Page 91 of Monsters in Love: Lost in the Stars

Harv-E

The woman was like an errant line of code in my programming from the moment Cy opened the door. The cascade-swirl of input made the constant tug between my logical processes and the strange gift of humanlike thought User Lawrence had bestowed on me even more intense.

Ana . This was not the Anabelle from the holo images, but her name and similar appearance couldn’t be a coincidence. Droids couldn’t feel dread, but the human emotion seemed apt as a description. Even so, like fish to a piece of bait, I found myself drawn to our unwanted visitor, the warm affection Lawrence must have once felt for Anabelle clouding my digital thoughts. This new Ana was as beautiful as my roses, as my fruit, though too gaunt. It itched at me, the need to round out her curves, to add gloss to her hair with good water and food, to heal her in ways we weren’t able to heal our User at the end.

I was more annoyed than usual at Thresher’s cheerful demeanor, though he and Cy likely attributed it to my deep suspicion surrounding human women. In reality, as much as I enjoyed the company and proximity of Thresher on any other day, anger surged in me at the way she smiled at him. I should have taken the damn backpack, it should have occurred to me first. An emotion my network described as inadequacy flooded through me, a torrent of reminders that I was the keeper of the fruit, not of Users. She’d never smile at me like that, I wasn’t even a mismatched droid, I was always built and intended for harvesting, even if User Lawrence had added modifications. I’d ended up at the scrap yard because I defied direct orders, refusing to obey and falsify logs for a User trying to steal from a hydroponics bay. But even though I’d been cast out, muted, and shut down, User Lawrence had seen something in me.

Perhaps User Ana could too . The traitorous thought slithered across my programming, making me even angrier. I needed to get her out of my programming, which started with getting her out of my view. The sight of her with closed eyes, smiling as she breathed in the rich, vital air of my growing plants with obvious joy, was driving me to glitch.

“Cy, I need to go check on the water generators, I trust you two can handle showing one User around the farm.” Cy’s faceplate turned to me, studying me for a long moment before offering a nod. He knew there was nothing wrong with the generators, but had likely weighed the risk of me being rude or offensive to our rare visitor against the benefits of keeping me nearby. Of course he wanted me gone.

I walked briskly towards the corn fields without even saying goodbye to Ana, inadequacy rushing in before I was able to instruct my sensors to bypass it. I was unsettled and frenetic in my movements, walking too fast until I was buried in the comforting closeness of cornstalks, out of sight and, more importantly, out of reach of the User that made me feel too much.

I sank to my knees in the soil, stretching out my hands and fingers to dig them into the dirt as well. Grief for Lawrence, for Anabelle, for the Terraformers and their sweeping vision of growth, it all welled in me. These human-like responses and memories were becoming more frequent as the cycles passed, an observation I’d very hesitantly shared with Thresher not so long ago. While Cy had human-like responses of his own, they were far more controlled than mine, and with my wetware evolution, the fear of being shut down for defects was more overwhelming than ever. It was why I was so obsessive about the crops: if the farm thrived, I had a reason for being . You didn’t remove parts that kept a machine running.

I focused across the fields to my crowning achievement: the apples. Of all the illicit programs and genetic replication datasets Lawrence had gathered in his lifetime, none were as rare as the glossy red globes hanging heavy on the branches. By the time we’d determined the right nutrients and micro-environment to nurture them, the trees had been little more than tiny green shoots when he’d died.

Wrestling back control from the unpredictable wave of feeling , I got back to my feet, carefully dusting the soil from my leather gloves and the knees of my coveralls. I couldn’t be caught out of control like this, least of all with a User nearby. I doubted Cy would shut me down completely, but I could imagine him putting me in a restoration cycle to check my base coding–which would inevitably reveal the wetware transfer I’d been concealing since Lawrence died. Wetware transfers were forbidden even under the domes: even so far from the Genship’s prying eyes, my entire unit could be shut down over it without Lawrence’s word and protection. I didn’t think Cy would condemn us by reporting it, but now that the dome could theoretically connect to the Genship once more, nothing was assured.

Danger loomed like one of the randomized storms in the dome’s weather systems, and my feet inevitably took me to the barn. It was the space that calmed me, where my core mission waited, where I felt least like a faulty droid. I pushed on the small side door, pleased the recent oiling had removed the squeak entirely, stopping behind a stack of soil barrels when voices broke the silence. Shock and anger threatened to overwhelm my logical programming.

He’d brought her here?