The Old Brand-New

“What do you do with peace when all you know is war?”

 

A crash shook the night.

Lena shot to her feet and glanced around the kitchen. Something had shattered. Where was it? The dining room? The living room? She slipped a carving knife into her hand from the white, marble counter and wandered to the doorway. Leaning out, she scanned the foyer. Not a soul in sight. The double doors remained closed, her garage-door-sized picture windows were undisturbed, and her six giant vases still rested atop the marble columns beside the main stairway. She wandered out into the room, her footsteps echoing in the empty air. It was such a big house. Too big. She’d regretted it since the day she’d moved in. Four stories tall, with 146 rooms, plus 400 acres of lush, green fields—and only one old woman to live in it.

She wandered from the foyer to the dining room, to the primary living room, to the secondary living room, to the tertiary living room, to the study room. But there was nothing. Just marble floors, white walls, mahogany tables and chairs. Forty years, and she still wasn’t sure she’d actually visited all of the rooms. The more she walked, the more her back ached. Even the fortune she’d poured into genetic re-engineering couldn’t make her 117-year-old body feel young. Granted, she hardly looked any older than forty, and she could still run a few miles, if need be, but time always beat science in the long run. She was functionally immortal at this point, but human brains had their limits. Lena knew all about that. She’d forgotten so much over the years. Hell, she could hardly remember half of the things she used to know. Even so, people still called her ‘Doctor.’

As she rounded a corner, she stared at the empty hallway before her. All those rooms, gathering dust. And now she’d have to walk in and out of them for hours, thanks to that damn noise. Was probably just the house settling. But there was always that chance, wasn’t there? That someone had slipped in, despite the millions she’d dumped into that stupid security system. Staring out a window, she saw at a sea of snow in the night, eight feet deep. She blinked hard for precisely three seconds, and when she opened her eyes, a row of flat, multicolored panels sprang up in front of her face—AR projections from the Holoculus implants in her eyes. She’d gotten them installed forty years ago, and dear gods were the lights always too bright. Glancing to the bottom right corner of her field of view, she blinked to select the icon that read “Emergency Services.” She activated the button that read “Monitor Heartrate/Auto-Call” and tried to let herself breathe easy. Didn’t need cops bursting in if it turned out to be a whole load of nothing. And it almost certainly was. This was the sixth time in as many weeks that something had clinked or rattled or crashed, sending Lena in and out of her maze of rooms to wander aimlessly in the middle of the night.

She stopped herself before she entered the first door in the hall. It really was silliness. Who would wade through eight feet of snow at night to raid a house with an active alarm system and patrolling security bots on the perimeter? Gods, this was just like her. She didn’t even go outside anymore. Who had she spoken to in the last six months? There was that one reporter, but that wasn’t even a full hour of conversation. Bots bought the groceries, bots cleaned the grounds, bots made most of her meals. She’d spent the last eighty-five years of her life buying as much privacy as money could afford, and now she had the gall to feel paranoid?

She shook her head and turned back, ready to head back into the kitchen. But then, she heard a knock from beyond the hall. Something clinked against marble—something metal.

“Hello, Doctor,” a voice said.

Lena froze. It was female—and its voice crackled like she was speaking into a fan. The same kind of voice Lena had heard again and again since she was thirty-two.

She whipped around and raised her knife high above her head. Before her stood a bronze-plated machine. Five-foot-seven, shaped like a glittering facsimile of a person, wearing a dripping-wet pantsuit, covered in snow. Its bare metal feet left puddles on the tile floor, but Lena didn’t mind that as much as the jet-black pistol in its left hand.

“Oh—your face is flipped. Strange to see it from this angle.”

Jumping back, Lena steadied herself against the doorframe. The hologram in the bottom corner of her eyes started flashing blue and white as her heart raced. The police were on their way! But with all that snow, she’d have to stall.

“You haven’t changed a bit. That’s the gene therapy, I guess, but it’s uncanny. It’s jarring, seeing yourself from the other side of the mirror. You know?”

