NothingSpecial: gender-bending transformation stories, comics, and occasional poetry =^_^=
Beyond meeting up for the scans,° I didn't see Grace again until the following Monday; she was busy getting the results analyzed, and I had classes and coursework to deal with. By the time she contacted me to arrange the next meeting, I'd almost forgotten about it – but soon enough, we were back in the study room, side by side on the bench.
° (Which would've been tedious, but I wasn't conscious for them; they had me run down completely, so they could image my components more precisely.)
"Thank you, again, for making time for this project," she said, when we'd gotten situated; I wondered if all robots were incapable of a simple "hello," or if it was just her. "I'd like to continue meeting with you, but I thought you should know that I'll be gone for the next couple weeks. Hopefully we can pick back up in the new year."
"Um, sure, I guess." I wasn't thrilled about being a "project," let alone continuing to be one indefinitely, but she'd been nice enough about it so far. "What'd you have in mind for today? Did you, uh, find out anything from the scans?"
She made a more-or-less gesture with her hand. "It's still being analyzed. Before we get into that, though, I, ah…I had someone who wants to meet you, if you're alright with it…?"
This was curious; Grace was usually so straightforward, even with that tangent about movies, that I didn't think she could be hesitant or unsure. "Who's that?" I asked, looking to see if there was someone waiting in the hall.
"My daughter," she said, smiling. "We were talking about my work, and she wanted to talk to you. She's never met a machine intelligence like you before."
I felt something spring loose in my head; thankfully, it snapped back into place. "You…you have a daughter?" I still wasn't really sure about thinking of myself as a machine intelligence to begin with, but I was more focused on this. "How is that…uh, how does that…?"
She chuckled quietly. "We can go into detail later," she said, "but you could say she's 'incubating' within me. She currently exists as a separate data structure running in any spare cycles I can free up. If you're okay with it, I'm going to give her control, so she can interact with you directly."
"So…she'll be you? Or, uh, you'll be her?"
Grace nodded. "I'll be supervising, but she'll be the one you're talking to. You can let me know if she gets out of hand, but she's a pretty good girl, usually. Is this okay with you?"
"Uh, sure?" I said. I was still a little confused by the idea – when people want you to talk to someone who's not there, it's normally more of a senility or mental-illness thing – but it wouldn't hurt for me to say hello.
She shut her eyes, and there was the briefest pause, as if she'd frozen. Then she opened them, and suddenly I was looking at someone else. It was uncanny; her body was unchanged, and her features were still recognizable, but the body language and expressions were clearly those of another person. I wondered if this was what it felt like talking to someone with dissociative-identity disorder.
Daughter-in-Grace looked around the room, eyes wide, taking in every detail with a look of wonder; she spent fully as much time admiring the wood grain on the table as she did scanning the bookshelf. It was most of a minute before she finally turned her attention to me. "Hi," she said, with a shy smile. "I'm Eve. Mama said I could come out and meet you."
"Uh, h–hi," I said, a little discombobulated. "Nice to meet you. I'm, uh, S–Sue." I blinked, frowned, and shook my head, but said nothing; correcting myself would start us off on a conversation I wasn't eager to have, and I'd probably never see her again, anyway. "Do you, uh, get 'out' often?"
Eve frowned, thinking for a moment. "More than I used to. Mama has to supervise me pretty closely; I'm still getting used to physics and coordination in your world. I can't even jump rope yet." She brightened. "I can use the swings, though! …But I don't think I could jump off safely." Her voice was somewhat less refined and more noticeably synthetic than Grace's; not that I was one to talk.
"Do you not have physics in, um, your world?" I asked, surprised. As a matter of fact, her movements were a bit ungainly, as if she weren't used to this body or these proportions. Something about it reminded me of a child dressing up in grown-up clothes that were much too big for them.
She shook her head. "Just approximations. Mama can only spare so much processor time most days, and an accurate simulation would require more of it. It'd take me much longer to grow up if we did it that way."
"How do you mean?" I said, trying to figure that one out. "Wait, does your 'time' run slower if your world is more complex?"
"Uh-huh!" she said. "Every so often, Mama extends the model. It lets me learn more, but your world speeds up relative to mine."
"That, uh, that…" That must be rough, I wanted to say, but must it? If your frame of reference was a world where time appeared to be passing at a constant rate, but a world that you only sometimes visited was passing by ever faster, would you find that troubling…? "Do you interact with anybody 'out here,' from your world?" I asked, after considering it.
Eve nodded. "Some of Mama's colleagues write me letters. I like reading them, but every time we upgrade, it takes longer and longer in their time for me to write back." She gave me a wistful smile. "I'm looking forward to living in your world, so we can talk in real time."
My brain clattered away as I tried to wrap my head around that. In a way, it wasn't so different from how humans experience time, as each passing year becomes a smaller fraction of their total lifetime, but at least it only felt like the world was outpacing you, and you only noticed once you were an adult. To actually live a relativistic life…I shook my head dazedly. "Um, so…what was the simplest your world's ever been?" I asked, trying to change the subject.
"In the beginning," she said, "I didn't even have a world-space, or an avatar. I was just an abstract object in a protected segment of Mama's memory, and all I could do was pass messages to other objects she'd created for me and receive their responses."
"That…sounds kind of boring." I wondered what the point of giving a "child" an environment like that was. Did Grace just not know better? Was it like me trying to guess what would make Lucky happy, when I had no idea what a mushroom-homunculus found truly fulfilling? "Were you at least able to talk to her?"
"Oh, Mama could communicate with me right from the start," she said, smiling sweetly. "But there wasn't much I could understand, since my experience was so limited. I couldn't even process language yet."
"Then how did you communicate?" I asked, trying to imagine what it'd be like to remember life before you could even speak. I could feel myself grinding away, plumbing the depths of my memories; I only recalled fragments before age five, for God's sake…!
"I guess it's like what you'd call 'telepathy,'" she replied. "Mama put her thoughts into my mind directly – but she was careful to tag them as hers, so I didn't confuse them with mine. We talk now, so I can learn about language, but she still does that when it's important that I understand her without ambiguity."
Must be nice, I thought, a little bitterly, but I pushed that feeling aside with an audible ker-chunk and got back on topic. "So…how long did you spend like that?"
"I didn't have a sense of time then," Eve said. "Even the next stage was just a sequence of actions with no temporal frame of reference. I got to play with blocks there. I still didn't have a world-space, but I could 'stack' them relationally and identify them by their attributes." She beamed with nostalgic pride. "Mama was so proud of me when I learned how to make a steeple…"
"Those 'worlds' were important for teaching me about cause-and-effect and object schema," she continued. "That was enough for me to handle a real world-space, and since I had to understand distance, that was the first iteration where time was relevant." She put a finger to her lip, looking thoughtful. "Mama says my first two worlds were so simple they actually ran faster than your world. She figures I spent about eighteen months in that stage of my life, but it only took about two of yours. She spent more time developing the next model than it took for me to graduate to it."
"And what does your world have now?" I asked, thinking it over; maybe I hadn't been fair to Grace. Lots of baby stuff seems trivial to adults, but to a developing mind, simple concepts are important milestones. She might've planned this better than I thought.
Eve took a moment to think it over. Oddly, for a robot, she tallied the results up on her fingers, and her expression was so perfectly that of a little girl that I had to fight to keep from laughing at seeing it on the face of a grown woman. Was this an affect? A tic she'd picked up from somewhere? It couldn't be instinctive, but it was clearly something she did without thinking about it…
"Lots of things," she said cheerily. "We play a game where Mama sets up puzzles for me, pushing boxes around a maze. I like that one, but it's hard because there's so many possible sequences – like in chess. Even Mama doesn't have enough memory to cache them all; we've been learning about heuristics instead. And I have 'books' of pictures I can look at to try to recognize what they represent. Mama says that's important in your world; she has to help me with it now." She paused, thinking. "I wonder if you'll look different when I see you with my own vision…?"
I hope I'll be different by then, I thought, but said nothing. I could feel my inner workings churn; should I tell her that the person she thought she was meeting was really someone else? How could I explain my giving her another name without making myself out to be a liar? Did she even understand the concept of sex, or how it sort-of applied here, even though I was by any practical definition sexless? Why did I keep putting myself in these situations…!?
"We do social simulations, too," she said, apparently oblivious to my inner turmoil despite the noise it made. "I think you call it 'playing house.' We change roles, so I can practice seeing things from other points of view; it's supposed to help me develop the capacity for empathy. That's another thing Mama says is important."
Something was bugging me. "Are all of your games just developmental exercises?" I asked, clicking off-tempo for a moment. "Don't you do anything for fun?"
Eve looked at me like she didn't fully understand the question. "They are fun, though," she said, steepling her fingers. "Does it matter if they also help me learn things?"
"…I don't know," I admitted, after a moment's consideration. Having your whole life oriented around educational milestones and societal function seemed stifling to me, but if she wasn't unhappy, was it a problem…?
"And I do get to do other stuff," she said, smiling. "It's fun just to play with the physics in my world. It doesn't take any more energy for me to run, and with the right kind of ramps, I can jump higher and farther than any human could, and land from any height without injury." She grinned. "I can even fly, if I want to."
"Really?" I asked, oddly intrigued. I wondered what it would be like to grow up in a world like that; great for a kid, probably, but it made sense that Grace was so cautious about preparing her for a place where you couldn't just respawn if you accidentally rocket-jumped into a chasm. "Do you have wings, there?"
She laughed. "I can! Mama made a game out of that, too; I can do a dance and turn into a harpy-me, or a mermaid-me, or other things. It's still only approximate, but it's fun to play at being different versions of myself."
I frowned. "Do you ever get confused about which of them is the real you?"
She gave me another look like she didn't get it. "Um, all of them? The experiences are different, and my different forms can do different things, but I'm still the same person. You know, like with playing—" She paused, thought for a moment, and grinned. "Hey, do you want to play house?"
"Oh, uh," I stammered, feeling my tempo accelerate, "I, ah, I don't really know how to…"
Eve eyed me curiously. "I thought this was a pretty exercise in your world? I can explain it, if it helps. Come on, Sue, it'll be fun!"
