Human Sister

about Michael filling the cabin, the four of us, shoulders and legs pressed together, held on to each other’s hands as we rode home.

Sara

    T he security personnel who met us at the winery helicopter pad reported an uneventful evening. There had been no searches of the house.
    Grandpa, Grandma, Elio, and I immediately went to Michael’s area to talk. I was anxious to set Michael free from his enclosure in my bedroom wall, but Grandpa said he first had to determine whether anything had been said that might have directed suspicion toward our house or Michael. He asked Grandma to go first so she could get to bed as soon as possible. She appeared exhausted, her fleshy cheeks and chin sagging more than usual, and unruly strands of her hair drifted over her face. In a weak, trembling voice she said that nothing during her interrogation had indicated there was any suspicion about what we were doing in the house. Grandpa was unsatisfied with this general assessment; he wanted the exact wording, as close as she could remember, of each question and each answer. She began to cry. I was afraid she was about to confess to something awful having happened, but instead, between sobs she said she was so tired that she couldn’t remember a single specific thing she’d been asked.
    Grandpa hugged her and asked her to go get some sleep.
    I went next. Grandpa appeared satisfied with my account.
    Elio said his interrogation had lasted no more than ten minutes. He’d been asked whether he had any knowledge of his mother’s cooperating with my parents or anyone else in support of the androids. He hadn’t. Had he any idea what she might have been doing with my parents on a plane headed to the moon? No. End of interrogation.
    Grandpa said his interrogation had lasted for over three hours. There had been extensive questions about every friend Dad had ever had from childhood to the present, about everyone ever associated with the Sentiren project, and about the probable behavior of the Sentirens and other androids under various circumstances; but nothing had been said that indicated there was any suspicion directed toward our activities or home. In fact, Casey had treated him respectfully.
    Although I didn’t say anything at the time, that last fact concerned me; it indicated that someone wanted something from Grandpa—they disguise themselves as flowers—but what?
    It was nearly 0900, and although all of us were by then tired, we had a joyful and tearful reunion with Michael when he was set free from the bedroom wall. Grandpa gave Michael a brief summary of what had happened and then told us to get to sleep; Michael’s many questions could wait until we were fully rested.
    I woke about three hours later and couldn’t go back to sleep. Were the interrogations actually over, or had they just begun? What were Mom, Dad, Aunt Lynh, and my brothers planning? Had the alleged disappearances of androids—of Aita—that Mom and Dad had been telling me about for years just been part of an act?
    I unwrapped myself from Elio, whose eyelids were quivering in a tempest of dreams, and went out to the main part of the house where I found Grandpa and Grandma in the living room, watching the news. They hadn’t been able to sleep much, either. Grandpa asked me to sit between them; then he requested a playback beginning at 1047 Pacific Time.
    Mom’s hair, medium length when I last spoke with her on Vidtel, was cut short, nearly shaved. She wore camouflage fatigues exhibiting patches of moon-dust gray and the black of shadows. Her delivery was cold and stern, reminding me of her manner several times when I was a child and she’d said I’d been naughty. Now, it seemed, the whole world had been naughty, and she and her associates had no choice but to take matters into their own hands, to escape with loving sentient beings from a brutal species with a long and vile history.
    The vast majority of humans, she said, have a tendency to believe that a group sufficiently different, especially any group they fear might be superior to or competitive with them, should be discriminated against or, worse, destroyed. Most humans believe in a fantasy about a god with whom they, of course, have a special relationship. A part of their belief is that this god gave some ethereal fantasy something they call a soul to each human being, and that scientists like her were trying to create people without souls contrary to their god’s will. Such humans feel that these