Human Sister

at least five hundred androids of different designs, including my brothers, had escaped to Canada after or immediately before the U.S. outlawed them, and that since then, nearly all had mysteriously disappeared, as had Aita. How long, I feared, would Mom and Dad be able to keep my brothers safe?
    Ten days later, a rally was held in Sacramento to pressure the California State Legislature to ratify an amendment to repeal the Twenty-second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It was the first time I was allowed to watch WNN news at home (I’d watched it a few times before with Elio).
    “I want you to see what 157,000 people praying and meditating looks like,” Grandpa said as I sat down beside Grandma on the living room sofa.
    The streets and lawns of the Capitol were crammed with people, most of them sitting on red-white-and-blue ERP meditation cushions. The silence amidst a gathering of so many was eerie. Occasionally, a WNN commentator would announce in an almost reverential whisper (“as during a golf tournament,” Grandpa growled) the presence of a high-ranking person of this or that religion.
    When a member of the presidium of the World Council of Faiths was pointed out, Grandpa gave his own commentary. “There’s the real power. They want Jairison to be able to run for a third term. He and the other presidents and prime ministers are slowly becoming little more than feudal princes and princesses of the World Council’s holy empire.”
    “Bad things often come from good things, and vice versa,” Grandpa had cautioned several times before. He had explained, for example, how even science, as it had encroached ever further on what had been considered the core of the human self—its mind and consciousness—had inadvertently fueled the rise of the World Council. Slowly, a majority of people had fallen in line with ecumenical efforts to agree on one overriding religious principle: that though our bodies may have risen by evolution from earth, as soon as humans had evolved to a sufficient enough likeness of a god, this god had intervened to give humans a divine soul, which carried with it universal human values and meaning. Man was both of this Earth and divine, but man’s tools, even his intelligent creations, were of this Earth only; and to try to make such creations equal or superior to man was hubristic and idolatrous in the extreme. For the World Council and for the ERP, the things of greatest value on Earth were human souls, and these two organizations were their god’s primary protectors of those souls against the hubris of science and big international corporations.
    When a segment came on showing a smiling, waving President Jairison and his family leaving their Sunday morning church service, Grandpa said he couldn’t take it any longer and turned off the news. “I’m told,” he said, getting up from the sofa, “that by day, Jairison meditates in his White House office on the divinity of the human soul, and that by night, he sleeps under a large reproduction of The Dream of Constantine by Piero della Francesca. The man is a dangerous lunatic, and I, for one, think that eight years will have been quite long enough.”

    I refused to let Michael join with me through the braincord while I told him what I’d seen on the news. I was concerned about frightening him with my fear: that all those people crowding the Capitol would think he was a soulless, dangerous thing. Whenever we joined together, Michael could feel what I felt, sometimes, it seemed, even more acutely than I did. For example, he had cried when he’d reviewed my memory of Elio’s asking me to go sleep in my own bed that night we’d returned from the Red Dog, whereas I had merely felt hurt and confused. Perhaps a part of me—a part that Michael had found—had wanted to cry but felt repressed by Grandpa’s warning that boys don’t like girls who cry over seemingly trivial things.
    I felt calmer by the time Michael and I crawled into bed together to sleep, so that when he asked me then to brainjoin with him, I consented, as I did about once each month when I let him watch my dreams unfold. He reached behind his head and tapped on the trepan door there. The braincord came out, moved up my nostrils, and we lay quietly, waiting for my sleep—and dreams—to begin.
    I was out walking alone early one morning in the small park of Elio’s apartment building when Michael frightened me by jumping down beside me out of the linden tree. He