Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

The Automated Ones

Melanie entered the foyer of Beaufort’s, leaving the reek of wet pavement behind and replacing it with a fog of fine-cuisine smells. Rain shimmered on her floor-length coat; she stripped the garment off and folded it over her forearm, looking back for her fiancé.

Daniel was still outside, fiddling with the umbrella. One of his shiny loafers was half-buried in a puddle, propping the door open. A cascade of water from the striped awning, a perfect line of downpour in the drizzle, was pattering across the back of his blazer.

“Darling, bring it in here and close it.” Melanie moved to grab the door and urge him inside.

“It’s bad luck,” he said. A yellow cab flew by, spitting up old rain from the gutter—adding another layer to the puddles.

“You don’t believe in that nonsense—now get in here before you ruin your new suit.”

“Almost got it—damn.” Daniel stepped through the door, the umbrella, broken and inside out, was limp in his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, shrugging his wide shoulders and twisting the corners of his lips up.

Melanie put her hand on his arm and reached for the ruined device. Even through the damp jacket, she could feel his warmth, his strength. “Forget it, sweetheart, we needed a new one anyway. It was ancient.”

“No—yeah. I just—I got frustrated with the stupid thing, that’s all. Tried to force it. I’ll buy you a new one tomorrow. Hey, a wedding present. I’ll get you one of those automated ones that does everything with the press of a button.”

Melanie laughed at the joke and helped Daniel out of his jacket. Normally someone would have already been here to check their coats, but the nearby stall was empty. Melanie slid the broken umbrella into a barrel full of fancier ones. With interlocked arms, the couple crossed the large entrance to the maître d’, who seemed lost in his large ledger of clientele.

“Bonsoir, Robert,” Melanie said. She was careful to slur the last half of the Frenchman’s name, dropping the t entirely and leaving the r clinging desperately to the e. Robert took the meticulous and exacting slurring of the French language to its absolute extremes.

He looked up from his book with a mask of mechanical surprise. Melanie suspected at once that he’d seen them enter, that he’d been hiding in his matrix of Washington’s who’s who of politics and law. “Mademoiselle Reynolds. What a surprise. We weren’t expecting you…” His eyes were welded to hers as he let the rest trail off. He was ignoring Daniel so blatantly, he may as well have been shining lasers on her fiancé.

The fib flipped on the lawyer switch in Melanie. She could feel the adrenaline of confrontation surge up inside. “Don’t pull that crap on me, Robert.” She stressed the t this time, ticking it between her teeth with a flick of her tongue. “I’ve eaten here every other Friday for two years. I called in and specifically requested a private table for—”

Robert held up his hands, cutting her off. “Oui. Of course. I’ll make an exception, just—merci, don’t create a scene.”

Melanie ran her hands down the sides of her blouse and over her hips, composing herself. “There’ll be no scene tonight, Robert. We’re just here to celebrate.”

There was finally a flicker of movement in the maître d’s eyes. A twitch to Daniel and back. The Frenchman’s thin lips disappeared in a grimace. “But, of course, mademoiselle. Congratulations.” He barely managed the word, and he couldn’t help but add, “I understand it was a very close decision you won. Five to four, no?”

“The important decisions are always close. Now, if you’ll show us to our table—”

“Of course. Right this way.” He grabbed two leather-bound menus and a wine list from the side of his stand. Then he made a show of looking at Daniel and smiling, but there was something unpleasant about the expression.

More bad looks followed. As they weaved through the tables, heads swiveled, tracking them with the precision of computer-guided servos. The din of jovial eating faded in the couple’s wake. The clink of excited silverware on thin china ground to a halt. Dozens of eager conversations, all competing with one another, faded into a hiss of white noise. It was the sound, not of air escaping, but of grease popping on hot metal. A buzz interspersed with spits of disgust.

“We can go somewhere else,” Daniel pleaded.

Melanie shook her head. They were led to a small two-top close to her usual table, but sticking out more in the traffic of the servers. She didn’t return any of the stares, just focused on getting seated before she answered Daniel.

The chairs were not pulled back for them; Robert waved at the spread of white cloth and meticulously arranged eating tools and strode away without a second glance. Melanie allowed Daniel to hold her chair and waited for him to settle across from her.

“We can’t let them change us, dear,” she finally explained. “If we didn’t come tonight, would it be easier next week? Or the week after? And where would you have us go, if not here?”

Daniel leaned forward, moving the extra glasses out of the way and groping for Melanie’s hand. They found each other and squeezed softly, throwing water on the grease fire popping around them.

“We could’ve gone out with my people,” Daniel said quietly. “Gone to Devo’s or Sears, or—”

“Please don’t whisper,” Melanie begged him.

“Does it sound strange?”