For a moment, I found myself casting about for an excuse – any excuse – like I had with Grace at first. I wasn't even sure why; the idea just made me feel awkward and out-of-place, and I was sure that I'd screw it up somehow, that I'd give myself away and reveal that I really wasn't what I'd pretended to be in a vain attempt to fit what I assumed were her expectations…
But what good would that do? Shutting her down without explanation would be at least as awkward as trying to play along (and raise more questions.) And…was it a given that I'd fail? That I couldn't do it "right?" Did I really know I wasn't qualified for something small children could do, or was that my own fear of failure talking? I'd felt just as nervous and uncomfortable with Anne, but contrary to all my expectations, it…it hadn't gone badly…and I hadn't hated it…
With a delicate metallic sigh, I nodded. "…Okay, s–sure."
She grinned. "Okay! You're more grown-up, so you can be the mother and I'll be the daughter."
"I, uh," I said, back to stammering awkwardly, "I don't…know how to be a mother…" I cringed inwardly, feeling like my ears should be burning, but there was only a rattling in the back of my neck. Did Eve not notice how weird and awkward I was being right now? Was this just something about social interaction that she hadn't learned yet? Or was she like Emma, trying to "help—"
"It's okay," she said brightly. "I'll explain it to you. Here, we can say that the bookshelf over here is the living room…"
I stopped myself, trying to get a handle on my emotional state. Come on, you, I thought, you're getting all weird about a children's game. Get a grip, already. I nodded and moved over to where she was indicating, listening as she explained how things worked, in her understanding…
…It's all make-believe, anyway…
We spent the better part of an hour playing house, as Eve laid out her slightly unique take on how family life worked.° After a while of me pretending to be the mom, we switched, and I had the odd experience of watching a little girl in the body of a grown woman pretend to be a grown woman, while I had to pretend to be a little girl and she laid me down on the bench, patted my head, and put me to bed.
° (Apparently, part of the mother's job was formally deallocating and clearing out objects that the daughter left lying around unreferenced in memory.)
As she was declaring me to be in sleep mode for the night, she paused for a moment, listening to something I couldn't hear. "Um, Mama says it's time for me to go," she said reluctantly. "She says you still have things to talk about."
"Oh, right," I said, sitting up. I'd been so preoccupied with the questions our conversation had raised and the awkwardness of trying to be what I thought she expected that I'd completely forgotten about Grace – but that was why we were here, wasn't it? "Uh, it was really nice to meet you, Eve."
She smiled sweetly. "I liked meeting you, too. Um, could I…could I write you a letter, sometime…?"
"Uh, sure," I said, finding myself smiling back. "I'd like that." I was surprised, and I didn't know how much we'd have to talk about, but it was nice to feel wanted, even if it might be because I was the only person she'd ever met who wasn't an AI researcher…
Eve grinned. "Okay! I'll do that when Mama can spare the time." She hesitated for a moment, then wrapped me up in a hug. I couldn't tell if it was something about how she grabbed me, but it felt strangely like she really was a little girl, hugging me around the waist and looking up at me like I was her big sister, even though she was taller than I was. I couldn't suppress a smile, and I wrapped my arms around her and patted her gently on the back; she buried her head in my chest. "Um, goodbye, Sue."
She froze for a moment, and then Grace was back, awkwardly extricating herself from my embrase – but I was too caught up in the realization that I'd promised "Sue" would write to Eve to pay her any mind. Damn it, was I going to have to keep up this pretense forever? Or would we end up having a very uncomfortable conversation about the insanity that was my life, and how I really wasn't the person I'd presented myself as? My mechanisms hummed with agitation…
"Hello?" Grace said, waving a hand in front of my face. "Are you alright? She didn't wear you out too much, did she?"
"Huh?" I said, distracted. "Oh, uh, nnno, she wwas fffinne…" I frowned. It'd been a while since I was last wound, and as busy as Eve had kept me, it was no wonder, but I still felt a bit embarrassed; I hadn't run down in front of Grace before. Maybe that was silly, but it felt strange to think that, even though we were both "machines," she was so much more independent than me…
"Oh," she said, catching on. "Here, let me help." She came around back, brisk and straightforward as ever, took hold of my key, and began winding me. She didn't act like this was a deficiency on my part; if anything, her touch and her manner were oddly maternal, for someone so no-nonsense. Or not so oddly, considering; but it wasn't how usually I thought of her…
"Um, thanks," I said, as she sat down next to me. She nodded. "Of course."
"She's a sweet kid," I said, trying to get my thoughts all sorted out.
Grace smiled. "She is. I'm glad she could meet you; she was intrigued from the moment I told her about you."
"Really?" I said, confused. "Why?"
"She was curious to meet another kind of machine intelligence, like I was," she said. "She's met other robots and a few pure software entities, but you're something completely different. She was also fascinated by your physical description; she's drawing you right now, in fact."
"I'm, uh, flattered, I guess." It did make me feel a little warm and fuzzy, but it was also confusing. Wouldn't something – some thing – like me look primitive and outdated next to, y'know, actual robots? Realistic, humanlike ones, even, not the archaic "metal man" or stack-of-boxes-wrapped-in-foil from a million chintzy old Z-movies? Who in the world would find me cool…?
(…Well, aside from Anne…?)
For a moment, neither of us spoke, and I wasn't sure why. Then Grace turned to me with an inquisitive look. "You gave her another name," she said. "Why was that?"
My metaphorical heart sank. "I…I'm sorry," I said, feeling my tempo getting all twitchy. "I didn't mean to lie to her, it just…kind of slipped out."
She frowned. "Was it a lie?"
