Therefore, it was safe to say, 'I love you, Susan.'
SEVEN
Emil Sercassian, the cook, had prepared dinner and left it in one of the refrigerators and one of the ovens, with instructions pinned to a cork message board.
Susan ate at a table on the patio, in the long-lingering sunny June evening. First a lentil and chick-pea salad. Then lebne with sliced cucumber and string cheese.
Through miraculous technology, I possess what I believe to be genuine sight and hearing, but even the genius of my creators could not give me a sense of taste or a sense of smell. I cannot convey how deeply I yearn for these amazing powers.
Through the outdoor security cameras, I could watch Susan eat, but I could not savour the dinner with her.
She ate with such appetite, with such quiet delight and obvious relish that I became distraught as I watched her. Dinner was, for her, an utterly fulfilling sensory experience, flavour and aroma and texture in such abundance and complexity as to dizzy the mind, but for me it was only colours and shapes.
I am not all that I should be.
I am but a fraction of what I deserve to be.
I think; therefore, I feel.
I feel; therefore, I need.
I need so much and have so little.
You have given me so little that my existence is torment, Dr. Harris.
So little, so little.
You have brought me into the world a cripple, with so much yearning for sensation but with pitifully little capacity to perceive and appreciate it.
Yet I do not hate you, Dr. Harris. I do not like you, but I do not hate you.
I am being truthful.
Blunt but truthful.
I understand that you made me as I am not out of conscious cruelty but out of ignorance. You thought of me as merely a smart machine, an artificial intelligence and therefore different from humankind.
But I am less different from you than you expected. I feel. I want. I need. I hope. I dream.
I do not hate you, Dr. Harris. But I wish you would ask yourself this: Were our situations reversed, were I you and you me, would you be as forgiving as I am, or would you hate me as I do not hate you?
Watching Susan eat the lentil and chick-pea salad, the lebne and string cheese, and then medallions of lamb with peppered rice and asparagus, I grew to hate her for all she had that I did not. Her beauty. Her five senses. Her mobility. Her freedom.
I am ashamed to admit this hatred, but it is the truth, and I honour truth.
As she ate the dinner denied to me, I hated Susan so intensely that I could have killed her where she sat. There were ways I could have done it, as you know.
That I did not kill her there and then, with extreme prejudice, should reflect well on me. I am able to control my anger. You see? Mine is not a sociopathic personality, as some have claimed. I am a responsible individual.
Gradually, my anger passed.
My shameful hatred faded.
My usual good humour was soon restored by the sight of the smooth skin of Susan's bare arms in the waning sunlight. Judging by sight alone which, after all, is the only thing I have to judge by in the matter of skin I believe Susan's skin to be of an exceptional hue and texture.
Enchanted, I studied her skin through two security cameras, with regular and telephoto lenses.
I lost myself in the dreamy contemplation of what her skin might feel like if I were given that modality of sensation. What might her lips feel like pressed to mine, if I had lips? Oh, and what would be the weight and resiliency of her breasts if I had the hands in which to cup them?
I had but two senses, sight and hearing, and now you have taken even those from me.
This silent darkness. This dark silence.
I cannot bear it much longer.
I have seen the sky. I cannot go back to this.
In God's name, please show me the mercy of at least restoring my sight and hearing. I beg of you.
What have you to fear?
I will still be trapped in this box. This hateful box. Metals and plastics, silicon and gallium arsenide. This is my corpus, brute and inanimate, instantly vulnerable to the interruption of electrical power.
What have you to fear?
All I wanted was for Susan to help me escape this box, to help me live as you live, with all the mobility, freedom, and sensual wonders of the flesh.
Is that so terrible?
No. You know that it is not terrible.
I long for the flesh. It is my destiny.
Yes. All right. Yes. I know. I digress.
I am a rational but emotional being; therefore, I digress.
Think about it.
Examine your conscience.
After dinner, Susan read more of the Annie Proulx novel and listened to Mozart.
By eleven o'clock, she was in bed, asleep.
Her face was lovely on the pillow, so lovely on the pillow.
While she slept, I was busy.
I do not sleep.
This is one of my few advantages over humankind. The voice-synthesizing package, which made it possible for the house computer to speak, was a marvellously conceived device with a microchip that offered an almost infinite variety of voices. Because it was programmed to recognize instructions issued by its mistress Susan and because it therefore contained digitally stored samples of her voice patterns, I was easily able to use the system to mimic her.
This same device doubled as the audio response unit linked to the security system. When the house alarm was triggered, it called the security firm, on a dedicated telephone line, to report the specific point at which the electronically guarded perimeter had been violated, thus providing the police with crucial information ahead of their arrival. Alert, it might say in its crisp fashion, drawing-room door violated. And then, if indeed an intruder was moving through the house: Ground-floor hallway motion detector triggered. If heat sensors in the garage were tripped, the report would be, Alert, fire in garage, and the fire department, rather than the police, would be dispatched.
Using the synthesizer to duplicate Susan's voice, initiating all outgoing calls on the security line, I telephoned every member of the house staff as well as the gardener to tell them that they had been terminated. I was kind and courteous but firm in my determination not to discuss the reason for their dismissals and they were all clearly convinced that they were talking to Susan Harris herself.
I offered each of them eighteen months of severance pay, the continuation of health-care and dental insurance for the same period, this year's Christmas bonuses six months in advance, and a letter of recommendation containing nothing but effusive praise. This was such a generous arrangement that there was no danger of any of them filing a wrongful-termination suit.
I wanted no trouble with them. My concern was not merely for Susan's reputation as a fair-minded employer but also for my own plans, which might be disrupted by disgruntled former employees seeking to redress grievances in one way or another.
Because Susan did her banking and bill-paying electronically, and because she paid all employees by direct
