COMPANDROID, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Jeffry’s mother gave me to him on his sixth birthday. “Silvanus,” she said, as she tied a red bow around my arm,”there are already indications that Jeffry has intelligence deficits. You may have to do the thinking for both of you.” She gave me a look I was too new to interpret, but when I remembered it later, I recognized love and despair.

At the time I had no perspective, having been so recently mind-wiped, but waketime brought ideas and information. I was a Silvanus Mark-VIII companion android, created for women of strong will and strange desires. I had no behavior pre-patterning for interaction with a small, defective boy. There was something strange going on.

Nevertheless, Jeffry and I got along with each other. “Hit him, Silly,” was Jeffry’s most frequent instruction to me early on; he accompanied the instruction by pointing at some child who was bothering him. I always complied, though I had been patterned for selective disobedience and could easily have refused. Hitting was in my behavior catalog. I never caused lasting damage.

By the time we reached second grade, Jeffry was the undisputed ruler of his class. None of the other children had compandroids any longer. They had outgrown their nandroids. I was tall, thin, and strong as a hydraulic press, and when Jeffry asked me to do something that would not harm him, I did it, except for his homework. His mother Chandra knew the secret key word that commanded absolute obedience from me, “iskandidar,” and using it, she forbade me to do any of Jeffry’s schoolwork.

“This mainstreaming can only last so long,” she said at dinner one night. “He’ll have to get sorted into some department or class that takes care of these mental things. I don’t want you to help him escape that. He has to grow up and be whoever he is. He’ll do his own homework, and sooner or later his teachers will realize he needs help.”

We were having our usual evening meal: we both had nutrient drinks. The alcove where we sat was pale and dim, the light coming from the central fixture in the kitchen workspace. Through the nearest wall I could hear the twin babies belonging to our neighbors on that side complaining in unison. Earlier I had fixed Jeffry’s supper, fed him, bathed him, and put him to bed, something else Chandra had ordained.

“Did he tell you to do anything interesting in school today?” she asked. She always wanted to hear what Jeffry wanted me to do. She rarely did anything about it; she just wanted to know.

“We had a quiet day,” I said.

What about Ms. Stratford? She do anything interesting?”

“She gave me back my homework.”

Chandra smiled. She had a round face, brown as tea with milk in it, and long black hair. Often when I was with her, all my pre-patterned sexual responses woke, but she was not my primary care object; I sent them back to sleep. I felt curious about them. They would never see any use in my relationship with Jeffry. Maybe after my next mind-wipe I would get a chance to use them.

“What grade did you get?” asked Chandra.

“A ‘C.’ She said my composition lacked originality.” Ms. Stratford was Jeffry’s second-grade teacher. She had told me a week before that she was tired of having me hang around the classroom doing nothing, and if I was there, I might as well learn something. She tested me and we discovered I had learned to read in first grade just by being present. So Jeffry did his homework and I did mine.

“That’s not fair,” Chandra said, her face clouding.”How can you be original when there’s so many things you can’t even think about?”

“What do you mean?” I had the option to ask for clarification at any time, unless someone forbade it.

“When I got you, the manual said you had limited capacity for originality, or something. It’s been a while. What did it say? Your pre-patterning was so complicated there wasn’t much room for new learned responses, but I could upgrade you with memory chips. Was that you, or the house computer? Anyway, how can she criticize the work of somebody who’s only two years old?”

“It’s her job,” I said.

“Can I see your paper?”

I put down my drink and went to the front room, whereJeffry’s satchel was. I got my paper out of it. In second grade we were still using pencils. “You have to learn to write by hand,” Ms. Stratford said. “What if there’s a power outage and all the computers go down? Somebody has to know how to cope in times of no batteries.”

I looked at my words on the blue lines that ran like highways the long way across the rough paper: a straight line, a stitched line, a straight line, a gap; a straightline, a stitched line…and my penciled letters. Ms. Stratford had given me six sheets of paper to practice on. My hands knew how to do a lot of things, but making letters hadn’t been one of them.

I took the page back to the kitchen and set it in front of Chandra.

She lifted it and read aloud. “‘My day, by Jeffry’s Silvanus. We get up. I fix cereal and C-mix for Jeffry. We wait for the hoverbus. We come to school. We go home. I fix dinner for Jeffry and put him to bed.’ Sil, you left out all sorts of things.”

“I covered the front of the page.”

She grinned at me. “Oh, yeah. I forgot that was the object in school. What’d Jeffry write for this assignment?”

