Chapter 32: 10:30. What Are Little Girls Made Of? (pt. 1)

Beyond meeting up for the scans,^* I didn't see Grace again until the following Monday; she was busy getting the results analyzed, and I had classes and coursework to deal with. By the time she contacted me to arrange the next meeting, I'd almost forgotten about it - but soon enough, we were back in the study room, side by side on the bench.

^* (Which would've been tedious, but I wasn't conscious for them; they had me run down completely, so they could image my components more precisely.)

"Thank you, again, for making time for this project," she said, when we'd gotten situated; I wondered if all robots were incapable of a simple "hello," or if it was just her. "I'd like to continue meeting with you, but I thought you should know that I'll be gone for the next couple weeks. Hopefully we can pick back up in the new year."

"Um, sure, I guess." I wasn't thrilled about being a "project," let alone continuing to be one indefinitely, but she'd been nice enough about it so far. "What'd you have in mind for today? Did you, uh, find out anything from the scans?"

She made a more-or-less gesture with her hand. "It's still being analyzed. Before we get into that, though, I, ah...I had someone who wants to meet you, if you're alright with it...?"

This was curious; Grace was usually so straightforward, even with that tangent about movies, that I didn't think she could be hesitant or unsure. "Who's that?" I asked, looking to see if there was someone waiting in the hall.

"My daughter," she said, smiling. "We were talking about my work, and she wanted to talk to you. She's never met a machine intelligence like you before."

I felt something spring loose in my head; thankfully, it snapped back into place. "You...you have a daughter?" I still wasn't really sure about thinking of myself as a machine intelligence to begin with, but I was more focused on this. "How is that...uh, how does that...?"

She chuckled quietly. "We can go into detail later," she said, "but you could say she's 'incubating' within me. She currently exists as a separate data structure running in any spare cycles I can free up. If you're okay with it, I'm going to give her control, so she can interact with you directly."

"So...she'll be you? Or, uh, you'll be her?"

Grace nodded. "I'll be supervising, but she'll be the one you're talking to. You can let me know if she gets out of hand, but she's a pretty good girl, usually. Is this okay with you?"

"Uh, sure?" I said. I was still a little confused by the idea - when people want you to talk to someone who's not there, it's normally more of a senility or mental-illness thing - but it wouldn't hurt for me to say hello.

She shut her eyes, and there was the briefest pause, as if she'd frozen. Then she opened them, and suddenly I was looking at someone else. It was uncanny; her body was unchanged, and her features were still recognizable, but the body language and expressions were clearly those of another person. I wondered if this was what it felt like talking to someone with dissociative-identity disorder.

Daughter-in-Grace looked around the room, eyes wide, taking in every detail with a look of wonder; she spent fully as much time admiring the wood grain on the table as she did scanning the bookshelf. It was most of a minute before she finally turned her attention to me. "Hi," she said, with a shy smile. "I'm Eve. Mama said I could come out and meet you."

"Uh, h-hi," I said, a little discombobulated. "Nice to meet you. I'm, uh, S-Sue." I blinked, frowned, and shook my head, but said nothing; correcting myself would start us off on a conversation I wasn't eager to have, and I'd probably never see her again, anyway. "Do you, uh, get 'out' often?"

Eve frowned, thinking for a moment. "More than I used to. Mama has to supervise me pretty closely; I'm still getting used to physics and coordination in your world. I can't even jump rope yet." She brightened. "I can use the swings, though! ...But I don't think I could jump off safely." Her voice was somewhat less refined and more noticeably synthetic than Grace's; not that I was one to talk.

"Do you not have physics in, um, your world?" I asked, surprised. As a matter of fact, her movements were a bit ungainly, as if she weren't used to this body or these proportions. Something about it reminded me of a child dressing up in grown-up clothes that were much too big for them.

She shook her head. "Just approximations. Mama can only spare so much processor time most days, and an accurate simulation would require more of it. It'd take me much longer to grow up if we did it that way."

"How do you mean?" I said, trying to figure that one out. "Wait, does your 'time' run slower if your world is more complex?"

"Uh-huh!" she said. "Every so often, Mama extends the model. It lets me learn more, but your world speeds up relative to mine."

"That, uh, that..." That must be rough, I wanted to say, but must it? If your frame of reference was a world where time appeared to be passing at a constant rate, but a world that you only sometimes visited was passing by ever faster, would you find that troubling...? "Do you interact with anybody 'out here,' from your world?" I asked, after considering it.

Eve nodded. "Some of Mama's colleagues write me letters. I like reading them, but every time we upgrade, it takes longer and longer in their time for me to write back." She gave me a wistful smile. "I'm looking forward to living in your world, so we can talk in real time."