“No. Of course not—it’s… it’s just that I don’t care if they hear what we’re talking about.” She forced herself to say it with an even tone, but the effort made her voice sound abnormal. Mechanical. She didn’t care, but the interruption brought a halt to the conversation.

The silence that fell over their table created a pit, a depression into which a dozen hushed conversations flowed.

Unfortunately for Melanie, she’d become an expert at hearing through the noise. Twice a month, while her friends talked about things that didn’t interest her, she would sit here in Beaufort’s and try to tease single strands out of the tangle. She’d learned to concentrate on the lilt or cadence of a solitary voice, winding that conversation in, honing the ability to drown out the rest.

That skill was now a curse. And Daniel, no doubt, was hearing them as well as she. Dangerous and mean-spirited shards of conversation crowded the already-cluttered table. More utensils meant for cutting. Supreme Court. Android. Marriage. Shame. God. Unnatural. It was a corporate meeting on intolerance carried out by the finest minds in the city. A brainstorming session on hate and ignorance that sounded no more informed than the crowds outside the courthouse. Each vile and familiar word probed Melanie’s defenses, attacking the steeled nerves that convinced Daniel to come and slicing at the ones that were for communicating pain.

Daniel squeezed her hand. So gentle. The tissue around his mechanical frame was soft and warm to the touch, no different than hers. She looked up from their hands to his eyes and blinked the wetness away from her vision.

“We can go somewhere else,” he suggested again.

Melanie shook her head and pulled her hand away from his. She reached for a cylinder of crystal and saw there was no water in it. Looking around for their waiter, she fought the urge to wipe at her eyes.

The sweep of her gaze, as she scanned the room, had a repellent effect. Heads swung away with disdain. All but three who were seated right behind her. Her old table. Her old friends. She couldn’t help herself—Melanie bobbed her head slightly in greeting.

“Linda, Susan—”

She didn’t get a chance to say hello to Chloe—the woman was already accosting her. “You’re disgusting,” she spat. “You’ll burn.”

She wondered what Chloe meant, taking it literally. It took her a moment to realize her friend was speaking of the old prophecies. Superstitions she couldn’t possibly believe. She turned back to her table, the waiter forgotten.

Meanwhile, Chloe’s words stoked fires under the other tables, turning up the heat and popping the grease with force. Insults were hurled, mixed with foul language. Screwing. Bestiality. Fucking. Hell. Damnation.

Daniel’s eyes were wide, pleading with her. They glanced over her shoulder toward the exit.

Melanie wondered what she’d expected. Awkward silence, perhaps. An organized shunning, at worst. Or maybe one person she hardly knew saying something rude, and the rest of the country’s elite and mighty feeling ashamed for the worst example among them.

But Chloe?

The empty chair at her old table would likely be filled by the time they returned from their honeymoon. Melanie could see another potential calendar of court dates looming as Beaufort’s attempted to refuse them service. Daniel had been right about this being a mistake.

But he was wrong to think it’d be much different at Devo’s. She’d seen the looks from the court stenographer and the bailiff bots. There’d been plenty of androids in the gallery as advanced as he, each of them far more flesh than machine. And not all of them were pulling for change.

It was a lesson Melanie absorbed from experience: you can’t be hated without learning to hate back. The system fed on itself. The tension as jobs were lost turning into ire on both sides. Defensive hatred turned into offensive hatred. Tribes turning on each other. They were all programmed this way.

Daniel was mouthing his silent plea once more as the chorus of derogatory remarks grew louder. She nodded her resignation and leaned forward to push her chair away. The sudden movement prevented the attack from landing square—the wine streaked through the back of her hair and continued in its crimson arc, splashing to the carpet beyond.

There were gasps all around, more from the anticipation of what might come next than at the outrage of the attack. Several men slapped their palms flat on the table, expressing their approval. China sang out as it resonated with the violent applause.

Daniel was out of his chair in an instant, rushing to Melanie. He slid one arm around her while the other went to the crowd, palm out. He was defending the next attack before it started. Several larger inebriated men took the defensive posture as an invitation. The gesture of peace was a vacuum pulling violence toward it.

Someone grabbed a corked bottle of wine and held it with no intention of drinking it.

Chloe was the closest. She would have landed the first blow, if she could. But Melanie’s rage gave the mob pause.

“Enough!” she yelled. “ENOUGH!” She screamed it as loud as she could, her voice high and cracking and her hands clenching into little fists with the effort. She glared at Chloe, who still seemed poised to lash out. “How am I hurting you?” she asked her old friend. She spun around as much as Daniel’s grip on her would allow. “How am I hurting any of you?”

“It’s not natural!” someone yelled from the back, the crowd giving him courage.