“He didn’t show me. He got a ‘D.’”

She bit her lip. “Was he upset you got a bettergrade?”

“No. I’m bigger.”

She drank some of her drink. “It fries me that they never notice how badly he’s doing. Do I have to announce it in assembly or something?”

I sat a long time, trying to figure out if I could ask questions not directly related to the needs of my primary care object. Somewhere in my patterning there was a program for spontaneous responses. I had been using it a lot more lately, with all these new demands on me. There was also a limited program for initiating contact. I imagined I could hook the two together, and found I could ask, after all. “Why don’t you tell someone?”

“I told you.”

“Why don’t you tell someone real?”

She blinked. “Sil,” she said.

“Why do you think he’s stupid, anyway?”

“Well, he’s got to be. He’s just got to be, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Silvanus, don’t give me this ‘terrible twos’ stuff, all right?” Preoccupied, she touched my hand. She was still studying my paper. I felt a pattern trying to fall into place, and I aborted it. She stroked my hand and it happened again. I let myself take the next step, just to see what would happen. Jeffry was safe and comfortable, or he would have let me know. I didn’t know if I could satisfy the needs of someone not my primary care object. I turned Chandra’s hand over and ran the back of my fingernail along her palm.

She stiffened and sat up, her black eyes widening.

I lifted her hand and took her thumb into my mouth, watching her.

“You remember,” she whispered.

I licked the back of her hand. She moaned.

I sucked on the first knickle of her index finger. She closed her eyes. Her mouth was half open. She was proceeding through her arousal cycle faster than my patterning suggested was natural for first initiation of contact.

She sat up straight and stared at me. “You do remember, don’t you?”

I smiled and took her index finger into my mouth.

“Stop,” she said.

I vibrated my tongue against the tip of her finger.

“Iskandidar. Stop,” she said, and I froze in place. She retrieved her hand from me. “Sit up,” she said. I sat back. “Answer. Do you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“We used to—” She leaned toward me and looked into my eyes.

I shook my head.

“But that was my favorite thing. Your starting with my hand.”

“Pre-patterning,” I said.

“I thought we invented that together.”

“Limited capacity for originality,” I said.

She sighed. “I didn’t like to think of someone else inventing that, but I guess it’s true. You really don’t remember?”

“I don’t remember anything before Jeffry.”

“Probably best that way,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and studied me. “You are still care-bonded to Jeffry?”

“Yes.”

“But you could initiate with me?”

“That was responsive. You initiated.”

“I did? Must have been habit. Can you followthrough?”

“I don’t know. As long as Jeffry doesn’t need me, maybe.”

She stood up and took my hand. “Come,” she said, and led me to her bedroom.

#

Jeffry tugged my toe. I sat up out of the blankets, leaving the warmth of Chandra’s proximity, and looked at him. “Are you all right?”

He was upset. Small brown face, light-brown hair, black eyes: Jeffry was small and stocky, thick-bodied and strong; his most frequent expression was a brooding frown. His eyes were open too wide for that now. He looked sad.

“Tell me,” I said.

“You back with Mama now? You’re not mine anymore?”

“I’m yours.”

“We got to go to school, Silly.”

I glanced at the digital alarm on Chandra’s side of the bed. Jeffry was right. Too late for breakfast, even. That would never do. I got up and dressed. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t apologize to me.”

“I made a mistake. I’m supposed to be up.” I tapped my head, wondering what had gone wrong with my patterning. I had a built-in alarm clock. What had turned it off?

“Shut up. Come on.” He handed me his satchel and headed for the front door.

“No. Breakfast first.”

“We’re late, Silly.”

“Breakfast first,” I said. He looked like he was going to protest, so I picked him up and carried him to the kitchen. I used to carry him around more when he was smaller. Chandra had set Jeffry-priorities in my patterning: care for his body first, his mind second. When Chandra first gave me to Jeffry, he had tested the limits often, hiding when it was time to go to school, ordering me to do things counter to his best interests, trying to hurt me. Things had steadied down after half a year.

“I won’t eat,” Jeffry said as I put him in a chair. He sat with his arms crossed over his chest.

I fixed hot cereal with raisins, cinnamon, and apples, his favorite. I poured milk on it, then looked at him. He pinched his mouth shut. He knew I knew a certain nerve stroke that would force him to open his mouth and swallow; my patterning was filled with obscure facts about the human body and how it responded to a broad catalog of touches. In the past I had just gone ahead and fed him; he knew resistance got him nowhere.