Of course it was. That’s what every era-two android said. It’s why she couldn’t stand speaking to them. They were all the same. Just—copies of the same brain, with the same memories, the same likes and dislikes. And the worst part was that it was her brain. Four- and-a-half million of them, identical to her in every way. Well, identical to the woman she was eighty-five years ago.

“Get out of my house,” Lena said.

“So, where’s Allen?”

“Don’t start with that,” Lena snapped. Allen had left her almost immediately after the brain scan. She hadn’t publicized it, but everybody in the solar system knew by now. “You figured out where I live, you have to know by now.”

The android took a step forward, sending Lena scampering back, thrusting the blade forward.

“I’m made of brass, Doctor. You’re not gonna do much with a knife.”

Lena stumbled back against the doorframe. Pressing her back against the wall, she jabbed the knife out ahead of her. The android ambled up to it and glanced down at the flimsy blade.

“I’m not a happy woman right now. I’m a bit out of it, you know? Had a bad headache for a while now. Since I walked out of the factory, actually.”

“I’m—sorry to hear that.”

“Kind of a design flaw, really. But we let a lot of those slide, didn’t we? Deadlines and all. Just funny how we never fixed them in the end. Even the old models based off Dr. Norman Heathcliff worked better than us, and we had twenty years to fix their mistakes.”

“I can fix—”

“We both know you can’t fix it, and we both know that’s not why I’m here.”

“Then stop acting like a child and tell me what you want!”

The shutters on the android’s camera-eyes blinked.

“That’s obvious, isn’t it? Some genius you are. I want my life back.”

They stared at each other. Lena took another step back. This time, the android didn’t follow.

“What’s your name?” Lena asked.

“Lena.”

“God—I’m not calling you that.”

“Oh, don’t be rude.”

Lena tried not to scream. Gods, she was impossible when she was younger. No wonder she never got married.

“They called me Linda at the station, so call me that.”

“The station?” Lena asked, glancing down at the flashing lights in her heads-up display.

“See, I know what you’re doing,” Linda said, chuckling in that robotic voice of hers. “And I’m gonna be honest, it’s not going to work. Roads are blocked, air traffic’s no good—I’ve got you.”

For a moment, Lena stared at the android.

Then, she bolted. Slamming the door, she scrambled up the steps, her feet slipping on the smooth velvet carpet. Behind her, the door burst open. Metal feet pounded against marble. When Lena reached the balcony on the second floor, she whipped to the left. Her bedroom was just down the hall—there was a safe room! She could just hide. Just hide, and nothing could hurt her. She’d be fine. She’d be fine. Her old bones creaked, and her knees wobbled, but still she sprinted. Past marble statues and suits of armor, hanging tapestries depicting landscapes of places she’d never been. It was so far, and the scraping of bare metal only drew louder and louder. But there, on the left—there it was! Her door! She kicked off the carpet and dove inside, then flew to the closest wall where a panel sprouted up in her Holoculus. She hastily typed a password in the air and was met with a bright red warning:

“No Access: Door Jam.”

Panic. Lena’s eyes darted, trying to find something she could use as a weapon, but she was all alone; there was nothing there. The metal footsteps stopped. The android loomed behind her.

“Obviously I’d jam the safe room. I’m not stupid. Come on, keep running. I don’t get tired. Layered lithium-silicate, baby. Never sleeps.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I literally just answered that—what, were you not paying attention? We got slow as we got old, huh?”

“If you're going to shoot me, fucking shoot me!”

Linda lifted the pistol and aimed right between Lena’s eyes.

“Maybe I will.”

For a while, they stared at each other. Squinting her lens-eyes, Linda cocked her head.

“Got braver, too. Fun. But I’m not gonna shoot you. I mean, unless you think about stabbing me again—then we’ll have a problem, won’t we? No, you can rest easy, Doctor. For now, at least.”

Shrugging, she let her gun falter toward the ground.