“He’s a machine,” Susan said. “He’s nothing but a—”

“Does your vibrator hold the door open for you, Susan?” It felt good to say this out loud. She’d thought about it hundreds of times when the relationship first started. Always wanted to bring it up. Melanie switched her glare to Linda. “How many times have I heard you bragging about how good your ‘little friend’ is?”

“We aren’t marrying our dildos, you bitch.” Chloe was visibly shaking with rage.

Melanie nodded, her jaw jutting as she clenched and unclenched her teeth. “That’s right,” she said. “You married a man forty years older than you. And how much of him is original, huh? We sit here every week and listen to you bitch and moan about your inheritance being wasted, on what? Replacement hips? New knees? A mechanical ticker? Dialysis machines and breathing machines and heart-rate monitors?” Melanie pointed to Chloe’s bulging blouse. “Is it unnatural for the old bastard to love those? Does he kiss your collagen-injected lips and marvel at how real they feel?”

She pulled herself out of Daniel’s protective embrace and whirled on the crowd of ex-friends and old colleagues. She placed her hand flat on her chest. “You people think I chose this?” She turned to her fiancé. “You think I could stop loving him if I just tried hard enough? Could any of you choose to fall in or out of love by force of will? Do you really think you’re in control?”

Daniel reached for her again, trying to comfort her. Melanie grabbed his hands and forced them down, but didn’t let them go. “We’re staying,” she said softly.

“We’re staying.” Louder. For the crowd. “And we’re eating. And you can hate us for being the first, but we won’t be the last. You can go get your surgeries and implants, you can medicate yourselves according to some prescription-language program, and you can all go to hell with your hypocrisy.”

The crowd swayed with the attack, held at bay even if it would take years—generations—for them to become convinced. Daniel guided Melanie to her seat, willing to stay if she was.

“Things are going to change,” she said to herself.

“I know, sweetheart,” Daniel said.

Melanie leaned to the side to scoop up her napkin, which was fringed with the red wine it wicked from the carpet. Daniel reached it first and handed it to her, careful to fold the stains away where they couldn’t spread any further.

“It’s coming,” Melanie repeated. “And if they didn’t hear it today, they need to check their hearing aids.”

Mouth Breathers

Cort eyed the school’s entrance warily; its double doors were gaped, swallowing children like krill.

He really didn’t want to be one of them.

“Mom—”

“We’ve been over this, son.” Melanie adjusted the strap on his breathing pack, jerking his torso around as she cinched it up.

“It’s not a parachute,” Cort said, frowning.

“Don’t talk with your mouth,” she told him. She tugged on the other strap, then lifted his chin to make him look at her. “You need to work extra hard to get along, okay?”

Cort grumbled but pushed his breathing tube back in his mouth. He tucked a thumb into one of the straps and tried to wiggle some circulation through to his shoulder. Behind him, the pack whirred purposefully, as if doing something. But it was just a prop to help him fit in.

He nodded to his mom, then waved goodbye to his dad, who sat in the car, his mouth a flat line. He didn’t feel like trying to communicate with the machine. He hadn’t been practicing like he should.

Cort turned to the hungry building and sulked off, trying to merge with the flow of Martian kids, blending in before they were all swallowed whole. It took every ounce of effort in his ten-year-old body to look straight ahead. They’d only been on-planet for three weeks, so he still had a tendency of walking around like a tourist, gazing up at the ruddy sky beyond the habidome.

It’s my last year of middle grades, he reminded himself. Next year will be even worse. Somehow, that made him feel better.

He jostled against a few other kids as the wide column squeezed past the hinged teeth and into the maw. The kids pushed against each other, wading forward, eager to be digested. Cort fought the urge to spit out his stupid tube; he found it hard to breathe through his nose while he was concentrating on it.

He tried to focus on the kid’s backpack ahead of him, forgetting about the breathing so he wouldn’t panic. Beneath a plastic grille, he could see a large fan spinning, just like his. The only difference was: this one wasn’t for show. It actually pushed oxygen somewhere, mixing it with proteins and fluids before circulating the slurry through the kid’s lungs.

Cort felt bile rise up in his throat just thinking about it. He quickly accosted himself for being judgmental, remembering what his mom had said—

Something hit the back of his heel, nearly pulling his shoe off. Cort stumbled, hopping on one foot, and knocked into the kid ahead.

The one behind shoved him. “Watch where you’re going, freak!”

The kid’s voice was perfect. Deep, gruff, and enunciated with crisp precision. Cort didn’t dare turn around and try to reply. It would just make things worse.

When the flow of kids started branching, Cort concentrated on moving with the fewer number, trying to find air, some room to breathe. He used his thumb and finger to pull the saliva away from the corner of his mouth, then wiped his chin with the back of his sleeve. He really wanted to tear the plastic tube out, but, impossibly, he was able to resist.

He needed to get in a pod before his head exploded.

Cort followed the masses down another hall, this one lined with individual learning units. He scanned ahead for “unoccupied” lights, but each one was grabbed by one of the other kids, usually a bigger one.

As the crowd thinned, Cort could see an end to the agony—a line of pods with green lights. Two kids wrestled with each other after choosing the same one. Cort slid past and grabbed the next one, practically falling inside before ripping the tube out of his mouth. He sucked in huge lungfuls of glorious air, nearly hyperventilating himself with relief. It had been like a kilometer-long swim underwater, blending in with the fishes.

He bent over, both elbows resting on his knees, and tried to take slower, deeper breaths. Sweat—partly from effort, partly from nerves—dripped off his nose. He rubbed his hands up his face and wiped them off on his thighs.

There was no way he could do this twice a day. Every day.

He wanted to go back to Earth.

The first lesson flashed up on the pod’s screen: a mixture of history and math. It leaned heavily on the Martian perspective, looking for calculations with dates he hadn’t yet memorized.

After a string of ten incorrect answers in a row, it kicked him down to fourth-grade history, which just made it harder to concentrate.

Luckily, the next few had a mix of Earth dates, but with a strange bias. He keyed in his answers quickly, watching the clock, and got back into fifth-grade history. Once again, the instructor wanted information he just didn’t have. Cort wiped more sweat from his brow, which just made the keyboard slick. For the next hour, he felt like he spent more time between the two grades than he did in either one of them.

When the Mathory lesson concluded, he had a few minutes to relieve himself in the suction potty before the next course. He was hoping for Englo-Bio, but got Poli-Theism instead.

He groaned to himself. Not only did he hate politics—he could never tell the Roman and Greek gods apart. He tried his hardest to stay out of third grade, but it was no use. The political structure of Mars made even less sense to him than Earth’s. And why teach this stuff anyway? It’d be eight years before he could vote!

He read the questions and typed in his best guesses, his concentration waning and waxing.

Had he known recess was up next, he would have at least enjoyed the opportunity to breathe freely, unmolested.

At the end of the Poli-Theism lesson, Cort’s morning report flashed up, along with a list of the people it would be sent to. He wondered if his mom would be one of those doting and bored parents, waiting on the real-time status update for everything their spawn were up to.

He looked at his dismal performance and hoped the report would get flagged as spam and never be delivered. In a smaller window, an instructor popped up and informed them that it was recess, a map underneath him showing directions to the gymnasium.

Cort immediately felt the urge to use the suction potty. He wondered if he could just stay in the pod, if anyone would notice. The sight of the three cameras mounted to the testing wall provided the answer. Not a good idea.

He took a deep breath and inserted the tube, trying not to think about breathing through his nose. The door behind him popped open on its own; he turned around to see the opposite wall disgorging a line of students. In the pod directly across, a mane of blond hair spilled around a face—a face as pretty as one can be with a tube pumping oxygenated fluid into it.

Cort smiled, but the flash of niceness was lost in a sea of passing kids. He waited for the flow to weaken before moving out into the hall and trailing along with the other stragglers.

The games were already underway when he arrived in the gym. The sounds of metal clashing against metal drifted up from the pit, the kids along the balcony leaning forward to look down through the glass.

The upper level looked completely full, so Cort followed some kids heading down a flight of stairs. They came out in an identical room—a large, rectangular doughnut of a balcony overlooking the gym’s pit—and the kids ahead of him took the few remaining spaces.

One of those spaces had been right beside a wild mane of blond hair. Cort felt his heart thumping in his chest. The girl turned, shifting her chair over, as another boy took the space beside her.

Once again, their eyes locked. Cort felt his breathing constrict even more. He started to wave, but someone knocked into his back, sending him sprawling forward. Scrambling to his feet, he rushed to join the kids moving down another level, his cheeks burning with embarrassment.

The nearby spots were already taken on the lowest level. That was fine with Cort; he wanted to sit on the other side. He fought the urge to run and shuffled as fast as he could, working his way around the balcony. He ignored the clashing of the large robots beyond the glass.

On the other side, he took one of the empty spots directly across from the girl. He could look up through the glass and see her blond hair waving as she concentrated on the games below.

He had to tear his eyes away to view the action. Dozens of robots clashed across the parquet floor of the gym, each one controlled by a team of kids.

He looked at his controls. He’d been assigned to the green team, left leg. Cort saw his robot immediately, but the lower-level seat meant it was hard to gauge the overall action. He grabbed both his sticks as the AI relinquished control of the green bot’s left leg, handing it over to him. Pushing and pulling on the two sticks, he did his part in keeping the thing upright, watching his display for instructions from whoever controlled the head.

