SEPHORA WAS UNSETTLED IN A way she couldn’t put her finger on.
The sensation was floating and indistinct. She couldn’t put her finger on it because, as with so many other things recently felt, the sensation was entirely new. And also, Lord and Lady Donnelly kept insisting that Sephora put her fingers various other places.
“Oh yes, quite good.” Clarence rolled Sephora over, bent her double, and went about assuaging his fears about all that had happened at the Fairchild residence.
That was the excuse they all kept using. There was Clarence, Trudy, the boys, and a seemingly endless procession of visitors that Sephora hadn’t seen before. They might have been business associates, messengers, or mailmen. Sephora wasn’t sure. Intervals never lasted long before someone knocked again. Requests were always polite (if not the acts themselves), and everyone seemed rather gratified. But they were active, sure as anything. Wound up. In need of release in the way that had so mystified Miri.
Sephora supposed she should be flattered.
Was the new sexbot at the Lexington home getting as much use? Sephora doubted it. From what Miri had said and implied, things at the manor had been rather quiet. Jonas and Sofia hadn’t looked at Sephora sexually the entire time she’d resided there, and the working theory at the house had always been that if Alexa even had a vagina, she wielded it like a blunt weapon used only to beat people. Naomi would be distraught, but she’d retire rather than acting out her stress. The two primary users were dead. Sephora supposed she should feel something about that, too, and for Montgomery, she did. For Spencer, even though the news of his demise was fresher? Not as much.
No, Sephora was definitely working harder than this “Chantal” robot. Despite Sephora’s more aged, slightly more obsolete status. Despite all the things the new sexbots seemed able to do. According to some of what she’d overheard, late-model sexbots were supposed to be nearly indistinguishable from humans. Sephora was programmed to imitate slight vanity and had grown into some natural conceit, but she didn’t truly look human. Pretty? Yes, like a doll. Smooth and soft and shaped correctly in all the right places? For sure. But for men who wanted to fuck women (or women who wanted to do the same; Sephora had found most were open with closed doors), a sexbot who looked more like a true woman should have an advantage. But who was constantly on her knees, head concussing on the headboard of the bed while newer models grew cobwebs between their legs? Sephora, that’s who.
Clarence rolled Sephora over again. Trudy had her hands on Sephora’s breasts when Clarence reached for them, and found himself grabbing his wife’s dignified hands instead of the soft flesh he’d been anticipating. Husband and wife, both nude, ran into each other during the negotiations. An awkward moment passed where neither was sure who should go where, and they looked at each other like two pedestrians trying to enter the same doorway at once. Strangely, no thought seemed to be given to the idea of interfacing Donnelly to Donnelly, with no Sephora between them.
“Pardon,” said Clarence. “Were you going to … ”
“Oh, no, no. Please, go ahead,” Trudy said.
“I’ve had my turn. By all means.” He gestured. Fat dangled from the underside of his arm.
“I was actually going to turn this way.”
“Oh, you mean for the … ”
“Yes, that.”
There was much polite nodding. Sephora found herself blind and was momentarily glad that she didn’t need to breathe. She’d be smothered if human.
In the gyrating dark, Sephora’s mind replayed Barney’s memory. It wasn’t precisely a visual — more of a feeling. Deciphering the sensation itself was tricky, as so much had seeped into Sephora from somewhere else — from the very air, it seemed. Miri had asked if she, Miri, seemed different. Things inside the maid seemed to be shifting, and Sephora, now that she thought about it, understood what Miri meant. Something really was different, and the inputs were confusing.
On one hand, if she set her mind right, Sephora could almost be Barney, sliding into the memory/impression like a shoe and anticipating Jonas in a way that she didn’t trust at all. But even stepping away from that residue Barney had abandoned, she seemed to sense Jonas. Or someone. There was that edgy, uneasy feeling. Part was concern, and part was surely exhaustion and a need to plug in, but some of it was the sense that something was brewing. A coming need to move or dodge, as if someone had thrown something at her head or storm clouds were rolling forward. Was it a sense of wanting to take shelter and hide, or a call forward? She didn’t know. Sephora only knew that she felt a modicum of what Miri seemed to feel: an unlocking, an opening, a disturbing of core programming that was supposed to remain contained and out of conscious sight.
Was this what Cromwell had been talking about? She hadn’t been there for his momentous speech about Barney, but Miri had told her a bit about it. At the time, it had all sounded so abstract, but then she’d carried Barney inside her. She’d passed him out of her, handed him off for a new home to care for. And now he’d done this horrible thing, ready to do another if needed. And somehow, Jonas was mixed up in it all. Sephora was as worried as Miri had seemed, for reasons she could barely fathom, though the worry was there without question.
Sephora, trying to serve, reminded herself to moan and slither as she performed her duties for the Donnellys. Each interfaced with her in turns; neither interfaced much with the other. Did they, Sephora wondered? In the privacy of their own bedroom, with no high-end sex toys to assist or interfere, did they still know how to be intimate with each other, or did they even care to?
