Human Sister

mistake by creating androids, by creating Michael, before society had matured enough to accept them? Had he, under the circumstances, been justified in deceiving me about what he’d been doing and about what had been done to me?
    In the midst of these questions, I remembered that Epictetus had written that difficulties are things that show us what we are. Perhaps he should have added that in their extreme forms, difficulties are things that leave innocent no one who encounters them. In any case, how could I both love and judge?
    Eventually, Elio woke and found me crying. For a while, he tried to comfort me. Then he insisted I put Grandpa temporarily out of my mind and sleep, for we had to be alert and operate mistake-free in the coming hours and days. I agreed, quieted, remembered Grandpa’s once telling me that we can never understand what we have done, for we are ignorant of the future, and fell asleep.

    Elio was still sleeping when I woke early the next morning, ready to set our escape plan in motion. I carefully unlaced myself from him, then dressed and stepped in front of the outside Gatekeeper. It opened: crisp January air; arborway wet with dew; eastern sky suffused with a luminous pink-hued flush of dawn that set hoarfrost on the grass glistening and lit the flowers and trees, the vines sleeping in the gentle breeze, the fog covering a distant valley in fleecy stillness: that beautiful world I loved this last morning that I lived at home.
    “Good morning!” I cheerily announced to the military guard, who was petting Lily. He asked where I was going, what I was going to do, when I would be back. He ran a scanner over me, smiled, and wished Lily and me a pleasant walk.
    I drove Lily out to the back road, parked the pickup, and began walking home. Because I couldn’t be seen crying while out walking on a beautiful morning—I might have been questioned as to why—I tried not to think about Grandpa and that the next day would be his last; tried not to think about how he might do it, tried not to think of his turning away, disappearing, leaving not even a shadow to follow. But in moments of weakness, I was unable to filter out those thoughts, and each time they squeezed through, they brought with them the heavy emptiness of memory, grief, and fear.
    When Lily and I returned home, the guard said he understood that Lily had “pooped out.” As expected, the people watching us had monitored my phone conversation with Elio and, we hoped, would think they knew why I’d left our pickup parked on the back road.
    During the rest of the day, Michael, Elio, and I prepared to leave. We quietly dug through sandy soil to within two meters of the surface of the vineyard and carefully checked and packed the supplies we would be taking: two nutriosynthesizers, two fabricators, two recyclers, seeds for plants, three fuel cells, and our library of nanodesigns, music, and books. Not until days later would I find out that Michael had also packed plans and some crucial parts for the artificial human wombs Grandpa had entrusted to him.
    About a half-hour before sundown, I went out to take Lily for her walk. I told the guard we would be retracing our steps of the morning to the pickup. But about a quarter of the way there, Lily and I turned back toward home. The guard asked what had happened. I told him about Lily’s cancer and arthritis, that she had started whining as if in pain, so I decided not to take her all the way to the back road. We would try to do that again the following morning.
    He knelt down and petted her. “Poor old girl.”
    I looked up toward the west. By darkening degrees sallow dusk was settling in.

    Following tearful farewells with Grandma, Elio, Michael, and I broke through to the surface of the vineyard above the house at midnight, a time, we thought, when none of the vineyard workers or neighbors would be awake to notice us pull ourselves and our supplies up from a hole between two rows of chardonnay vines, then walk nearly one kilometer through thick fog to the pickup. Elio drove carefully, stopping fully at each stop and maintaining a speed under the relevant limits, so as not to draw the attention of any law enforcement that might have been operating in the middle of the night. The drive to Bodega Bay, the loading of our supplies onto the Lefcort cruiser, and our trip out to within 10 kilometers of Anzen went without a hitch. Our plan was still for Michael to take one of the subs down to Anzen to