together, connected by a warm milky-diamond umbilicus, and Cassian Uoya-Agostino entered her daughter.
We had planned this for months. How to dress ourselves in our very best. Which frame to use. How to arrange the light. What to say. I could speak by then, but neither of us thought it my best trick. Very often my exchanges with Ceno went something like:
Ceno said it was not worth the risk. So this is what Cassian saw when she ported in:
An exquisite boardroom. The long, polished ebony table glowed softly with quality, the plush leather chairs invitingly lit by a low-hanging minimalist light fixture descending on a platinum plum branch. The glass walls of the high rise looked out on a pristine landscape, a perfect combination of the Japanese countryside and the Italian, with rice terraces and vineyards and cherry groves and cypresses glowing in a perpetual twilight, stars winking on around Fuji on one side and Vesuvius on the other. Snow-colored tatami divided by stripes of black brocade covered the floor.
Ceno stood at the head of the table, in her mother’s place, a positioning she had endlessly questioned, decided against, decided for, and then gone back again, over the weeks leading up to her inevitable interrogation. She wore a charcoal suit she remembered from her childhood, when her mother had come like a rescuing dragon to scoop her up out of the friendly but utterly chaotic house of her ever-sleeping father. The blazer only a shade or two off of true black, the skirt unforgiving, plunging past the knee, the blouse the color of a heart.
When she showed me the frame I had understood, because three years is forever in machine-time, and I had known her that long. Ceno was using our language to speak to her mother. She was saying:
Cassian smiled tightly. She still wore her yukata, for she had no one to impress.
Ceno’s hand shook as she pressed a pearly button in the boardroom table. We thought a red curtain too dramatic, but the effect we had chosen turned out hardly less so. A gentle, silver light brightened slowly in an alcove hidden by a trick of angles and the sunset, coming on like daybreak.
And I stepped out.
We thought it would be funny. Ceno had made my body in the image of the robots from old films and frames Akan loved: steel, with bulbous joints and long, grasping metal fingers. My eyes large and lit from within, expressive but loud, a whirring of servos sounding every time they moved. My face was full of lights, a mouth that could blink off and on, pupils points of cool blue. My torso curved prettily, etched in swirling damask patterns, my powerful legs perched on tripod-toes. Ceno had laughed and laughed—this was a pantomime, a minstrel show, a joke of what I was slowly becoming, a cartoon from a childish and innocent age.
“Mother, meet Elefsis. Elefsis, this is my mother. Her name is Cassian.”
I extended one polished steel arm and said, as we had practiced. I used a neutral-to-female vocal composite of Ceno, Cassian, and the jeweler who had made Ceno’s pendant. “Hello, Cassian. I hope that I please you.”
Cassian Uoya-Agostino did not become a bouncing fiery ball or a green tuba to answer me. She looked me over carefully as if the robot was my real body.
“Is it a toy? An NPC, like your nanny or Sara’s princess? How do you know it’s different? How do you know it has anything to do with the house or your necklace?”
“It just does,” said Ceno. She had expected her mother to be overjoyed, to understand immediately. “I mean, wasn’t that the point of giving us all copies of the house? To see if you could… wake it up? Teach it to… be? A real
“In a simplified sense, yes, Ceno, but you were never meant to hold onto it like you have. It wasn’t designed to be permanently installed into your skull.” Cassian softened a little, the shape of her mouth relaxing, her pupils dilating slightly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re my daughter, not hardware.”
Ceno grinned and started talking quickly. She couldn’t be a grown-up in a suit this long, it took too much energy when she was so excited. “But I am hardware! And it’s okay. I mean, everyone’s hardware. I just have more than one program running. And I run
Cassian glanced sharply at me. “What’s it doing?” she snapped.
Ceno followed her gaze. “Oh… it doesn’t like us talking about it like it isn’t here. It likes to be involved.”
I realized the robot body was a mistake, though I could not then say why. I made myself small, and human, a little boy with dirt smeared on his knees and a torn shirt, standing in the corner with my hands over my face, as I had seen Akan when he was younger, standing in the corner of the house that was me being punished.
“Turn around, Elefsis,” Cassian said in the tone of voice my house-self knew meant
And I did a thing I had not yet let Ceno know I knew how to do.
I made my boy-self cry.
I made his face wet, and his eyes big and limpid and red around the rims. I made his nose sniffle and drip a little. I made his lip quiver. I was copying Koetoi’s crying, but I could not tell if her mother recognized the hitching of the breath and the particular pattern of skin-creasing in the frown. I had been practicing, too. Crying involves many auditory, muscular, and visual cues. Since I had kept it as a surprise (Ceno said surprises are part of special days like birthdays, so I made her one for that day) I could not practice it on Ceno and see if I appeared genuine. Was I genuine? I did not want them talking without me. I think that sometimes when Koetoi cries, she is not really upset, but merely wants her way. That was why I chose Koe to copy. She was good at that inflection that I wanted to be good at, so I could get my way.
Ceno clapped her hands with delight. Cassian sat down in one of the deep leather chairs and held out her arms to me. I crawled into them as I had seen the children do and sat on her lap. She ruffled my hair, but her face did not look like it looked when she ruffled Koe’s hair. She was performing an automatic function. I understood that.
“Elefsis, please tell me your computational capabilities and operational parameters.”
Tears gushed down my cheeks and I opened blood vessels in my face in order to redden it. This did not make her hold me or kiss my forehead, which I found confusing.
“The clothing rinse cycle is in progress, water at 55 degrees Celsius. All the live-long day-o.”
Neither of their faces exhibited expressions I had come to associate with positive reinforcement.
Finally, I answered her as I would have answered Ceno. I turned into an iron cauldron on her lap. The sudden weight change made the leather creak.
Cassian looked at her daughter questioningly. The girl reddened—and I experienced being the cauldron and being the girl and reddening, warming, as she did, but also I watched myself be the cauldron and Ceno be the girl and Ceno reddening. Being inside someone is existentially and geographically complex.
“I’ve… I’ve been telling it stories,” Ceno admitted. “Fairy tales, mostly. I thought it should learn about narrative, because most of the frames available to us run on some kind of narrative drive, and besides, everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all. Like, when I was little and daddy read me the Twelve Dancing Princesses and I thought:
