you, yes.” Katie kept her eyes trained on the ground as she spoke, afraid to meet his gaze. “But Carter, I didn’t know until after I had told him. I mean, when I saw that most of the Aqua Generation information in our database was missing, I was confused, maybe even suspicious, but I was just doing my job. Nothing clicked for me until--”

“I know,” Carter said again. 

Katie frowned and returned to her seat. “How do you know?”

“Let’s just say that, after forty years of serving under humans, watching their expressions and listening to their tones of voice, I’ve become skilled at seeing the emotions under the skin.” 

Katie couldn’t believe it. Despite the wires and systems under his synthetic skin, Carter could feel. He couldn’t be anything but human.

Carter cocked his head to one side and said, “You looked rattled when you came back, whereas before you left, you were full of excitement, like you had just bought a pair of shoes for fifty percent off.”

Katie chuckled, the noise echoing off the walls of the study. “That would be my mother, not me,” she said. “She’s always going after the bargains.”

“That she is.”

Katie nodded. “Well, Carter…” She paused as she stared into Carter’s eyes. Were they the windows to an internal computer? Did he even have a soul?

She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and said, “You should leave. I’ll just tell them that you heard me talking on the phone and decided to escape.”

Carter frowned. “Escape? Save myself?”

“That’s right. They’ll be here in the morning. That gives you at least four hours to disappear.”

A few seconds passed before Carter shook his head and said, “No. I can’t.”

Katie didn’t understand. “What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can, Carter. It’s a human instinct--it’s called self-preservation. They’re going to demolish you.”

“I can’t leave,” Carter said. “Don’t bother asking me why. Every part of me is pushing me to run.” He looked down at his lap. “But something inside of me tells me that I can’t.”

“Oh my God.” Katie took a few steps, jolted by the shock he had delivered to her. “Oh my God.” The surprises wouldn’t stop coming.

“What?”

“You’re so humanistic, in every way,” she said. “But you don’t possess the basic instinct of self-preservation.”

Carter chuckled nervously and leaned back in his seat. He sounded scared, and with good reason. “Sucks for me.”

An awkward moment of silence passed.

“Well, I’m going to go to--” Katie smiled, not knowing what to say. “I have to wake up my mom and tell her--” She stopped. She didn’t know what she was going to tell her mother, though the truth itself would be cumbersome enough to grasp.

“I’m going to be gone by morning,” Carter said as Katie stood up from her seat.

Katie paused.

“Do you think we could chat?” Carter looked up at her with his pleading human eyes. “I know that I haven’t been the nicest little house slave, but--indulge me? Grant a robot’s dying wish.”

Katie fought back a smile and thought about his request. She had just been responsible for sending an innocent being to his death. The least she could do was sacrifice a few hours of her time.

“What do you want to chat about?”

Carter shrugged. “Human things. Human life.”

“That’s a pretty broad topic.”

“Then let’s narrow it down.” He gestured at the study door, though his eyes never left Katie’s. “Why are you so wary to see your mother?”

Katie forced out a laugh and said, “I’m not wary. I’m just--” She stopped herself. Why bother keeping up this pretense? She was talking to something that would be silenced by tomorrow morning. “Yeah, my mother and I, we don’t get along.”

“And why’s that?”

Katie sighed. “Different values, I guess. She emigrated from China when I was still in the womb, so that I could be a citizen of this country. And she’s always dangled that ‘sacrifice’ in front of me, pushing me to be the best. No, to be better than the best.”

Carter smiled and said, “I’ve never had a mother, but I think that all mothers want the best for their daughters. Their worst fear is seeing their daughters follow the same path that they did.”

“Yeah.” Carter was right on the money with that statement. “But I don’t know. Her priorities in life are different than mine. You see, my dad left us when I was three--”

“I know. Nina told me.”

“Right. Well, my mother’s always told me that love is overrated. When finding a husband, security is the most important.” Katie shook her head and looked out the window behind Carter.

Raindrops pitter-pattered against the glass, cutting through the silence of the night.