My brain clattered away as I tried to wrap my head around that. In a way, it wasn't so different from how humans experience time, as each passing year becomes a smaller fraction of their total lifetime, but at least it only felt like the world was outpacing you, and you only noticed once you were an adult. To actually live a relativistic life...I shook my head dazedly. "Um, so...what was the simplest your world's ever been?" I asked, trying to change the subject.

"In the beginning," she said, "I didn't even have a world-space, or an avatar. I was just an abstract object in a protected segment of Mama's memory, and all I could do was pass messages to other objects she'd created for me and receive their responses."

"That...sounds kind of boring." I wondered what the point of giving a "child" an environment like that was. Did Grace just not know better? Was it like me trying to guess what would make Lucky happy, when I had no idea what a mushroom-homunculus found truly fulfilling? "Were you at least able to talk to her?"

"Oh, Mama could communicate with me right from the start," she said, smiling sweetly. "But there wasn't much I could understand, since my experience was so limited. I couldn't even process language yet."

"Then how did you communicate?" I asked, trying to imagine what it'd be like to remember life before you could even speak. I could feel myself grinding away, plumbing the depths of my memories; I only recalled fragments before age five, for God's sake...!

"I guess it's like what you'd call 'telepathy,'" she replied. "Mama put her thoughts into my mind directly - but she was careful to tag them as hers, so I didn't confuse them with mine. We talk now, so I can learn about language, but she still does that when it's important that I understand her without ambiguity."

Must be nice, I thought, a little bitterly, but I pushed that feeling aside with an audible ker-chunk and got back on topic. "So...how long did you spend like that?"

"I didn't have a sense of time then," Eve said. "Even the next stage was just a sequence of actions with no temporal frame of reference. I got to play with blocks there. I still didn't have a world-space, but I could 'stack' them relationally and identify them by their attributes." She beamed with nostalgic pride. "Mama was so proud of me when I learned how to make a steeple..."

"Those 'worlds' were important for teaching me about cause-and-effect and object schema," she continued. "That was enough for me to handle a real world-space, and since I had to understand distance, that was the first iteration where time was relevant." She put a finger to her lip, looking thoughtful. "Mama says my first two worlds were so simple they actually ran faster than your world. She figures I spent about eighteen months in that stage of my life, but it only took about two of yours. She spent more time developing the next model than it took for me to graduate to it."

"And what does your world have now?" I asked, thinking it over; maybe I hadn't been fair to Grace. Lots of baby stuff seems trivial to adults, but to a developing mind, simple concepts are important milestones. She might've planned this better than I thought.

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Eve took a moment to think it over. Oddly, for a robot, she tallied the results up on her fingers, and her expression was so perfectly that of a little girl that I had to fight to keep from laughing at seeing it on the face of a grown woman. Was this an affect? A tic she'd picked up from somewhere? It couldn't be instinctive, but it was clearly something she did without thinking about it...

"Lots of things," she said cheerily. "We play a game where Mama sets up puzzles for me, pushing boxes around a maze. I like that one, but it's hard because there's so many possible sequences - like in chess. Even Mama doesn't have enough memory to cache them all; we've been learning about heuristics instead. And I have 'books' of pictures I can look at to try to recognize what they represent. Mama says that's important in your world; she has to help me with it now." She paused, thinking. "I wonder if you'll look different when I see you with my own vision...?"

I hope I'll be different by then, I thought, but said nothing. I could feel my inner workings churn; should I tell her that the person she thought she was meeting was really someone else? How could I explain my giving her another name without making myself out to be a liar? Did she even understand the concept of sex, or how it sort-of applied here, even though I was by any practical definition sexless? Why did I keep putting myself in these situations...!?

"We do social simulations, too," she said, apparently oblivious to my inner turmoil despite the noise it made. "I think you call it 'playing house.' We change roles, so I can practice seeing things from other points of view; it's supposed to help me develop the capacity for empathy. That's another thing Mama says is important."

Something was bugging me. "Are all of your games just developmental exercises?" I asked, clicking off-tempo for a moment. "Don't you do anything for fun?"

Eve looked at me like she didn't fully understand the question. "They are fun, though," she said, steepling her fingers. "Does it matter if they also help me learn things?"

"...I don't know," I admitted, after a moment's consideration. Having your whole life oriented around educational milestones and societal function seemed stifling to me, but if she wasn't unhappy, was it a problem...?

"And I do get to do other stuff," she said, smiling. "It's fun just to play with the physics in my world. It doesn't take any more energy for me to run, and with the right kind of ramps, I can jump higher and farther than any human could, and land from any height without injury." She grinned. "I can even fly, if I want to."