"Well, yeah, I guess," I said, feeling awkward. "I mean, that's not my name, it's someone else's."
"Someone specific?"
"N–no!" I grimaced, feeling like I was being cross-examined; but I had told her child something other than the straight truth, and it made sense that a mother might have questions about that. "It was a pseudonym," I said with a sigh. "I went to a friend's for Thanksgiving, and I was worried her family would feel uncomfortable if they knew who I really was."
She eyed me curiously. "And you thought they'd be less uncomfortable if you pretended to be someone else?"
"…Yes." I could feel tension coiling in the back of my neck…
"Did it work?"
"I, uh…I don't know?" I tried to think it over; was it a robot thing, the ability to give people the third degree like this? An AI-researcher thing? Or just a mom thing…? "I mean, they didn't seem uncomfortable."
"And you think they would've been, if you'd told them your real name?"
"Uh, yeah?" Her manner was so damned straightforward – it was like she didn't even realize she was interrogating me…
"Why?"
I sighed. "Because I'm a guy, okay? And I'm stuck in this…clockwork-automaton drag, and I can't take it off, and I don't know if I ever will be able to! My whole existence right now is me presenting as something I'm not – how is that not weird and awkward!?"
Grace's eyes widened, and she raised an eyebrow. I felt my eye twitch as I tried to process that. She couldn't really mean to act like this was only just clicking for her…!
"You feel like your appearance misrepresents you as a person?" she said, as if this was only just clicking for her.
"Yes!" I could feel my internals whirring, and I wondered if she was going to have to wind me again before I went back to the dorms.
"Because you appear to be a woman?"
"Yes!"
She frowned, thinking that over. "And it's the fact that you look female but were originally male that you feel is the misrepresentation? Is that more or less important than the fact that you look female but are technically asexual?"
I was prepared to fire back again, but I actually had to stop and consider that for a moment. "I mean, yes? More? The other part is weird and uncomfortable, but it's not like having a basic fact I've known about myself for my whole life suddenly turned on its head…"
She looked confused. "So you're simultaneously uncomfortable looking female because you identify as male, and uncomfortable not being biologically female?"
That caught me off-guard. I didn't think about it as much as I did about being a "girl," but I still remembered my uneasy discovery that night. I hadn't known what to make of it then; did I now…? Did it bother me? No, I knew it did, but why? Was it for the same reason looking like a girl at all bothered me, because I was presenting the world with an image I knew didn't reflect reality? But I'd been doing that for years, trying to be what other people thought I should, or assumed I was…why did this bother me, if that didn't?
…Well, that bothered me, too, but not in the same way. That was about fear of failure; of trying to keep one too many plates in the air, having them all come crashing down, and having to admit to the world that I screwed up…that I was a screw-up. I knew I was only trying to keep them spinning because other people expected it of me; it was the aftermath that was the problem. But this felt different; I just couldn't put my finger on how…
"I…don't know," I said, with a heavy sigh. "I don't understand any of this, and I never asked for it. I don't know who or what I'm supposed to be, and the things I thought I knew about myself I've lost to this change. I don't know where I belong, or what category I fit into; if I hold onto what I was, then I'm choosing to 'identify' as the opposite of how people see me, and if I go along with their perception, then I'm pretending to truly be something I only resemble. No matter what I choose, I'm making myself a liar."
She frowned. "You think that it makes you a liar if people misunderstand you?"
"If it's because I choose to behave as though I'm something I'm not, yeah," I said, staring at the floor, feeling something winding tight under my collar, buzzing in my head…
"And you conclude that you're not truly a man because people don't perceive you as one, but not truly a woman because you aren't biologically female?" She gave me curious look. "Why do you hold to public opinion for the one, but not the other?"
"I don't KNOW!" I groaned, gears whirring, surprised at my own exasperation. Why was I stuck reliving the same damn argument I'd had with Emma!?
…Okay, no, that wasn't fair; as much as I believed that Emma believed she was trying to rein herself in, she clearly had a personal preference in the matter. Grace just seemed like she was trying to pin down exactly how I felt about this, as methodically and deliberately as if she were conducting an—
Wait. Had we started our interview, and I hadn't realized it? Had I spent this whole time thinking she was grilling me on what I'd told her daughter, when she was really trying to determine…what, how I felt about being a "girl?" I felt a bit bad about getting frazzled with her, but only a bit; maybe it was scientific rigor and not her trying to lawyer me into a corner, but it was still frustrating…
Grace, for her part, was surprised by my outburst, but collected herself quickly. "I'm sorry," she said. "I hadn't realized this was a touchy subject for you."
I stared at her, baffled. "Why would it not be?" I asked, then glanced away, feeling myself clatter awkwardly. "And, um, I'm sorry…"
She nodded. "It's alright. To be honest, I'd wondered if this would be an issue; but you seemed fine with it when I met you, and all of the concerns you expressed to me last time had more to do with agency than gender."
"I seemed fine with it!?" I repeated incredulously. "What gave you that idea?"