The stress and exertion forced him to hold the tube with his teeth, breathing around it and through his mouth. He did his best to not be a hindrance. Cort wasn’t very good at bot-ball, but at least he could keep his side of the green team upright, not tripping over anything. He even had a few good plants while the right leg got some good shots off. It wasn’t bad playing a support role, especially since he didn’t make a fool of himself.

In the first fifteen-minute period, they got two shots on goal and did adequate damage to the yellow bot. Everyone received the exact same score, of course, but Cort kept his own tally and thought his team had done well. Not that he would say such a thing. Not on Mars.

When the horn sounded, signaling the first intermission, Cort glanced up to catch the girl’s attention, maybe see which team she’d been on.

But she was gone.

He looked around as the kids on his level ran for the exit to get refreshments and use the public suction potties. Cort used the time to gather his breath. He watched the kids file out of their level, all in the same direction, clockwise around the glass partition. He turned back to his controls.

The blond girl sat beside him, arriving from the opposite side.

“Hello,” she said through her computer.

Cort reached up and pushed the breathing tube back in his mouth, biting down on it hard. He concentrated on the words, forcing them into the computer. “Nice see you,” he said.

He shook his head, his forehead breaking out in a clammy sweat, and tried again. “Nice to you,” it came out.

The girl looked away, through the glass partition and across the gym’s pit. Her hair—that close—it was like staring at liquid gold. Cort wanted to reach out and touch it, or smell it. He felt dizzy.

“Talk with your mouth,” the girl said through her computer. She looked around to make sure they were alone. “I want to see.”

Cort felt like he was going to wet his pants, he was so flustered and anxious. He looked side to side before pulling the tube out, allowing it to hang from his pack. He turned his head away while he wiped his mouth dry.

“My name’s Cort,” he said, looking back at her. It was all he could think to say.

“Riley,” she said. She stared at his lips. The computer made her voice ring with a sonorous and pleasing tone. Cort wanted to be able to speak like that. But with a boy’s voice.

He smiled at her.

“Did it hurt?” she asked.

“Did what hurt?” Cort glanced up at the balcony above. Some of the kids were returning to their seats, holding colorful refreshment canisters up to their breathing tubes.

“Your first breath,” Riley said. “They say it hurts real bad, and that all Earth kids have to go through it. They say it makes you scream.”

“I don’t remember,” Cort said. He licked his lips, self-conscious of doing the opposite of what his mom had told him.

“It was that bad?” Riley asked. “Have you blocked it out?”

Cort shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I actually don’t remember much before I was five.”

Riley brushed some of her golden hair back. Cort saw one of her ears poking through, white and smooth. It made her look like an elf princess or something equally mysterious and regal.

“And it doesn’t burn? The air?” She leaned forward, staring at Cort’s mouth.

It made him want to cover his mouth with both hands. Or open it up and let her look inside. Or both, somehow.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t burn at all.” He watched the fluid circulating through her breathing tube. “How does that feel?” He pointed shyly toward her mouth. “Is it like drowning?”

Riley’s computer laughed for her. “No, silly, this is how we are even before we’re born. I can’t imagine my lungs empty, the way yours must be.”

The corners of her mouth turned up around a little, a dimple forming in one cheek. Cort recognized it as a smile. And pretty.

He started to say something about her hair, but she cut him off.

“You should put it back in,” Riley said, pointing to her own tube.

Cort looked around and saw the kids coming back from intermission. He put his tube back in and turned to compose something for Riley, concentrating on the words as hard as he could.

“Like our talking,” it came out, the computer voice stilted and awkward.

The corners of her mouth tightened again; she spun out of the chair with a wave of golden locks, then went running around the balcony, back to the stairs.

Cort looked sheepishly down at his controls, which were counting down the resumption of the games.

Time being the only numbers the system kept track of.

“How was school?” Melanie asked.

Cort jumped in the passenger seat, spitting out his tube and trying to get comfortable with his pack pressing into the seat.

“Don’t you know?” he asked.

“I didn’t look at any of the reports.” She put the car into gear and merged with the flow of heavy traffic moving past the school. “I wanted to wait and hear it from you.”

Cort thought about telling her all about Riley, and that first intermission, and how he was going to use the same pod tomorrow, and hoped she’d do the same, except he’d try and walk with her to recess next time, and maybe they’d be on the same team, and she could talk about what it was like to breathe amniotic fluids, and he could blow air through her hair, and let her see what that was like—

“It was okay,” he said, his mind reeling. “I got busted down to fourth grade,” he added, figuring she might as well hear it from him.

