Human Sister

he could actually see through them.

First Brother

    I n her gloved hands, she holds a paddle in which the shaft is partially retracted into one of its blades. In sync with the rocking of the raft in the water, the shadow of the brim of her hat moves about on the paddle. She appears to visually scan the coastline. She pauses once for approximately five seconds and again for approximately eight seconds to focus on a sailboat listing onto its port side in the sand of Goat Rock Beach.
    She begins to extend the shaft of the paddle, looks up, smiles, and exclaims: “Pigeonoid! I’m so happy to see you!” She brings her hands together, pulls the glove from her right hand, and reaches out with the naked hand. Her hand moves back and forth in a motion correlated with increasing and decreasing stroking pressure (as predicted, within acceptable parameters) on the dorsal structure. The irregular tessellated pattern of the skin on her wrist is penetrated by sweat-gland shafts, which occasionally well up with moisture that glistens in the sun before evaporating.
    A close visual inspection of her lips and nostrils confirms that she is free from the infection.

Sara

    B efore escaping to this place under the sea, I copied everything I was able to gain access to on Grandpa’s computer. I’ve been reviewing notes for a book he began but apparently never finished on android psychology. The following entry was made just over three years before I was born and twelve years before Michael first opened his eyes:

    Creativity requires more than the generation of representational diversity and the ability to recognize novel patterns; it also requires the recognition of significant new problems. In humans, problems arise naturally out of their continual dialogue with the world in which they are embedded. The lack of motivation to dialogue with the external world that typifies androids at their present stage of development undoubtedly contributes to their low level of creative output even in the sciences and mathematics, belying the pedestrian notion that the abstract is not emotionalized.
    The problem of emotion in androids begins with the problem of empathy, for we do not know how to engender a rich repertoire of emotion without a foundation of empathy. But repeated failures over the past few decades to achieve even a moderate degree of empathy in androids from our most sophisticated mirror neuron systems lends credence to the theory that empathy presupposes an experience of the other as being like oneself. To that end, we make androids look like us and give them servo-mechanical systems capable of mimicking the actions of our bodies. But how is it possible for a creature to experience itself as being like me if it has never experienced hunger, pain, the discomforts of heat and cold, the total dependency on parents during infancy, the relative intellectual and physical inadequacies of youth, sexual desire, and so on? On these and on most other aspects of my life as lived, any adult furry little mammal in the wild is more like me than is any android yet created.
    We need to develop and study intelligent systems that feel hunger and pain, go through long periods of dependency, struggle to learn, desire…

    Grandpa eventually got what he wanted: two such intelligent systems, ones that would feel pain and desire and all the rest—Michael and me—to develop and study. And love and protect and deceive.

    Nearly three months after my eighth birthday I lay, dreamy and blissful, on an operating table not long after receiving a sedative. Colorful cartoon images seemed to appear and disappear on the top of the white interior of a sterile operation tent, which had been designed by the military for occasions when evacuation to a hospital was impracticable. A scent, as of a tub scrubbed very clean, permeated everything, and the air felt drowsy amid the soft buzz of air filter motors keeping positive pressure inside the tent.
    First Brother stood beside me, wearing a white surgeon’s gown. We were in the back part of the house, in Grandpa’s laboratory and study, where we had what Grandpa called level 3 security. Above us, beyond the top of the tent, beyond the ceiling of the room, and up through five meters of sandy soil, chardonnay vines hung heavy with musty, sweet-smelling grapes nearing harvest in the late September sun.
    I looked up at First Brother’s face. I’d been told that the visible portion of his head had been produced by a