I set the bowl of cereal on the table in front of him.”Why?” I said.

He looked at me. A tear ran down his cheek. “She wants you back,” he said.

“If my interaction with Chandra disturbs you, I won’t do it anymore.”

“You can’t stop her.”

“You are my primary care object, Jeffry.”

“She can wipe that, the way she wiped you before she gave you to me.”

I sat down and started eating his cereal. I didn’t know what was happening inside me; patterns had unraveled.

“Silly!” Jeffry took the cereal away from me and ate it himself. He stopped when there was still some left, and gave it to me. I finished it a slow spoonful at a time, realizing that it tasted quite different from Balanced Science nutrition, which was my regular diet. Jeffry watched me eat. He looked worried.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You never did that before,” he said. “Ate my cereal.”

I put the spoon down and looked at my own hand. “I feel confused,” I said.

“Don’t say that. You never get confused.”

His eyes met mine. My confusion melted as his needs reassumed primary importance. “School,” I said. I checked his satchel, discovered he had not packed his lunch, and got it out of the refrigerator. There was a credit cafeteria at the school, but Chandra decreed sack lunches for Jeffry. That puzzled me. I was a luxury item, and she owned me; everything else about her life was impoverished.

In the hoverbus to the school stop, I took Jeffry on my lap. I had never done that before either. He didn’t protest. With my arms around him, I felt contented. He leaned against me.

After we got off the bus, he took my hand and waited for the others who had gotten off at the stop to leave. “Sil, you got to stop doing weird things now. If anybody notices, they’ll mind-wipe you again.”

“How can anyone tell what’s normal for me, Jeffry? I’m not even doing the job I was created for.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen the ads for my model on late-night HV. They show what I’m supposed to do. And I know what’s in my head. Most of the patterned responses I have don’t involve you at all.”

“You want to be Mama’s again?”

“I don’t want anything.”

He turned to watch a child scolding a dog across the street. When he looked back at me, his eyes were narrow, his mouth frowning. “Let’s go,” he said.

All the kids looked at us when we came in. Ms. Stratford was wearing her green dress. She had red, crinkled hair, blue eyes, and freckles. She was tall and slender. When she asked us why we were so late, Jeffry said breakfast. I said a communications breakdown. She grinned at me. Jeffry kicked the side of my foot. “Well, just for that, you two can spend first recess writing a composition: what I did with my morning,” she said, and then we sat down and accessed our arithmetic.

When the recess started, Jeffry got paper for both of us. “Don’t lie, Silly,” he said. “Just say breakfast. Please.”

“Jeffry,” said Ms. Stratford. “Go sit in Luri’s desk. I want work, not whispers.”

Jeffry frowned and moved to a desk across the room. I licked the tip of my pencil and wrote.

“What I did with my morning, by Jeffry’s Silvanus. The alarm did not go off. It was a commicashun break down. Jeffry had to wake me. I got up late. I made Jeffry breakfast. Feed the body first and the mind second. We caught a later bus. The rest of the morning we did arithmetic.”

It didn’t quite fill the page. I erased half the last sentence and rewrote it, spreading the letters wider. I handed it to Ms. Stratford.

She read it, corrected my spelling with a red pen, and smiled at me. “Who says feed the body first?” she asked.

“Patterning.”

Jeffry brought his paper up. He craned his neck trying to see what I had written. Ms. Stratford narrowed her eyes, then handed my paper to Jeffry. He read it and heaved a big sigh.

“Silvanus,” said Ms. Stratford after she had made red marks all over Jeffry’s paper, “I want you to write me a made-up story tonight. Make up everything that happens in it.”

“I have a limited capacity for originality,” I said.

“Then you’ll just have to work very hard.”

“Ms. Stratford, you can’t ask him to do stuff like that,” said Jeffry. “You might upset his inside stuff. You want to wreck him?”

“I don’t think it will hurt him,” she said, smiling at him as if he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“He’s doing too much stuff he’s not supposed to do already,” said Jeffry. “You got to stop this writing stuff. You got to leave him alone. He’s already falling apart. He told you.” He shook my paper at her. “He had a communications breakdown. He never didn’t alarm before.”

“What are you afraid of, Jeffry? That he’ll learn to think for himself?”

He stared at her with his mouth half open, then turned to me, eyes wide. He gripped my hand. “No,” he said after a moment. “Maybe. He’s not supposed to. If he does what he’s not supposed to they wipe his brain and start over. I don’t want them to start over, okay?”