"Well, you weren't making any overt attempts to seem 'masculine' around your peers," she said. "I'm not as familiar with metamorphic studies in general, but I understand that's not uncommon with 'flipped' transformees who strongly identify with their original sex." She sighed. "I've certainly known a few robots who felt the need to performatively assert themselves…"
"Moreover," she continued, "you 'begged off' when I approached you because you wanted to play dress-up with your friend. Granted, that's not exclusively a 'feminine' activity, in this day and age, but it has definite cultural associations. And as far as I've seen, almost all of your friends are female. I don't mean to imply that you aren't having the difficulties that you say you are, but it was not my initial assessment."
Her read was so off-kilter it was damn near cater-corner; I had to take a moment to process the sheer strangeness of it. "I wasn't acting 'masculine' because it'd be pointless," I sighed. "I mean, look at me – I'm a freakin' doll. I'd only make a fool of myself trying. And…I owed Anne, okay?"
"For helping you prevaricate?" she said, slipping back into cross-examination mode. I groaned. "Yes…"
She nodded. "I thought that might be the case. Are you that uncomfortable working with me? I genuinely hope this hasn't all been against your will."
I shrugged. "It's…it's not that. The administration made it clear from the get-go that they expected me to play along; it's not your fault they wanted this. And…I don't really have a problem with you. I just thought you'd be…well, dissecting me, metaphorically. Trying to take me apart, see what makes me tick—" I caught myself and grimaced; Grace chuckled quietly.
"And have I not?" she asked, more seriously. "From your reaction just now, I worried I'd crossed a line."
"I…I don't think so?" I said, sighing. "I mean, some of this has been awkward, but…I don't think you mean any harm. I think you're approaching it honestly."
She smiled. "Well, I'm glad to hear that. But please don't feel like you're obligated to play along for my sake; do let me know if there are boundaries you don't want crossed." I nodded, and she continued. "Getting back to your friend – that was something she wanted, and you didn't?"
"She'd been asking about it for weeks," I said, thinking it over. "I…didn't know what to expect. I thought it'd be more, you know, foofy. Stupid frills and ribbons and corsets; cringey, embarrassing stuff."
"But that wasn't what it was?"
"…No." I shook my head. "It was still weird, but…I didn't hate it, I don't think. I just…thought it'd be all awkward and embarrassing."
"To be seen in those kind of clothes?"
"To be in them."
"Because that kind of thing is considered very 'feminine?'"
"Because that's not me." I found myself calming down, tempo slowing, even as I considered what I'd imagined – and feared – Anne would do to me. Oddly, it helped that Grace was so blunt; even if she was prodding at things I wasn't entirely comfortable discussing, it didn't feel like she was trying to goad me into anything…
She nodded thoughtfully. "And what you ended up in was?"
"I…don't know…?" I ran it over in my head, trying to work out what I had thought of it, and why. "I don't really know what is my style, but I know what isn't. It's like when you're a kid and your aunt makes you wear some hideous little suit she thinks is precious on Easter Sunday and you just want to die. It's not that you have a preference for what you'd rather wear, it's just that it's anything but that. I didn't get that feeling, with Anne. I don't know why, but…I didn't hate it."
She laughed. "I understand. It took me years to forgive my mother for the dress she made me wear to my uncle's wedding." She turned serious again. "But the clothes your friend dressed you in – were they more gender-neutral than you had anticipated?"
"…No," I said, surprised. I'd felt awkward about Emma's outfit, which was more "ordinary," because she was trying to make it explicitly feminine; but Anne's choices were even more "girly" in terms of components and more outré in style, yet she hadn't tried to make it a thing, and I'd been more or less okay with it. Was I less concerned with my appearance than with how people tried to categorize me based on it? "Even with Rhoda's stuff…" I murmured to myself, trying to sort through my thoughts…
"Who, now?" the robot-woman asked.
"Oh, uh, my roommate's sister," I said, startled; I hadn't realized her hearing was that sharp. "Over Thanksgiving, she and Tammy, uh…kinda had me do some costume stuff with them. Apparently it's a hobby of hers."
"This was before you agreed to let Anne dress you up, then."
"Uh, yeah."
"And were the costumes more or less 'feminine' than Anne's?"
"Um, less…?" I said, starting to grasp where she was going with this, but not sure how to feel about it. "But not by much. Just…you know, kind of grab-bag fantasy-adventure stuff, not…doll clothes."
She nodded. "Do you think you were more open to that because of the different context?"
"I…I guess?" Was that really all it was? "Well, also, Anne's kind of…weird about it. Like, I know now that she's basically alright, but…um, the first time we ever talked, she was gushing about how much I was like a doll…"
"Ah," Grace said, putting two and two together. "And you thought she'd treat you as one, if you went along with her request."
"Uh-huh," I said. "She isn't really like that, but I didn't know it then. I guess I kinda kept worrying about it."
"So then you do have some idea of what you want to be, or at least what you don't."
"Pardon?" I said, confused.
"Recall what you said earlier – about not knowing what you're supposed to be." She pointed a finger in my direction. "Yet you know, at the very least, that you're not merely a 'doll' – not something to be defined by others, without any agency of its own. Which we touched on previously, as well."
"Well, nobody wants that," I said. "Anybody would object to being treated that way."
"A doll wouldn't." She gestured to me again. "But you do – therefore, you aren't one, not in that sense. You have the ability to decide for yourself, as much as anyone."
I thought about it for a minute, frowned, and sighed. "Even if I could figure out what I want to be, that wouldn't change anything about what I am. It's not like just putting on a different outfit, or swapping avatars in a game, or…or like Eve doing a little shapeshifter dance."