“Mom always said that every type of love in this world is just a reflection of self-love,” she continued. “If you love yourself, you won’t need the love of others.”

“Then what about your boy toy, sleeping in the other room over there?” Carter asked. “Are you in love with him?”

Katie opened her mouth to say “Yes,” because when someone asks you a question like that, the answer is so obvious that it’s almost a reflex.

But this time Katie paused. Stopped. 

Seconds ticked by.

And then she asked, “What’s your definition of love?”

Carter chuckled and shook his head. “If you have ever been in love, you wouldn’t need someone else to define it for you.”

The words stabbed into Katie’s chest, planting pain like fire. “How would you know that?” she shot back. “Don’t tell me that you’ve been in love before.”

Carter snorted. “No, I’ve never been in love, nor have I ever been loved. People don’t love pieces of machinery. They kick you around and abuse you, knowing that if you break down and cease to perform, they can take you down to the shop and replace you.”

Katie said nothing and looked down at her hands, folded across her lap.

“Anyway, enough about me,” Carter said. “Tell me more about you.”

Katie blinked away the tears clouding her eyes and said, “What do you want to know?”

Carter shrugged. “Tell me why you wanted to go in robotic diagnostics. The guy who examined me thirty years ago treated psychological examinations like a job, something that would pay the bills and feed his family. But you…” He moved his seat closer. “But you have a passion for robotics. You were so determined, even desperate, to seek out humanistic traits in me. Why?”

Katie smiled through the bitterness mushrooming in her heart. “I grew up as an outsider,” she said. “It’s not that the other kids didn’t accept me. I always had a lot of friends. But my mother, she never let me get too close with anybody. There were no such things as sleepovers, birthday parties, and after-school activities. So, when I was little, I had no such thing as a best friend to tell all my secrets to. As I grew older and more rebellious, this changed, but--” She swallowed the lump in her throat and continued. “I’ve never forgotten what it was like to be on the outside looking in, desperately wanting to break the glass between me and the people I wanted to be.”

Carter nodded. “And so, by analyzing the psychological awareness of robots--”

“I wanted to break the glass between robots and human society,” Katie said. “I thought, if I could find a robot that was so humanistic that he was no different from a real human--”

She had to laugh at herself, realizing that voicing her thoughts out loud sounded even more stupid than it seemed inside her head.

“I don’t know. Maybe then I would feel like I achieved something, like I’ve helped someone else break the barrier.”

The more she talked, the more things she revealed about herself, like thoughts and ideas that she had been planning to take to the grave. As she spoke, Katie felt something inside her escape, little by little. Like the boulder that sat on her chest was eroding away.

Like, finally, everything was beginning to make sense.

#

The men came to the door before the sun even crept up. 

“What is going on?” Nina demanded as she stepped out of her room, still dressed in her pajamas. 

Katie, Charles, and Carter were already standing at the front door.

“Katie, why are you all making all this racket at--” Nina stopped when her eyes fell upon the five other men in the room. 

“You must be Ms. Huang’s mother,” one of the men said. He handed Nina a business card. His name was Ian Roberts. “We are with BioCorp’s robotic collection division, here to pick up a certain robot. Carter, I believe?”

Before Nina had a chance to reply, Carter stepped forward and said, “That would be me.”

Standing there, Katie felt her stomach twisting, turning. 

“Now, hold on,” Nina said, grabbing Carter by the arm as he walked toward the men. “Carter, where are you going?”

“We’re taking him to the testing lab at BioCorp,” Roberts said. “You see, Carter here has passed our robotic psychological examination and is now pending human status.”

Nina looked confused. “I never submitted Carter for any examinations.”

Roberts’ pleasant smile faded. “Umm…” He looked from Nina to Katie.

“I gave Carter the psychological examination,” Katie said. Her mother’s eyes jumped to her. “I read a poem to him last night, just to see whether or not he could interpret it as a human could, and he passed.”