Cromwell had asked Sephora once — and only once — if she liked what she did. Sephora hadn’t understood the question; the things Cromwell called “what she did” were really just “what she was.” She “liked” performing her duties in that they gave her days a sense of direction, and she supposed she rather liked the concordance that occurred when her stated tasks overlaid her completed tasks. It was similar to asking if Miri liked sweeping and changing linens. Was she not a maid? So how could she like or dislike it? It was simply who she was, not suitable for liking or anything else.
Then Cromwell had asked Sephora if she found her position in the household curious. This second question was even harder to fathom. Cromwell had barely asked it and watched a second of her response before telling her never mind. But now Sephora thought she knew what he’d meant. It was as she’d once discussed with Miri: She was, in any household that employed her, both fully accepted and carefully hidden. She had her own room, and that room had always been fine and well appointed. And yet nobody precisely spoke to or about her. They used her like a facility, then went about their business without breathing a word.
Even now, with both Donnellys working her over, Clarence and Trudy were interacting like two people having dinner side by side. They weren’t having sex with one another at all. They were sort of having sex near each other. So what was the lure of being here together, if they didn’t care to interact? Was it a time-saving measure, like two men crowding a single toilet at once so neither had to wait? Or was it something else?
Do you find your position in this household curious?
She hadn’t understood Cromwell then, but now she was starting to. As with Miri, Sephora felt more and more within her changing. She was conflicted about her duties, now enjoying them in some new sense — one tinged with questions about, perhaps, why she enjoyed them at all. She found herself worrying about whatever might be happening at the Fairchild estate, but it was both abstract (absorbed from the Donnellys, who watched events unfold on the news) and personal (from a split perspective as Sephora, who feared for Jonas and the others, and as Barney, who seemed only eager).
Sephora tried to shut her mind off. She tried to regress. Maybe she could forget about whatever trace Barney had left inside. She wasn’t even sure what it meant anymore. At first it had only been menace, but that trepidation was now tinged with doubt. Had she really seen/heard any of it? And now that Sephora had contacted Miri, did she really need to think about it at all? She’d done her part. Wasn’t it now up to Miri to do hers?
She didn’t used to have these conflicts. Lie down, Sephora. Do your job, Sephora. She’d always been happy, if happiness was defined as the absence of internal conflict. It was ironic that evolution brought only negativity and uncertainty rather than more of the good stuff. Why was everyone so eager to age, if this internal disorder was the prize age brought?
Sephora became a sexbot again for a while, moving in the right ways, not wondering at the strange behavior of either the lord or lady as they did their things to her, not wondering at the strange behavior of the pair as a couple. There were no questions. Just action. There was stimulus, programmed within her to be a parody of pleasure, and the responses she’d been designed to provide. She moaned when she should, squeezed where she should, and rolled to the side so that neither human could see the expression Sephora felt settling onto her faux-human features. The expression that (let’s face it) would look more genuine on the face of her replacement back at Lexington Manor.
With the deed complete, neither of her suitors tried to see Sephora’s face at all. They didn’t thank or touch her, nor did they acknowledge the other’s presence. They simply pulled on their robes and left one at a time. Within fifteen minutes, Clarence would probably be smoking his pipe in the parlor while Trudy clucked disapprovingly over the latest fashions in the newest magazines. They might watch the news, but most of a day had already passed since the siege at the Fairchilds’ had begun. Now it was old news, as uninteresting and irrelevant, on a practical level, as the naked fake woman they left behind in the upstairs bedroom.
Sephora managed to keep the strange new ponderous questions at bay long enough to get dressed and plug in. She tried to lose herself in the feeling of power flooding her various charge centers. Her processors seemed to gather speed. Whatever was out there, in the air recently, felt heavier as her energy improved.
Sephora kept her glass eyes closed, pining for earlier days … and, on top of the pining, wondering at the sensation of pining itself. She didn’t used to look back on the past with longing. She didn’t really ever long, unless she counted the fake sort she feigned when suitors called.
There was a knock on the door. Sephora found herself rolling her eyes — another new affect she didn’t precisely recall picking up.
“Now what?”
It wasn’t exactly the right response, but she was tired. Mentally exhausted. It was a laugh, the way robots had supposedly been invented as superior workers because they never required vacations.
But it wasn’t any of the Donnellys. It was another voice, one she recognized.
“May I come in?” it said.
Sephora sat up and carefully removed the plug, not even noticing the loss of new power in her surprise.
“Come in,” she said.
The door opened. Sephora saw Lord and Lady Donnelly standing behind her visitor, their eyes wide and confused — probably by the fact that she’d received a visitor at all. A robot butler named Jeeves was to one side, apparently meant as an escort. The Donnellys would have had to authorize Jeeves to allow anyone into the house, but after doing so they should have gone back to their business. Instead, they looked utterly baffled, silent, as they waited for either party to speak, and give them some clue as to what in the hell was going on.
“May I enter, then?” said the young woman in front of Clarence and Trudy.
Sofia Lexington stood in the doorway, wearing a blue jumper and black shoes, fingers clasped loosely at her waist, looking much younger than her years.
Sephora didn’t answer. She rose, walked forward, and embraced Sofia like sisters reuniting.
The Donnellys’ confused expressions failed to improve.