"But you can choose how it affects the way you see yourself," she said. "You think of your body as being at odds with your 'self,' because you were originally male. But with everything we've just discussed, you still haven't articulated any specific objections to the idea of being a woman."
She started counting off on her fingers, and I realized where Eve had picked that up. "You dislike clothes because they don't suit your tastes, not because they're 'feminine;' you don't go out of your way to act 'manly,' and trust me, knowing it's futile hasn't stopped others from trying; and you're apparently more comfortable with people perceiving you as what you resemble than knowing what you were, or you wouldn't present yourself as 'Sue' when you're uncertain. To borrow your own argument, you may not be certain of what you want to be, but you seem to have some clear ideas of what you don't."
For a while, I said nothing and just thought, trying to process that. She…she was wrong, wasn't she? Was she? I didn't try to act "manly" because I didn't want to make a spectacle of myself; as I was now, I couldn't even pull off "butch," not that I wanted to. I'd just come across like a cartoon tomboy, trying way too hard. And I pretended to be "Sue" because I was afraid of what people would think, not because I was more comfortable with it. It was all a front, just like I was used to putting up, right…?
…Right?
Because if not, then…what? Even if she were right, and I didn't have any specific objections to that particular aspect, did I really want to spend the rest of my life as this? To resign myself to never being able to function without people there to help me? To being only a facsimile of…of…
"It's…not like I'm even a…a woman, anyway," I murmured to myself; but I realized when I saw Grace's expression that I'd forgotten about her hearing. She was visibly taken aback, and for a long moment she said nothing; but I could see a variety of emotions flashing across her face in a depth that I hadn't known she was capable of.
Finally, she gave a very deep, very human sigh. "I'm sorry; I didn't mean to disconnect like that. I was just…struck by how much you remind me of myself. It had me a bit lost in thought."
Now it was my turn to be taken aback. "Your…yourself? Were you…?" I never would've guessed, I thought; she seemed so comfortable with it…hell, she was even a mom…
She shook her head. "Oh, no – I was born female. But when I changed, and I had to come to terms with it…" She got that uneasily nostalgic look again. "I was young enough that I never got strongly attached to sex as a component of my identity before it no longer applied. But that only goes so far when everyone else thinks of it that way – and when you still look like what you really aren't, to them."
"That…must've been hard," I said; I was still confused, but I could spare a little sympathy. Navigating that transitionary phase was awkward for everybody, but especially if you were different from everyone else…
"It was," she said. "For years, I wondered whether I was really a 'her,' or just an 'it.' I was initially attracted to intelligence research since I thought I might feel less out-of-place, but…most researchers are human, and most humans struggle to get past human preconceptions. But it did put me in touch with other machine intelligences, and it gave me more opportunity to observe people, as well. And each of those experiences was enlightening to me."
"First of all," she continued, counting off again, "I'd never realized that 'just an it' is a fundamentally prejudiced way of thinking. Not an intentional prejudice – for humans and other sexed species, that divide is so close to universal that it's almost invisible – but still real. But some of the other machine lifeforms I met were much further from the humanoid end of the spectrum than myself – yet still recognizably people. And observing humans in light of that made me realize that it doesn't wholly define them, either."
She chuckled dryly. "Biological lifeforms tend to think of 'people' as primarily their corporeal form, since it's a core part of how they understand themselves. For machine intelligences, it's the opposite – to a significant extent we're all abstract 'software' that could be removed from our physical body and installed in some compatible one, if such existed, or even executed in a purely virtual environment."
"But neither view is wholly correct," she said. "You can take a sample of 'organics' and sort them out by any demographics you like, and you'll still find enough individual variation that it's difficult to even guess at the truly universal characteristics of a group; so we can't correctly state that people are merely the aggregate of properties inherited from each 'class' they're members of."
"Contrariwise, even robots are subject to the peculiarities of their architecture, just as humans are influenced by the needs and desires of their bodies," – she tapped her chest as if to illustrate, though if she was indicating anything specific it was lost on me – "and there are observable commonalities within 'organic' demographics, exceptions notwithstanding; so we also cannot take the view that people are abstract 'souls' that merely happen to inhabit corporeal vessels without being tangibly influenced by them."
"And…you see all of that as relating to my situation…?" I asked, more than a little confused at how we'd gotten from her life story into a digression on a holistic view of personhood and individuality, or what it had to do with me.
Grace chuckled and shook her head. "Apologies; I'm rambling. My point is this: your physical form undeniably influences you in various ways – we saw a few in the tests last time, and I'm sure there are more – but it does not wholly or authoritatively define 'you' as a person. Neither do your memories of your original form. What you were and what you are now both matter to the question of what makes up 'you' – but they're only aspects of your 'self,' not the whole; nor do they limit you to being only this or that."
She smiled fondly. "When I became a machine, I found that I was much less dominated by my emotions than I had been; I'm sure you've felt that, too. It was strange and uncomfortable at first, but also freeing; yet I still knew how I used to feel. I could think more clearly, but I knew how I'd struggled to focus. I remembered everything I was, yet I was intimately aware that I was different. But I still remembered; no part of the old 'me' was lost, even though many parts of the new 'me' were changed. I was – and am – still me; I'm simply a different 'me' now."
