The Melancholy of Mechagirl

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.”