Ms. Stratford sat back, her eyebrows lifted. “It doesn’t have to work that way,” she said. “Androids can achieve identity and acquire citizen status, if they pass certain tests. You know how close Silvanus is?”

“I don’t care,” said Jeffry. “I just want him to stay the same. He used to be somebody else. I remember when I was little, he was someone else. Then Mama took him away and he came back and he’s this one now. I liked the first one! Now I like this one! I don’t want to lose another one. Silvanus! Don’t write anymore! Don’t talk anymore to anybody but me! Understand?”

“I understand,” I said.

“You got to leave him alone, Ms. Stratford.”

Ms. Stratford stared at me, her eyes wide. “Silvanus, you have your own voice and your own mind. You can stop being a slave any time you choose. Just say the word and I’ll help you.”

Jeffry said, “Sil, if she starts bothering you, you do what you’re supposed to do to women to her, okay? Make her be quiet. Don’t listen to her.”

“All right,” I said to Jeffry.

Jeffry glared at Ms. Stratford. “You leave him alone now,” he said. “If you don’t, it’s your own fault.”

“Are you threatening me, Jeffry? I can have you suspended.”

“I don’t care.”

She stood up. Her face was white behind her freckles.”We are all going to see the principal, right now!”

* * * *

“What was I like before?” I asked Jeffry as we rode the hoverbus home.

“You were more like a daddy.” Jeffry rolled the note the principal had given him to take home to Chandra into a thin tube, then pretended it was a cigarette—stuck it in his mouth, pulled it out, blew imaginary smoke. “You were a present from my real daddy to Mama. He said he wanted her to stay in shape while he was gone, and you were the safest way. At first you were more like a toy. She had you stand around a lot. She fed you. Then she played with you some and had a good time. Then you started getting realler somehow. She had you take me places and give me baths and stuff, too. We went to the zoo. We had a lot of fun. You were—I don’t know how it works. I don’t know. You were somebody else, Silly. You were like my dad.”

“What happened? Why did Chandra change it?”

“Daddy’s space ship blew up. He was one of the Mars pioneers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. His space ship blew up and she decided to get you mind-wiped and give you to me. I sure hated you when you came back. You’re not the same at all.”

“Why does she say you’re stupid?”

“I don’t know. Stop asking questions now. You’re not supposed to. Just stop.” He sat forward in his seat and stared past me out the window.

Chandra was not in the apartment when we got there. We had been sent home early. “Homework,” I said to Jeffry, setting his satchel on the kitchen table.

“No more homework! We’re getting transferred. We don’t have to do anything until a new teacher tells us to.”

“Oh. You sure?”

He held out the wet-edged note the principal had given him. I unfolded it and read it. “Dear Ms. Sachdeva,” it said, “We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused by the actions of our teacher, Ms. Stratford, in regards to your property, Jeffry’s Silvanus. We are rectifying the situation by transferring Jeffry to another classroom. Rest assured that he won’t have this problem with Ms. Argos. Sincerely,” and a scrawled name.

I set that note on the table and unfolded the one Ms. Stratford had slipped into my smock pocket. “Silvanus. I’m convinced you can be a whole, self-willed person. Keep thinking for yourself. If you want help, ask me; I can get in touch with the Android Rights Action League. If you have the power to disobey Jeffry, write me a made-up story. That’s the first test.”

Jeffry pulled the note from my hand, read it, and tore it into tiny pieces. “You can’t read, Silvanus, understand me? You can’t read.”

“Homework,” I said, pulling at the satchel’s fastenings. I lifted out the blue disk. That morning I had known it was labeled “Arithmetic,” but right now the word was just black lines above a picture of a quartered sphere.

“But—” Jeffry looked at me. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and booted the disk in his miniputer. He put the keyboard in his lap and worked on problems. I poured him an apple juice and sat down to watch.

* * * *

“But I like it that Sil was learning to read and write,” Chandra said after studying the note from the principal. “What’s so criminal about that?”

Jeffry sat across the table from her and frowned.

“Sil?”

I looked at my hands on the table. My fingers were long, thin, and brown. Jeffry had instructed me not to talk to anyone but him.

“Somebody had better tell me something. I can’t afford to have either of you analyzed.”

“Silly, you talk. You tell her anything she asks about.” Jeffry got up and went to his room, where he slammed his closet door three times and then became quiet.

“What’s the matter with Jeffry?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“He refuses to talk to me, he slams doors, nothing is the matter with him?”