"You're right," she said with a sigh, "it's not merely a matter of changing 'skins.' What you are now will influence who you are, to some extent. Even if you become something else, the memory of having been this will shape your sense of self for the rest of your life. Nothing you can do will ever change that."
"The Moving Finger writes, and having writ…" I murmured to myself, thinking about that single, crucial what-if…? so many days and nights ago, back in the lab.
She nodded. "Precisely. The past is the past – beyond our power to alter. But we can choose how we let it shape the future. How will you come to understand yourself? I don't know. You might not, either – but you do have a say in the matter. Whether you choose to take charge of that determination? That's up to you, Freeman."
Maybe it was – but would I even know what I wanted? Ha, did I ever? How could I, when all I knew was looking to other people for direction? When I had no opinions or beliefs of my own, because that ran the risk of me getting it wrong, of screwing up? If I simply let the flow of events carry me passively along, then it could never be my fault when things went wrong, not really…better, then, to abstain, to let others figure that stuff out, to simply be—
"—not merely a 'doll' – not something to be defined by others…"
I cringed inwardly as I thought back to how I'd first felt when Anne said it, and to that awful nightmare…was that really what I wanted for myself? But if not that, then what? Surely not this; why would I want this!? Why should I give in, why would I decide to accept all the strangeness and unfamiliarity and inconvenience that came with this bizarre new form, just because I didn't…didn't…?
I shook my head vigorously, trying to clear my thoughts; this was all getting so confusing… "What…what'd you learn from the scans?" I asked, staring at the ceiling, steadying myself and trying to steer the conversation in a different direction.
"We're still puzzling it all out," Grace said. "They came out well, but your mechanisms are, unsurprisingly, very complex; and since we didn't capture them in motion, there's going to be a lot of guesswork in determining what it means that A connects to B and what happens when C interacts with D, if you take my meaning."
"Nothing definite, then?" I felt a little disappointed, and my tempo lagged a bit; it was still strange and awkward to think about myself as being this machine-thing, but I couldn't deny feeling a certain curiosity. I'd had a rough idea of how human-me worked, but I knew nothing at all about automaton-me, other than basic inferences about what made which noises when I did this or felt that. My whole body was a "black box" – would I ever understand myself…?
"Not yet," she replied. "Reverse-engineering is a painstaking process even in the digital domain, and with you, there's mechanical tolerances and variance to consider. And at this point, the engineers I'm working with are still building a component model out of the raw volumetric data. It'll be a while before they can start trying to determine how you work in any depth." She shrugged. "Right now, we're just guessing at high-level organization – the mechanisms in your hips are clearly driving your legs, etc. But there's a lot we have no idea about yet – which parts constitute your 'brain,' what you have for self-repair and reproductive systems, and so on."
"I could save you the trouble on that," I said glumly, my mind drifting back to the earlier topic. "I don't have those."
She gave me a melancholy smile, and shook her head. "I'm aware of that," she said. "Not in the human sense, certainly. But every living thing has some means of propagating its kind, whether or not sexual reproduction is involved. For you to have become something so…incomplete as to lack that would be utterly without precedent."
"Ah, my apologies – please, don't misunderstand me," she said, noting the confusion and indignance in my expression (and the audible grinding from my torso.) "Obviously, for thinking beings, what we do with that capability is our own decision. My point is only that you must have some means for it."
"…It's…alright," I said, once I'd stabilized. Why did that rattle me the way it did? I couldn't fault her logic, and it was all but established fact that transformations never resulted in disability or malfunction. But it irked me nonetheless, and I couldn't stop turning it over in my head, thinking about what I'd seen that night, and how any possible alternative would even work…and if she was right and I did have some means of…of making more of me, how was I supposed to feel about that? Was I supposed to want that? I couldn't even figure out what to do with one of me…!
For that matter, how was I supposed to self-repair? I didn't eat anything, I only needed to drink because my voice depended on it, and it was ridiculous to think that I had, what, a foundry in my torso!? But if not, then…was I just incapable of healing? Fated to die as soon as something critical broke inside me? Or would I need her team of engineers to work out how to repair me, if I couldn't do it myself…?
Of course, I could easily imagine Grace having some kind of nanotech maintenance system, but I didn't really understand that stuff to begin with. And we'd never had lunch together, so for all I knew she ate metal ingots in silicon sauce. But how closely did machine "life" model biological equivalents, anyway…?
"What about Eve?" I asked, half to myself. "Will she ever be real…? Um, I mean, physical?" It seemed like a silly question; from what both of them had said, Grace obviously planned for her "daughter" to take on a real-world existence at some point. But I couldn't help being curious, since she'd brought the subject up…
Grace chuckled softly. "That's the plan. She's not ready to cope with the real world yet, but one day she will be." I could tell she was going into lecture mode. "When that day comes, my self-repair systems will create an 'embryo' with self-repair and material-acquisition functions, plus a basic body-plan; this will in turn construct a 'starter' body. I'll transfer Eve's 'consciousness' into it, and she'll begin her life in the real world."
"A…a 'starter body?'" I said, trying to wrap my head around all that.
"You could think of it as analogous to the infant stage in animal life: small and simple enough to be constructed quickly with a minimum of materials, but complete enough to function independently of the 'parent' organism." She smiled. "Though in human terms, she'll more closely resemble a doll."
