Human Sister

blew my nose.
    They both smiled. “To know ourselves, honey,” Dad said, “has long been humans’ deepest intellectual desire. We have learned an immense amount about ourselves—one day you’ll understand this—in the process of trying to duplicate with alternative materials how we think and feel and act.”
    “And how to improve ourselves,” Mom said. “There’s no other way to test what might result from certain proposed improvements, such as having larger working memories, different algorithms for memory prioritization and decay, heightened sensory perception, and so on. Such things we can’t try out on each other. Who knows what might go wrong? It is in the nature of complex systems to be unpredictable, and as we’ve seen in other fields during the past few decades, not all the surprises can be expected to be pleasant ones.”
    “Your brothers have already given us so much,” Dad said. “Compared with your grandma and grandpa, and even to Michael, they probably appear to you to be a bit cold. But if you ever get to know them as we have, you’ll find them to be immensely interesting and caring and even loving, in their own way.”
    “And like us,” Mom added, “they want to create—to reproduce, if you will—and care for what they’ve created. Your four new brothers are the product of your older brothers’ designs and devoted nurturing.”
    “What we’re getting at, honey,” Dad said, “is that we love you dearly. You’re our daughter, our only human child. You came to us as a happy accident, but we were so busy with other important things that we felt we couldn’t do justice to you or to our love for you if we selfishly kept you to ourselves. We felt, and hope we were right in this, that your grandma and grandpa could give you much more of what you need than we, with our busy lives, ever could.”
    It’s hopeless, I thought. They’ll never understand what it feels like to be abandoned. To be abandoned in favor of brothers.

    After having a snack in the lab’s lunchroom, Dad asked whether I’d like to go for a drive to see the city and the wintry countryside. I said I’d like to spend more time with my brothers, but Mom said my introduction had been distracting enough to them for one day.
    It was midafternoon when Dad stopped the car near a snowy field abutting a river lined with trees. The three of us got out and started building a snowman; but before long, clouds blanketed the sky, and soon, swirling down through the bracing air, some flakes of paralyzed water landed on my face, were warmed, and once again flowed, crawling like insects down my cheeks into the scarf around my neck. Then the ground was white, the trees were white, even the sky was white; and at the edge of this world of one color, the invisible sun set earlier than I expected, sending darkness, like an owl on a hunt, swooping swiftly and silently down upon us.
    We had just settled into the car and begun to warm up when Mom’s teleband beeped. She answered, and by the few words I heard and by the tone of her voice, I knew, or was led to believe, that a crisis had occurred. She snapped the teleband off and turned to Dad. “That was Louise at the AAN. Aita isn’t responding. She was working at the greenhouse. They want us to get over there right away.”
    Dad started the engine and headed back toward the city.
    “What’s the AAN?” I asked.
    “The Android Assistance Network,” Mom answered.
    “What do they do?”
    “We’re an underground network that helps androids escape from the United States.”
    “Who is Aita?”
    “An android who works at a greenhouse nearby. She came out of the Robotic Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and is a second-generation android, developed and trained exclusively by other androids, as have been your four new brothers.”
    “Is something wrong with her?”
    Mom glanced at Dad, then looked back at me. “Recently some androids have been disappearing. Most of them are equipped with alarms and tracking devices, but at the time of each disappearance, the frequencies on which those devices broadcast are jammed for a few minutes, and when the jamming ends, there’s nothing, not a trace of the android anywhere.”
    “Have Aita’s frequencies been jammed?” I asked.
    “That’s what Louise just told me. Most of the people with the AAN think the androids are being kidnapped by U.S. agents, thrown into insulated chambers, and, well, after that we can only speculate.” Mom looked