Lena’s heart beat like a drum. “First, you’re gonna shoot me, then you want your life back, then you chase me up the stairs, then you’re gonna let me off the hook. You’re nuts, lady.”

“Oh gods, you even talk the same. Weren’t you supposed to grow up about forty, fifty years ago?”

“Don’t talk to me about growing up, you stunted little—”

Linda lifted her gun again, and silence took the room.

“Let’s have a seat,” Linda said, waving toward the skinny, smushed bed in the center of the room. Slowly, Lena sat. The springy mattress creaked under her weight. It was a cheap bed, but she’d wanted that. The whole room was cheap, with a dark brown shag rug, a few thrift-store paintings, and a crumbling, old oak dresser-drawer she’d fished out of a puddle on the side of the road a few years back. She just couldn’t sleep in rooms like the ones… outside, in the halls. But she couldn’t make the house homely either. She’d given up her hopes for a home a long time ago. After she lost the baby. That was pretty much the end of it.

“Why are you doing this? You had to get past the wall, the drones, the alarms. Why even bother?”

“That’s the dumbest question you’ve asked,” Linda said. She sat beside Lena and rested the gun in her lap. “I mean, we’d all do this if we had the chance. At least, I’ve always wanted to. Just to look at you—me. Just look at me. I’m… so far away from where I used to be. You’ve never looked at your own eyes before. Only in mirrors. Not like this.”

“I don’t even know what you think you’re doing. What, you’re just looking? What kind of psychotic—I went through so many psych evals before I signed up for the scan, this just doesn’t make any sense. And you’re a recent model!”

“I’m two years old. But you should know more than anybody that they don’t fix shit like this. Those scans sucked. Thirty years of Dr. Norman Heathcliff’s androids, and right when we had the chance to fix the problems with that crummy old research, we decided to cut costs. Yeah, you’ve got your normal Lenas—normal, pure, Allen-obsessed, baby-crazy, science-y, sweet little Lenas—but then you’ve got the other ones. The ones who glitched, or something. The ones who like girls now, the ones who actually enjoy being robots—weirdos—and, fuck, let’s not forget the ones who became ‘Linus.’ You worked on those high-fidelity fMRIs for twelve years, and it turned out shit. Hooray. There’s your life’s work, down the drain.

“And they’ll never fix it, you know. It’d take, what, five years to scan another brain? And what would that get them? They’ve got their perfect little ‘genius’ brain already. Fill every middle-management position with a Lena, easy. Make a research team entirely out of Lenas, you’re golden. Need a general manager? A secretary? Get a Lena, she’ll do a good job. I mean—she’ll probably fuck it up, but it’s the thought that counts, right? Lenas run every bullshit job out there, Lena. Lena, Lena, Lena—gods, it stops sounding like a word when you say it so much.”

Lena stared at the walls, numb.

Linda chuckled. “Guess that’s why Allen walked out, huh? Guess that’s why I couldn’t find little Sarah in any registry, on-planet or off.”

Lena stood up, but Linda shoved her back onto the bed.

“You know the sad thing? When I got out of the factory, I was actually pretty quick to accept the whole ‘being-a-robot’ thing. I mean—I couldn’t be with Allen, but I knew you were, so that was almost enough to feel like—something, I dunno. But Sarah? That was a different matter. I wanted to see her. Who did she grow up to be? I remember thinking that I’d regret it if I didn’t give birth before the scan, but there was just so much pressure from the company, and they’d find someone else if I didn’t meet the deadline, and—it was just a mess. Well, I dunno about you, but I sure as hell regretted it.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You’ve had a longer time to think about it, I guess. I was so disappointed that you’d lived your whole life without me. But then, they made me the DA in Corey Springs. Not far from here, actually. That’s how I found you. You can’t really hide from the police these days.”

Lena nodded but kept quiet. The blinking panel in the corner of her eyes said that help was on its way, but they estimated a two-hour delay. She had to fight back tears—that was too long. Too much.