"Really?" I asked, oddly intrigued. I wondered what it would be like to grow up in a world like that; great for a kid, probably, but it made sense that Grace was so cautious about preparing her for a place where you couldn't just respawn if you accidentally rocket-jumped into a chasm. "Do you have wings, there?"

She laughed. "I can! Mama made a game out of that, too; I can do a dance and turn into a harpy-me, or a mermaid-me, or other things. It's still only approximate, but it's fun to play at being different versions of myself."

I frowned. "Do you ever get confused about which of them is the real you?"

She gave me another look like she didn't get it. "Um, all of them? The experiences are different, and my different forms can do different things, but I'm still the same person. You know, like with playing-" She paused, thought for a moment, and grinned. "Hey, do you want to play house?"

"Oh, uh," I stammered, feeling my tempo accelerate, "I, ah, I don't really know how to..."

Eve eyed me curiously. "I thought this was a common exercise in your world? I can explain it, if it helps. Come on, Sue, it'll be fun!"

For a moment, I found myself casting about for an excuse - any excuse - like I had with Grace at first. I wasn't even sure why; the idea just made me feel awkward and out-of-place, and I was sure that I'd screw it up somehow, that I'd give myself away and reveal that I really wasn't what I'd pretended to be in a vain attempt to fit what I assumed were her expectations...

But what good would that do? Shutting her down without explanation would be at least as awkward as trying to play along (and raise more questions.) And...was it a given that I'd fail? That I couldn't do it "right?" Did I really know I wasn't qualified for something small children could do, or was that my own fear of failure talking? I'd felt just as nervous and uncomfortable with Anne, but contrary to all my expectations, it...it hadn't gone badly...and I hadn't hated it...

With a delicate metallic sigh, I nodded. "...Okay, s-sure."

She grinned. "Okay! You're more grown-up, so you can be the mother and I'll be the daughter."

"I, uh," I said, back to stammering awkwardly, "I don't...know how to be a mother..." I cringed inwardly, feeling like my ears should be burning, but there was only a rattling in the back of my neck. Did Eve not notice how weird and awkward I was being right now? Was this just something about social interaction that she hadn't learned yet? Or was she like Emma, trying to "help-"

"It's okay," she said brightly. "I'll explain it to you. Here, we can say that the bookshelf over here is the living room..."

I stopped myself, trying to get a handle on my emotional state. Come on, you, I thought, you're getting all weird about a children's game. Get a grip, already. I nodded and moved over to where she was indicating, listening as she explained how things worked, in her understanding...

...It's all make-believe, anyway...

---

We spent the better part of an hour playing house, as Eve laid out her slightly unique take on how family life worked.^* After a while of me pretending to be the mom, we switched, and I had the odd experience of watching a little girl in the body of a grown woman pretend to be a grown woman, while I had to pretend to be a little girl and she laid me down on the bench, patted my head, and put me to bed.

^* (Apparently, part of the mother's job was formally deallocating and clearing out objects that the daughter left lying around unreferenced in memory.)

As she was declaring me to be in sleep mode for the night, she paused for a moment, listening to something I couldn't hear. "Um, Mama says it's time for me to go," she said reluctantly. "She says you still have things to talk about."

"Oh, right," I said, sitting up. I'd been so preoccupied with the questions our conversation had raised and the awkwardness of trying to be what I thought she expected that I'd completely forgotten about Grace - but that was why we were here, wasn't it? "Uh, it was really nice to meet you, Eve."

She smiled sweetly. "I liked meeting you, too. Um, could I...could I write you a letter, sometime...?"

"Uh, sure," I said, finding myself smiling back. "I'd like that." I was surprised, and I didn't know how much we'd have to talk about, but it was nice to feel wanted, even if it might be because I was the only person she'd ever met who wasn't an AI researcher...

Eve grinned. "Okay! I'll do that when Mama can spare the time." She hesitated for a moment, then wrapped me up in a hug. I couldn't tell if it was something about how she grabbed me, but it felt strangely like she really was a little girl, hugging me around the waist and looking up at me like I was her big sister, even though she was taller than I was. I couldn't suppress a smile, and I wrapped my arms around her and patted her gently on the back; she buried her head in my chest. "Um, goodbye, Sue."

She froze for a moment, and then Grace was back, awkwardly extricating herself from my embrace - but I was too caught up in the realization that I'd promised "Sue" would write to Eve to pay her any mind. Damn it, was I going to have to keep up this pretense forever? Or would we end up having a very uncomfortable conversation about the insanity that was my life, and how I really wasn't the person I'd presented myself as? My mechanisms hummed with agitation...

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