His mom reached over and tousled his hair. “I’m sure you’ll be back before you know it,” she said. “Did you practice your talking?”

Cort nodded. “Yeah. A little.”

And he vowed to practice some more that night. Really, this time.

While (u > i) i- -;

The scalpel made a sharp hiss as it slid across the small stone. Daniel flipped the blade over and repeated the process on the other side. Each run removed a microscopic layer of stainless steel, turning the surgical edge into something coarse and sloppy. He referred to the simple rock as his “Dulling Stone.” It had become a crucial part of this once-a-week ritual. The problem with sharp blades, he’d discovered, was that they hardly left a scar.

He leaned close to the mirror and brought the scalpel up to his face. Several years ago, when he’d made his first wrinkle, he could have performed this procedure from across the room. The focusing and magnifying lenses in his then-perfect eyes could tease galaxies from fuzzy stars—but those mechanisms were no more. They’d been mangled with a surgeon’s precision. Now he needed to be within a specific range to make sure his cutting was perfectly sloppy.

He chose a nubile stretch of untouched skin and pressed the instrument to his forehead; the blade sank easily into his very-real flesh, releasing a trickle of red. Daniel kept the blade deep and began dragging it toward his other brow, careful to follow the other ridges in their waves of worry.

As always, the parallel scars reminded him of Christie, Melanie’s young niece. When her parents discovered she was cutting herself, they’d asked Melanie for help. And Melanie had asked Daniel, as if he would understand such a sickness. Cutting to relieve anxiety? He’d had no answer for once. And he was so smart back then. If they asked him now, of course, he’d be able to tell them— Ah, but nearly everyone involved was dead now, and—

He was making too many connections; recalling too many links with his past. His mental acuity was out of control; the blade hadn’t traveled a centimeter, and he was thinking about a dozen other things. Parallel processing. It wouldn’t do. He assigned another twenty percent of his CPU cycles to the factoring of large primes. The world sped up around him as his mind slowed to a crawl. Now it was moving too fast, not him.

As his logic gates were overwhelmed with new computations, instructions meant for fine-motor servos became delayed. His hand slipped and parallel lines touched. An old scar was torn open. Blood leaked out in a stream as Daniel fumbled for a tissue. He noted the shakiness in his hand, the difficulty he had turning spatial commands into physical motion.

Better, he thought.

He dabbed clumsily at his forehead to wick away the mess he was making. The new wrinkle was outlined in oozing red—but it wasn’t complete. He picked up a small blue vial, the perfume it once contained lingering, triggering olfactory sensors just acute enough to register the floating molecules. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t seize it. The failure was another sign of progress.

He tapped out a small pyramid of coarse sand into his palm, pinched some of the powdered stone between two fingers, and pressed it into his new wound. He was careful to grind the fine shards deep enough to trigger his tear ducts. Past the pain that warned him of the permanent damage being caused.

None of those systems had been dulled, of course. There’d be no cheating.

He grabbed another tissue and dabbed it across his forehead, removing the excess blood and grit. Before more could work its way out, he smeared a layer of skin adhesive over the rubble-filled canyon. He smiled at the warning on the first-aid tube—it prescribed, in several languages, the necessity of cleaning out the wound before applying. He worked the edges of the tan gel as it congealed, blending the fake skin into the real.

He surveyed his work. The lines radiating out from the corners of his eyes could be denser, but he’d save that for next week. He skipped to his hair, which was coming along nicely. He allowed himself a bit of fine-motor control for this part, removing 512 strands in a long-established pattern. Next week he’d ramp up to 1,024 hairs a session, he decided. Soon it’d be 2,048 follicles destroyed each week. He also needed to change the dye formula. Move past the snow-on-slate and begin a full bleaching.

Cosmetically, he was satisfied. He moved to his least-favorite portion of the ritual—the part he always saved for last.

Memory.

It was a routine within a routine. First, he culled specifics, sorting through his banks for two momentous occasions to completely erase. The pizza party in ’72 was still in there. He would miss it, but there were few easy choices left to make. He deleted the entire day without looking at it too hard. He had made that mistake too many times. He also took out something recent, a movie he’d watched a few months ago. Gone.

Next came the roughening-up. He still had plenty of good memories set aside for this process. He chose the honeymoon. It had only been hit twice before, so he could still recall most of the week. This wasn’t a full deletion—it was more like bisecting a holographic plate. You still had the entire image when you were done, but with half the detail.

He made the pass, wiping 1s and 0s from his protein memory at random. It was like shading his cheeks with blush, smoothing everything out and tapering it just so. He glanced briefly at the wedding night to see what was left, but it was hard to say without knowing what was gone.