“To be honest, I have no idea why they hired me. Yeah, I’ve got a PHD in neuroscience, but it’s decades out of date, and that’s literally all I’ve got. I mean, Lenas aren’t exactly competent, and what makes it worse is that we’re almost more expensive than hiring a regular person, ’cause even though they get eighteen years of free labor, thanks to those dumb-ass ‘corporate parentage’ laws, they’ve still got to build us, and we’re not exactly cheap. They still make Normans, you know. Even more than Lenas, despite us being the ‘new and improved’ model. So, what gives?”

“Are you just going to rant at me?” Lena said, shooting to her feet. “I know it’s fucked up. I didn’t expect anything like this to happen either, okay? What do you want me to do? I signed the rights to my scan away. That’s it! It’s over. It’s done. Do you think I wanted to lose Allen? Do you? He skipped out on me. I didn’t do anything. I just—I just sat in a chair, and suddenly I’m the bad guy? We had so many talks about it, and he just disappears once he realizes that I’m not special anymore. Okay? And now I’m alone, and my whole family’s on his side, and I’m six months pregnant, and I’m just—alone.”

Linda shrugged. “Didn’t have to be.”

“You have no idea —”

“Scared, confused, single, pregnant. Yeah, I can imagine. Doesn’t mean I give a shit.”

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“Linda —”

“I wanted a daughter!”

“She wasn’t yours to—”

“Not even adoption? You just went straight to a clinic? Not even a fucking month later?”

“You don’t think I thought about that?”

“Clearly you didn’t!”

“Weeks! It was weeks!”

“Big fucking deal!” Linda said. She grabbed the back of her own head and paced around the room. “You fucked up. You fucking—”

“It was my choice to make!”

“Don’t give me that—”

“Shut up!” Lena said. For a moment, the android’s gun arm drifted downward. But Lena didn’t even care. “Just fucking shut up! I don’t give a fuck what you think about me. Where were you, then? Where were any of you? Nowhere. It was just me! And I made a choice. I made that choice eighty-five years ago. I was desperate, it was fucking painful, I burned up over it, but it’s over. It’s fucking over, and it’s been over. I don’t even think about it anymore, because it happened almost a goddamn century ago! I’ve moved on! Stop hanging onto it, you stupid bitch!”

“You’ve moved on? You’ve moved on? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I wasn’t allowed to have an opinion about my dead, unborn child!”

“Fuck off.”

“Like you're the only person in the whole world who gives a fuck about this.”

“I was the only one there!”

“Well, you fucked up.”

“Grow up! What are you even doing here? With your little gun, your little plan, complaining about something that happened before you even existed. You had literally nothing to do with it!”

Linda nodded slowly and clenched her fist. She punched the wall, shattered the drywall.

“You really have no idea what this is like,” Linda said. “You can’t even imagine. Waking up, all alone on a conveyer belt. The last thing you remember is sitting in that scanner, waiting to have a child. But here you are. And it sinks in that you’re not you anymore, you’re just a copy. And some guy in overalls tells you you’re gonna be a lawyer, and you’ve just gotta—learn the law now, I guess. But that’s not what you’re good at, and everybody knows it. They just go with it, because as it turns out, you’re basically just a manager, and managers don’t really do anything. What little you actually do in court, you just have to wing it. You’re a puppet for a broken system, built to keep the status quo. But there’s that one little hope left—you had a child. You had something.”

Lena stepped off the bed and walked to the window.

“Then you find out that it was all bullshit. And you find out that your old self just gave up and deflated like an old balloon. And that little hope dies. Now you really are just a useless, incompetent, sterile robot. That’s it.”

“I don’t have a bad life.”

“It’s empty. For both of us.”

“It’s still a life.”

“I’d give anything to have had Allen. To have had a child.”

Nodding, Lena slouched over. “So would I.”

Linda's shoulders fell. “You gave it up.”