“You gave him one of your nonsensical psychological examinations?” Nina exclaimed with a glare. “Why in the world--”

“Nina, it’s okay,” Carter interrupted. “I’m just going with these men down to the lab to get tested. I’ll be back soon.”

None of the men said anything, and Katie stood with her eyes glued to the ground, her heart racing with an unsteady beat of guilt and fear as Nina rounded on her again. “Katie, how could you?”

“Ma’am.” Roberts stepped in between them, a sheet of paper in his hand. “This is the buyer’s contract you signed in Indiana when you bought Carter, a little over three months ago. If you read the safety clause below, you’ll see that BioCorp is perfectly within its rights to take possession of any robot, at any time, without giving a reason until BioCorp has kept the robot for more than twenty-four hours.”

Nina’s eyes scanned the paragraph. She said nothing afterwards. 

“All right,” Carter said, smiling. “I guess it’s time for us to go.” 

Roberts nodded and motioned for the men behind him to file out.

As Carter placed his first foot out the door, he suddenly stopped and turned around.

“I almost forgot,” he said, looking down at Li Bai’s book of poems, still clutched at his side. He handed the book back to Katie. “Thank you.”

Katie looked down at the book. “You can read this?” She had a hard time keeping her voice steady. “When did you finish?”

“While I was waiting for you to finish your phone call,” Carter said. “It took a little longer, using the Internet to translate the Chinese, but I did finish. By the way, this Li Bai guy is a total cheese ball of emotions. I can see why you like him. You’re both so much alike.”

Katie tittered, pushing down the feelings that were convulsing inside her. It hurt. It was supposed to hurt. 

“Oh, don’t be so sad,” Carter said. “You look like someone just burned your favorite doll.” 

And with those words, he nodded to Roberts, standing a few paces in front of him. “I’m ready.”

Katie called out, “Wait.”

Carter stopped.

“Wait.” She took a deep breath, examining Carter from head to toe. She wanted to remember him. She needed to.

We had it right the first time, she thought as she stared into Carter’s eyes. On the first try, we created a breed of robots that could feel, that could think.

And the company, terrified of their own creation, was trying to erase all evidence of Aqua Generation robots having ever walked the Earth.

“This is murder,” Katie blurted out. “You can’t do this. Carter may not have a beating heart. He may not have blood streaming through his body like you and me. But his brain, the freethinking system that BioCorp installed into him, tells him that he is human. He is human.”

She stepped forward and grabbed Carter by the arm. “And for this reason alone, I cannot let you haul him away and recycle his parts like a defective machine.” 

Silence blanketed the room for a moment, and then Roberts, standing beside Carter, spoke. “Ms. Huang, I’m not sure where you’re getting these ideas. We are only taking the robot down to the lab for extensive checkup, as you probably expected we would. You were the one who called in.”

Katie had nothing to say. She clenched her teeth as tightly as she could, but the tears that she fought against eventually crept down her face.

“Hey, look, don’t worry about me,” Carter interjected.

All eyes in the room found their way to him. 

The robot grabbed a hold of both Katie’s hands, looked deep into her eyes and said, “Remember, don’t live your life caring about the criticisms of others and changing yourself in order to realize dreams that weren’t even your own. You’ll lose sight of who you really are.”

Feeling weak all over, Katie said, “What if it’s already too late?”

Carter shook his head. “It’s never too late,” he said. “Because I see who you really are. I see you, trapped inside who you’ve become, waiting to burst out.” He gave her hands a squeeze before letting go, stepping back. “So don’t be afraid to laugh when something’s funny. Don’t be afraid to cry when you’re hurt. But most important of all, don’t be afraid to speak up if you’re unhappy. Life’s too short to be unhappy.”

Though every part of her ached, Katie thought that the last impression she would give Carter should be covered with a smile.

  Carter smiled back. “Everything will be all right.”

The words froze Katie’s heart.

Everything will be all right, she repeated. Her father had told her the same thing, on the night that he packed his bags and left.

She watched in silence as Carter and the men walked out the door, disappearing from sight. This time she made no attempt to stop them.