“He’s scared I’m going to be mind-wiped again.”

“Oh, no, Sil! No. I’m never going to make that mistake again.”

“Why did you do it in the first place?”

She glared at me. She took a deep breath and let it out. “Because he needed you more than I did. I wanted him to have you…I wanted him to have somebody who cared about him the way you cared about me. His father died.”

“He told me. I was better before, wasn’t I?”

“Different. Even your voice was different. You were more—grown up. It was hard to get used to this new you at first.”

“Child care-bonding,” I said, and shook my head. Afternoon cartoons on the HV. Advertisement for nandroids: “Children! Wouldn’t you like to have a Nanny who is always kind? Somebody you can count on for a hug? Ask your parents—” Prime time ads for the same product stressed their firm and consistent discipline—“a companion who always plays fair, who will give your child the parenting no previous generation has had the benefit of; Nandroids, an investment in our planet’s future.”

Nandroids were built to bond adult-to-child. I was built to bond equal-to-equal. I had changed from Chandra’s equal to Jeffry’s equal: child-to-child. Chandra had balanced it with special commands, but that didn’t recreate the previous me. “Maybe if you wiped me and re-bonded back the other way—”

“No! I’ll never take that chance again. Whoever you are, that’s who you are, okay?”

“But what if I get broken?”

“How could you?”

“This morning I was confused. I was confused all day, even though Jeffry told me not to be.”

“How could you help a thing like that?”

“Jeffry says if I keep doing what I’m not supposed to, something inside me will break and I’ll have to have a mind-wipe.”

“That’s only if you’re really sick and start menacing humanity—like any other criminal. Or if your owner decides. But we’re not going to decide that, Sil.”

“He thinks other people can force it to happen.”

Chandra got up and paced into the kitchen workspace and back, into the kitchen workspace and back.

“Ms. Stratford told me there’s some sort of android rights action league and if I pass some tests I can get to be a citizen or something. I have to make up a story.”

“Oh, that never works. The radical fringe! They’ve been dragging cases through the courts for years and haven’t proved a thing. I thought she must be one of those nuts, but I like it that she gave you assignments. I mean, it’s all right with me if you want to try writing a story for her. If you were a citizen, would you want to stay with us?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So it really doesn’t make any difference. What a tornado in a teapot.” She stopped in front of me. She tilted my chin up, then leaned forward and kissed me. After the day’s confusions, I was glad when my pre-patterning locked in and I could do something well without having to think about it.

After sex, after the short deep sleep that followed it, I sat up in the darkness and grasped her arm. “Why do you think he’s stupid?”

“It’s the middle of the night,” she muttered.

“He’s my priority.”

“His father was stupid,” she said. “Space stupidity. All they do out there is die, and off he went, and died.” Her voice snarled. “Don’t you ever go to space, Sil. Don’t let Jeffry go either, iskandidar. Not even to be just a shuttle pilot. That’s what his father was at first. Mars pioneers. Sacrifices to Kali.”

“You think if he’s sidelined into special education he won’t be able to get into space?”

Tense silence in the darkness. I could sense her body heat elevating slightly. After a moment, she said, “Silvanus.”

“What?”

She sat up and punched me. She rained open-handed blows on my upper body. Her breath came in gasps, which changed to sobs. I shielded my vulnerable parts and waited. There was a pattern of response to this initiation; it was an invitation to pain-giving. With every blow she struck, I fought off my impulse to make counterblows, because I knew, with some part of my mind which had never been awake before, that this was not the situation for which I had been pre-patterned.

At last she lay back, her breathing heavy and rapid.”Hit me,” she whispered.

I sat still.

“Hit me, iskandidar. I shouldn’t attack you because you say something awful but true. Hit me back.”

I waited.

“Silvanus.” She rolled over and turned on the bedside light, then lay and looked up at me, her eyes large and dark. “Did I damage you?”

I looked down at my upper arms and chest. I was crafted thick-skinned so as not to bruise easily. “Maybe a little,” I said.

“In the patterns?”

“No.”

“I used the magic word,” she said, “and you didn’t do what I told you to.”

I sat silent. Then I said, “Mind-wipe?”

Her silence lasted longer than mine. At last she said,”No.”

I lay back down beside her. The safe ground of promise had just trembled in her silence. I had better obey her, whatever she asked, next time. Even if no one else knew, I would know I did it by choice.

If I was Jeffry’s equal, and he was learning and growing, how could I help learning and growing too?