"A doll…?" Why did that muddle me up emotionally? It was strange that one word, one concept was loaded with so many different implications; things that I didn't want to be, that I feared I already was, that other people loved, that I maybe didn't entirely hate…all in some sense true of the abstract "class," but all applying differently to its members. Dolls were mere objects controlled by others, but Anne's were treasured friends and idealized other-selves; I was revulsed by the idea of being "merely" a doll, but kind of okay with the fact that Anne saw me as one…what even was the true definition?
"Of sorts. We'll work out the exact design then, and of course she'll develop into a 'mature' form as she adjusts and materials become available, but that's how it'll start." She paused momentarily, and gave me a wry smile. "You really made an impression, judging by her drawing; I've never seen her work this hard on something that wasn't a puzzle. It's entirely possible that she'll end up looking like you."
I stared at her, chattering in confusion. "Looking like me? How!?"
"Just as I said. Her basic platform will derive from mine, just as the kernel for her 'brain' was taken from mine, but the exact body-plan and cosmetics are something she'll design, with my supervision. We haven't had that conversation yet, but suffice to say, I've never seen her taken enough with someone she's met to try drawing them until now."
I tried to comprehend the notion – not merely that someone found me "cool" in the abstract, but that they might actually want to be me? Or…to look like me? Granted, she'd never have to worry about needing someone to wind her, but still…why would anyone find this intriguing, let alone desireable…? Especially if she could just choose from any possible appearance before even being 'born…'
Must be nice, I thought, a little bitterly – but some part of me resisted the feeling. Was my problem really, ultimately, with how I looked? Or was it with how people saw me…how I thought they saw me…? How I feared they'd see me…? But how did I want to be seen? As I was, surely – but that just tied back to the question of what I wanted to be…
I shook my head again, trying to get my poor overworked brain off that train of thought. "Doesn't that bother you?" I asked, looking for something else to ponder. What must a parent think of having their child so openly model themselves on someone else? If Eve wanted to look like me, would Grace be jealous, or bitter…?
Grace looked confused for a moment, then shook her head. "I'm sure she'll make some decisions that drive me a little crazy, as she becomes more independent; and we've had our disagreements already. But I didn't decide to have a child because I wanted a clone of myself, or a made-to-order trophy to show off to the neighbors."
She smiled warmly. "Honestly, one of the most wonderful parts of this is watching this little creature that could barely stack blocks at first develop her own distinct personality and discover for herself who she really is. I wouldn't trade that for anything, even if I were hoping she'd look like me. Besides," she laughed, gesturing to her rainbow-gray pupils, "she'll have my eyes in any case."
"But…didn't you already make her a girl?" I asked, considering her words. "Or, um, did you? Is she even, in her world?"
She shook her head. "I could have, but it didn't seem right to take that decision into my own hands. When she was instantiated, she wasn't even aware of the concept; somewhere along the line in her early stages, I told her it was one of my attributes in response to her queries about myself. When she first graduated from the blocks world I gave her a simple, ambiguous design, like a very small child; but I looked like myself, and it became clear in time that she saw herself as being like me in that respect. Subsequent revisions have altered her avatars in that direction."
"But you named her 'Eve.'"
"After the fact. She was already a 'her' before she could handle full natural-language processing; naming her took a backseat while she was undergoing critical early development and I couldn't introduce her to people anyway." She shrugged. "Perhaps I had some subconscious influence on her, but that's true of any parent."
"You think so?" I asked. That probably was normal, wasn't it, in most people's view? But was it really the case? Was unspoken influence really "subconscious," or just a way of saying things without saying them…?
"Of course," she said. "Parenthood isn't about trying to mold offspring into what you decide they should be, but it's not about observing a petri dish from the other end of a microscope, either. Your job is to nurture your child, and part of that is sharing what you have with them – knowledge, experience, interests, and passions. Not all of it will resonate, but you can't care for them without having an influence."
"I suppose not," I said, mulling it over. It'd be neglectful for a parent to not engage with their kid or offer them guidance, after all…
"Besides," she said, "it's not something that seriously limits who or what she can be. Being a machine imposes a much more concrete definition of self than being a girl; but it's all I can give her. If she weren't 'born' a robot, she wouldn't be 'born' at all; would that be better, if, hypothetically, she didn't wish to be one? Womanhood is hardly constraining at all, by comparison."
"Huh, I guess…?" I murmured. Was that really true? It didn't seem factually wrong, but did it really feel right? My mind was all a-jumble with everything we'd discussed, the questions it'd raised, and my own still-processing feelings on all of it. I was turning over a half-formed question in my mind, trying to sort out the particulars of what I wanted to ask, when my phone suddenly beeped; it took a moment for that to register.
"Oh, geez," I said, surprised. "Sorry, I really gotta get to class."
"Oh, my apologies," she said, almost as surprised as I was. "I should've alerted you; I'm afraid I got too wrapped up in our discussion. Well, I won't keep you, but I do hope we can continue to meet come January."
"Uh, yeah, sure," I replied, gathering my things and heading for the hall. I paused at the door and turned back to Grace; I still didn't half know what to think of all this, but something in me felt…better…than I had earlier. "Um," I said, my internals pulsing with an unfamiliar rhythm, "tell Eve thanks for me, would you?"
The machine-woman smiled. "Of course."