The final step was the one he dreaded the most. Random memory deletion. It went against his primary programming, both the degradation of awareness and the arbitrariness of the maneuver. He triggered the routine with a grimace. He’d long toyed with the idea of changing the algorithm, making it so he wouldn’t even know what was being lost—but he never went through with it. He always wanted to know. Even if it was just a brief glimmer before it winked out forever.

Some of his best memories had been sacrificed in this way. They would flash like fish in shallow water, darting out of sight as he plunged after them. And he couldn’t help it; he always plunged after them.

This time—he got lucky. It was the day in Beaufort’s with Melanie. One of his few bad memories left. The details were already gone, but an overwhelming sense of disgust lingered, leaving a bad taste on his tongue receptors. Whatever that was—good riddance, he thought.

Daniel forced a smile at his reflection—the scar tissue around his eyes bunched up. Much better, he thought. Or worse, depending on how one looked at it. He continued factoring large primes and rose unsteadily to his feet. The mechanical linkage in his left leg had been built to take a pounding, but his arms had been even better designed to dish one out. He could feel the metal rods grinding on one another as they struggled to bear his weight. He had to lurch forward, shifting his bulk to his less-damaged leg as he shambled toward the door.

He fiddled with the knob and limped into the hallway. A flash of movement to one side caught his attention. It was Charles, one of the male nurse-bots, leaving Mrs. Rickle’s room. The android had a tray of picked-at soft foods in his grasp; the various mounds were swirled into a thick, colorful soup.

Synthetic eyes met and Charles smiled—raised his chin a little. “Big night tonight, Mr. Reynolds?” he asked.

“Hello, Charles. Yup. Scrabble night.”

“Scrabble tonight, huh? Well, I hope she goes easy on you, old fellow.”

Daniel smiled at the reference to his progressing age. It was kind of him to notice, to nurse along the ruse. “She never goes easy on me,” he replied in mock sadness.

Charles added the tray of half-eaten food to his cart and sorted some paper cups full of pills. “Would you mind delivering her medication for me? You know how Mrs. Reynolds feels about…” The android paused and looked at his feet. “…my kind,” he finished.

Daniel nodded. “She’s getting worse, isn’t she? About treating you, I mean?”

Charles strolled over to deliver the medication. “It’s fine. Like I always tell you, she’s done enough for my kind that I’ll stomach a little—unkindness.”

The nurse-bot turned back to his cart.

“Either way, I’m sorry,” Daniel called after him.

Charles stopped. Spun around. “You ever hear of a woman named Norma Leah McCorvey?” he asked.

Daniel leaned back on the wall so his bad leg wouldn’t drain his batteries. “Didn’t she pass away? She lived two halls over, right? The woman with—”

“No, no. That was Norma Robinson. Yeah, she passed away in ’32. Norma McCorvey lived, oh, over a hundred years ago. She was more famously known as Jane Roe.”

Daniel knew that name. “Roe v. Wade,” he said.

“That’s right. One of the biggest decisions before your wife came along…” The nurse-bot studied his shoes again. “And people remember her for that—for the decision. They remember her as Roe, not as McCorvey.”

“I don’t follow,” Daniel told Charles. He eyed his wife’s door and fought the urge to be rude.

“Well, most people don’t know, but years later—Norma regretted her part in history. Wished she’d never done it. Converted to one of the major religions of her day and fought against the progress she’d fostered. I just…” He looked back up. “I’ll always remember you and your wife for the right reasons, is all.” He turned to his cart without another word and started down the hall.

Daniel watched him go. One of the cart’s wheels spun in place; he wondered when Charles would finally get around to fixing that. Favoring his bad leg, he shuffled across the hall to Melanie’s door. It was shut tight, as usual. He knocked twice, just to be polite, before pushing it open. A familiar lump stirred on the bed, changing shape like a dune in a heavy gale.

“Who’s there?” a raspy voice croaked.

Daniel went to the sink and poured a cup of water. “It’s me. Daniel. Your husband.”

She rolled over, long white hair falling back to reveal a thin, weathered face. Wispy brows arched up in a look of surprise that had become her state of rest. “Daniel? Dear? When did you get here?”

“I live across the hallway, sweetheart.” He said it patiently as he crossed to her with the two cups.

“Of course. That’s right,” she said. “Why do I keep forgetting that?”

“Don’t worry. I forget stuff all the time. Here. Take these.”

Melanie labored to sit up straight, grunting with the effort.

“Honey, use the remote. Let me show you…” Daniel reached for the bed controls, but his wife waved a fragile arm at him, shooing his words away.

“I don’t trust the thing. And I don’t trust whatever that damned robot is wanting me to swallow.”

Daniel sat on the edge of the bed and held the first cup out to her. “He just delivers what Dr. Mackintosh prescribes, dear. Don’t take it out on the messenger. Now, swallow these; they’ll make you feel better.”