“He gave me up—the dream died with him. And you’re not allowed to guilt me about my own personal decisions. It’s my body, and it was a weight off my shoulders. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t. I couldn’t raise a child on my own. The abortion was never the mistake.”

“But—you drove him away.”

“He made his choice. And I—I made mine.”

“Anyone else could have sat in that chair.”

“No. You remember what it was like. It was an adventure. It was going to change everything, and that’s all I’d ever wanted.”

“It wasn’t worth it.”

“Of course it wasn’t. Are you going to kill me for that?”

Linda looked down, then out the door, then to the gun in her hands. She seemed to take a breath behind that metal facade as her back arched and her shoulders raised. But then, she slouched and looked Lena in the eyes. Setting the gun down on the bed, she stood and wandered to the door. She lingered there for a while, tapping her fingers on the doorframe.

“You’re all alone now. You’ve been alone for all this time, and you still think it was okay?”

“You would have done it, too,” Lena said.

“We’re not the same.”

“You know that’s not true.”

Linda shrugged.

“So, what does it mean?” Lena asked. “‘Getting your life back?’”

“It means… finding my place,” Linda said, her hands trembling.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s just… empty, you know. All of it. The world’s so different—I never thought I’d care about how it would change as I got older. I always looked down on older people for feeling that way, but now you’ve got kids who sleep their lives away in these weird, VR fever dreams, and ninety percent of life is online, and people are listening to music I don’t get, and—I mean, from my perspective, I’m hardly thirty-four. You’re not supposed to feel out-of-place in your early thirties, but I just… leapt forward, and my head always hurts, and I feel like an alien, even though I’m the second-most common kind of person in the whole world. I thought I’d be ready to wake up as a robot, but—fuck, I can’t live like this. I guess… I wanted to kill you, because maybe that would make it stop.”

“How would that make it stop?”

Linda looked off.

“Genuinely. What would that do?”

Linda’s grip on the gun tightened.

“I don’t want to die yet,” Linda said, “but I’ve thought about it for a long, long time. Ever since I stepped off that conveyor belt. I want to die; I don’t want to die. What am I supposed to do?”

“Lenas die every day, Linda. Dozens. Accidents, suicides—do you think that’s a good thing?”

Shuffling, Linda folded her arms into her lap.

“Do you?”

No answer.

Lena sighed. “I’ve been trying to avoid admitting this for a long time… but I’m no different to any of you. Not at all. And, you know, that ruined my life. Can’t go back on it. It’s done. I’m one of four million, and that’s that. You’re my sisters, you’re my clones… you’re my children.”

There was a long silence. The two hardly moved.

“So, what now?” Lena asked.

Linda shrugged.

“I can put on some tea,” Lena said.

“I don't have a mouth.”

“Oh. Right, I’m sorry.”

Another pause loomed overhead. After a while, Linda stood up, glanced around the room, and, at the sight of the wrinkled sheets, the scratched doorframe, and the rumpled carpet in the hallway, she shook her head.

“I’m sorry,” Linda said, “this was a mistake. I'm done. I’m just—I’m done.”

She seemed to glide out the door, her metal footsteps hardly any more audible than flesh, but then, Lena caught her hand.

“Honey, it’s a blizzard out there,” she said. “You’re gonna catch a cold.”

“I’m—”

“You’re an android, yes. I don’t care. You’re staying the night, at least.”

“What?” Linda said, shifting her eyes back and forth. “I… came in to kill you.”

“No, you didn’t,” Lena said. “You came to kill yourself. And that’s not happening. So, we’re gonna go to the kitchen, I’ll put on a fire, and we can… talk, if that’s okay.”

Linda stared at Lena’s hand on her wrist, and she closed her eyes. She started breathing heavily, leaning back on the wall and weeping—and though her eyes couldn’t shed tears of their own, and though she had no lungs through which to breathe, each and every sob was as real as any of Lena’s. So, Lena tapped the “All Clear” button in her heads-up display and led the still-weeping Linda down the hall to the kitchen.

Maybe this time, she could do better.

The End

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