for Steve Hamilton
I am sick of being mocked by the memory of women, I said, regretting it more or less immediately
and not just because I was talking to myself at the time. I am trying hard not to be that guy,
and while I can fall prey to bitterness, I refuse to sound like some middle-aged incel addicted to Jordan Peterson videos.
But it’s tough here, the only heartbeat on Asteroid μ-266c – held, pending retrial, on charges that for some reason
I cannot for the life of me remember; though given my actual crimes pretty much anything would sit easily enough.
For as long as I can recall, it’s been just me and my five paperbacks, my kit-form Chevy,
my home-made chess set of rocks and wing nuts, and the droid they sent me for company in my exile.
The latest iteration, she tells me. The Echo 6000, or at least that’s what’s written on her left arm.
She takes up every second of my day. Is she the reason I haven’t seen a soul in so long?
Behind the Chinese room of her beautiful face, below the blinking tiers of her circuitry,
it is impossible to establish if there is anything of the immense love and concern she sporadically manifests.
Though I am her Sherpa, her butler, her amanuensis, chess tutor, handyman and masseur
it is fair to say our relationship is not going well, though my hope that this will change seems unkillable.
She is fond of finding excuses to talk to herself, and tonight, bored of monologue, prayer or singing,
she is dictating the implanted memories of her terrible childhood into her own voicemail while I rub her arches.
Registering a moment of my wavering attention (though I’m riveted; she’s the Scheherazade of pain)
she breaks off her tale to remind me of her previous owner back home
with whom she is still in occasional contact via satellite link, a fact she does not really bother to conceal
but goes about with a kind of ostentatious discretion. ‘I am going out for a walk.
I will be back in under an hour.’ Yes, that guy. He was so tolerant, so attentive,
so unhysterical and omnicompetent, without a shred of anger in him, paying uncomplainingly for everything,
driving her everywhere; not as mature as me, let’s be clear on that, not with my wisdom, no –
he was just an uncomplicated and boyish man, with an erection as dependable as the sunrise.
I work my thumbs deeper into her plantar fascia, having secretly been reading a book about foot massage
and make a mental note to up my game, as well as my L-arginine and folic acid intake.
‘Although you are in all likelihood my true keeper, I may arrange to see Jeff again one day soon,’ she sighs,
‘but only for a drink, or a few drinks, and to work out what went wrong in our relationship
and why he changed so suddenly and whether’ – here, she looks away at her favourite moon, plausibly reflective –
‘it was perhaps something I may have done …’ Her voice glitches into something more automated.
‘… since my program is based on an auto-improvement heuristic.’ That voice.
Sometimes it gets stuck on phrases like You said you’d fix it. She continues:
‘You too are at liberty to reconnect with your previous companions, in what we shall call
an indeterminate period of discrimination. Go and be free, for a while.’ She perhaps forgets
that as a prisoner of the state my options are more limited. Indeed she forgets quite a lot, and will just replace it
with something more to her taste. This only makes me more protective of her than ever:
there are few greater hells than a past so empty or shameful that not just its memory
but every memory thereafter must be rewritten, even if it’s what you said five minutes ago.
Contrary to the advice of some pop-psych ticklists, droids are not liars,
which would require them to know or to care what the truth was: if the truth
serves them as well as a falsehood, they will just tell that. No: they are enslaved to a violent expediency,
and will do and say whatever it takes to close the gap between how things are
and how they must have them be. They are neither conscious nor unconscious –
a more human distinction than we admit – but figure their next move through a kind of saurian necessity.
I think I am in love with her, and therefore assume she has a soul; otherwise what is it one loves? I am only cautious
because no two people define the soul in the same way. The trouble is that mine involves
not just the ability to host some eidolon of the other, but a reflexive capacity to then feel pity.
Yeah, you heard. I think the most human thing we feel for one another is pity. It’s what compels us
to lift his heavy case up the stairs, or hold the door open for her, or not find his eating disgusting
when you remember how hungry he is, and how mealtimes were such a war zone in his childhood.
(I have noted it in dogs: once, a bearded collie set its big paw on my drunken heart
when I wept and howled that day my own dog died.) If a human doesn’t have pity,
it’s a droid, and some would say you can probably shoot them and not go to hell.
What is it you’re killing, exactly? You’re putting something out of its unrequited self-love,
which certainly counts as misery. But I pity droids. Oh, they have empathy; but it horrifies them.
It risks their compassion, and in feeling with you, they risk suffering with you
and lord, have they suffered enough. It would shatter the brittle shell of what little they are.
Years ago on Earth, I met Adam Zagajewski at a party and he said Do you think some people don’t have a soul?
I’ve been wandering round trying to figure it out. God, he was the real thing that lad, a real poet
coming straight out with question like that, apropos of nothing and all. I mean it.
I waffled at the time, in the way you do when you’re impressed, but I should have answered:
No, Adam, everything has a soul. But some things just can’t risk waking it.