She shot him a look as she threw the pills on her tongue. “I don’t wanna feel better,” she spat around them.

“Well, I want you to. Now drink.”

She did.

He set the paper cups aside and smiled at her, trying to help her forget her bad mood. “Do you feel like a game of Scrabble?” he asked. Thirty years as a lawyer, winning rights for his kind, had filled her head with a vocabulary that computers were envious of. Even though she couldn’t string them together into rational ideas—not anymore—the words were still there, ready to be pulled from confounding racks with too many consonants.

“Scrabble night?” Her eyes flashed beneath the webs of cataracts. “You mean ‘Bingo Night,’ right?” False teeth flashed with the joke, a reference to her rack-clearing skills with seven- and eight-letter words.

“You call it what you want, but Charles said you should go easy on me tonight.”

“Fuck Charles. You tell that abomination—” Melanie stopped, her eyes widened even further. “Sweetheart, what did you do to your forehead?”

Daniel moved a hand up to his brow; it came away spotted pink, the drippings of a future scar. Too many primes, he thought.

“I must’ve hit it on something,” he lied. “You know how clumsy I can be.” He turned to the sink to smear the fake skin a little, making like he was tending to the wound.

“You weren’t always clumsy,” Melanie called after him. “I remember. You used to be so strong and agile—but at least you haven’t gotten any less handsome.”

“Thanks, dear.”

“You’re welcome. Now set up the board while I get my robe on— Oh, and I must tell you about the awful dream I was having before you came.”

“I’m listening.”

“Oh, it was horrible. We were younger, and married, but you weren’t you—you were one of those damned androids, and in the dream I was covered in rust, and, oh— It was terrible.”

“That does sound awful,” Daniel admitted.

Melanie swung her feet over the edge of the bed and reached for her robe. “What do you think it means?” she asked.

Daniel unfolded the board and set the tile dispenser in place. He stopped factoring primes for a moment.

“Probably nothing,” he lied. “Just a bad dream. Random.”

“Nothing’s random, dear. Take a guess.” She rose and joined him by the card table, placing one hand on his shoulder.

Daniel turned to his wife of nearly sixty years. His every processing unit was racing for an optimal solution to her query, but it was like looking for the largest prime. It was something that didn’t exist.

“Maybe you’re scared of losing me?” he tried.

Melanie raised a hand—bone wrapped in brown paper—and placed it on his cheek. “But, in my dream, I think I hate you.”

He pulled away from the touch, and in his auditory processors, the sound of neck servos seemed as loud as turbines, a dead giveaway. “Don’t say that,” he pleaded. “I don’t think I could go on if you ever hated me.”

“Oh, darling”—she wrapped her hands around his arm and pulled him close—“I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re right. It was just a dream, nothing to it.”

Daniel encircled her with his arms, steadying their embrace with his good leg. Just a dream, he thought. How badly he wished that were so. His protein memory cells went idle, awaiting further instructions. He held his wife. Servos whirred quietly in one knee, fighting to keep the rest of him upright.

Melanie opened her mouth to say something—but then it was gone. She’d forgotten how she got here.

Daniel considered, briefly, doing the same.

Some stories are laboriously written, and some are discovered. The act of writing has been likened to a story using the writer as a vehicle of expression. The author is the lightning rod; the words spark from clouds. We see this when ideas seem to reach a critical mass and pop up across culture. A broad swath of philosophy looks for expression everywhere it can, like a tube of paste squeezed and squeezed until it comes out all along the seams.

When John Joseph Adams and I edited an anthology together several years ago, we were both surprised (and delighted) to see a handful of submissions that dealt with homosexuality and questions of equality, even with stories set against the backdrop of the apocalypse. It wasn’t a coincidence, of course. The topic was everywhere; it has been one of the civil rights issues of our shared time; as speculative writers we were all exploring this theme.

“Algorithms of Love and Hate” was the first of several of my works to explore the ever-changing idea of equality. Too often we make progress in one area only to find ourselves pushing against the next. Or we find ourselves progressive in one area and stodgy elsewhere.

In my novel Half Way Home, I point this out explicitly: that our current modern selves will be seen as backwards to future generations. We make progress in areas of race, but can’t abide same-sex marriage. We solve that, and find ourselves scrapping sentient robots for spare parts. We expand our circle of empathy again, only to find yet another deficiency.

The point isn’t that we should expect moral perfection, or that we can know all objective moral truths, only that our smugness should be kept in check and our judgment of past generations should be tempered by recognition of their progress and our own failings. Too often we seem to think that barbarians are in the past and that we’ve reached some pinnacle. I think the climbing never ends.