Human Sister

promises, word for word, that I’d given him six months before. But this time, because Mom and Dad were there, the words were richer with meaning, rooted now in a larger world. They came out slowly, each like a carefully crafted gift to be cherished by everyone hearing them. I wanted Mom and Dad to know how I felt. I wanted Elio’s and my love to blossom in the sunshine of their blessings.
    When I finished, Mom lifted the ring she held. “Here, Sara, put this on Elio’s finger. For me it’s a symbol that I’m giving my dear, dear daughter to you, Elio, to love and cherish and care for all your days.”
    I put the ring on Elio’s left ring finger, then kissed his finger, feeling at once the cool firmness of the metal and the warm softness of his flesh.
    After Elio stated his vows, Dad handed him the other ring and said, “With this ring, I give my best friend’s son to you, Sara, to love and cherish and care for all your days.”
    During that moment and for the nearly two hours that followed until we waved good-bye to Elio at the airport, I felt blissfully part of a loving family that included Mom and Dad.

    For years during the winter holidays, my parents had become increasingly oriented toward work, but this year, after they waved good-bye to Elio at the airport, they seemed busy almost to the point of panic. Our scheduled trip to Banff was canceled, and every night until I returned to California, we slept on cots in the lab.
    “Please be a love and stay out of the way. We’re so busy right now,” Mom said after I’d asked several questions the night after Elio had left. Probably in response to seeing that I felt hurt and disappointed, Dad gave me a draft of an article on evolutionary quantum computation that he was preparing for publication. He asked me to proof it.
    That task kept me out of the way for the next three days. On the night of 25 December, as we sat down in the break room for a quick dinner, I handed him back his draft with my comments. He immediately began reading. When Mom asked him to eat before his food got cold, he requested another espresso. He downed the steaming liquid in a gulp and got up, saying that he was going to his office to look up something.
    I had just fallen asleep on my cot later that night when Dad knocked and turned on the lights. “Thanks for your comments. Very insightful. You solved the problem I wrote in the margin on page 7. All of us here have been working on it unsuccessfully for some time now. Your brothers are curious about how you solved it and would like to examine you over the next few days. Would that be all right?”
    “Sure! That would be great!” My brothers are interested in me, I thought. At last!
    I lay awake for hours, fantasizing about our getting to know one another better and becoming closer. But the next few days would validate Grandpa’s admonition that disappointments are the disharmonies between expectations and desires, on the one hand, and the patterns of reality, on the other.

    One day just over eleven years earlier—it was about a month after Uncle Marcus had been killed—Grandpa returned home from Berkeley later than usual. He typically traveled to Berkeley in his tiltrotor two or three times each week to visit old professor buddies or take care of his duties as chairman of the board of Magnasea, the company his father had founded that was primarily in the business of robotic systems and deep-sea mining. Magnasea had had the Navy contract to develop android SEALs, the so-called Sentiren project, that resulted in the creation of my brothers. It was about a half year after my birth that the Navy canceled the Sentiren project and my brothers left the Magnasea lab to live at home with Mom and Dad, the home from which I had been cast only a couple of months before.
    Grandpa usually returned from those trips to Berkeley in good humor and with interesting stories to tell. But that evening, his face appeared unusually long and creased.
    Grandma offered him a glass of wine and asked what had happened. He told us that in the morning First Brother had taken the Turing test. Present during the test, along with Grandpa, had been Mom, Dad, Second Brother, and a panel of ten professors.
    I asked what the Turing test was. Grandpa said it was a procedure proposed by Alan Turing in the mid-twentieth century to determine whether a system had achieved human-level intelligence, based on whether the system was able to deceive human interrogators—who