IGMS Issue 45 Read online

  "Possibly," I said.

  "I wanted to make my peace with everything first. Go out with no regrets. So I spent last week tracking down what had happened to my children. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting very much. I left them alone with an alcoholic father before some of them could even walk. But you know something? They were fine. My sister took them away after the funeral - my sister who I'd thought hated children. Timothy and Victoria died of measles very young, but the rest grew up. Some had children of their own, some didn't. Harriet married into aristocracy, and Henry ended up running a factory. I didn't hurt them after all. Violet died in childbirth. I have descendants all over the country. I don't know why that made me cry so much."

  Neither did I. Matilda never cries.

  She took a deep breath. "Anyway. I got on the train to Dover today. I'd never seen the grass look so green or the sky look so blue. We passed a field of poppies next to an old stone farmhouse and I gasped out loud with how red they were. When I got out there, I walked up to the top of the cliffs. I could see the castle to my right, and the ocean stretching out to France. I was honestly prepared to jump. I leaned forward and closed my eyes."

  Matilda stopped. I waited patiently.

  "I don't really know," she said, with a laugh that could have been embarrassment, or just wonder. "I just couldn't do it. I loved it all too much. The sun, the smell of the grass and the sea, the feel of the sweat and the warmth and the breeze on my skin, the way the light caught the waves. I used to tell my children that the froth on the tide was white horses trying to reach the shore - I'd completely forgotten all of that until that moment."

  "So you didn't jump," I finished.

  "No," she said. "I didn't. Not today. I went down to the beach instead. I think I've got a good deal left to do."

  She looked at me expectantly. I never know what to say when Matilda looks at me like that. Well, sometimes it's obvious, I admit, as it was a few moments ago. But often it's not.

  "I see," I said again. "Well, that's . . . very interesting."

  Matilda laughed. "I knew you'd understand," she said. She stood, and patted me on the shoulder. "Go back to your nap."

  I felt for the next few weeks as though I were waiting for something to happen, but somehow nothing did. Or perhaps that was what happened. Will drank less, and smirked more, and then out of the blue announced that he had booked a trip to Venice and Rome for next year. Matilda left Roberto -- I accidentally saw the text -- and cancelled her package tour to Africa. Then she started to write a book. The electricity bill was paid on time, even though it was Will's turn. There were still fights, and my chocolate milk disappeared mysteriously from the fridge, and Alfie caught one of his colds that swiftly spread through the entire flat, but that all couldn't be helped, I suppose.

  "Do you know," Alfie said one day as we sat around the dinner table at six, "it's been over a month since Will's funeral?"

  I did know this. I keep track of dates, because of the bills.

  "How about that?" Will said blandly.

  "Mm. It'll be summer in three weeks."

  When summer came, we went to the Lake District for a weekend. Alfie's always trying to get the flat to go on holiday together. The others agreed this time, so I agreed too.

  It had been two months by then, and Will was still alive. So was Mattie.

  I did get Alfie to admit it, of course. I thought about not, because I'm not a person who has to point out what they know all the time, but in the end I did.

  It had rained our first day in Windermere, and we were all tired from the travel and the walk and ended up snapping at each other in the tiny B&B until the owners must have wished they hadn't taken our booking. But on the Saturday, the sun came out, and we went for a walk along the lake. Will and Matilda hired one of those pedalboat things, and Alfie and I got ice creams and walked up to sit on the hill and watch them.

  "You made it up about Edith or whatever you called her, didn't you?" I said after a while of just sitting in the sun; perfectly conversationally, but making it clear that it was not a question.

  Alfie blinked, and I saw his ice-cream wobble in his hand. "Why would you --?"

  "My question is," I replied, "why would you?"

  Alfie was silent for a moment. The breeze blew off Lake Windermere, and ruffled his curls in his face.

  "Alright," he said finally, brushing them back. "Yes, I did make it up. I thought it might help. Will, in particular -- I thought that if he only thought he could end his life, someday, he wouldn't be trying to do it every second."

  "He might have tried right then and there," I said.

  Alfie shrugged. "He was doing that every month anyway. One more disappointment wouldn't hurt very much. But I strongly suspected he wouldn't. Neither of them would. It was the immortality that was weighing on them -- it weighs on all of us, sometimes."

  "People who know they'll die someday do sometimes decide to die today," I said. "It happens all the time."

  "Yes," Alfie said, a little quietly. "Yes, of course they do. Unhappy people, and unhealthy people. But neither Will nor Mattie were really that unhappy. And they're certainly not now! Look at them!"

  I said nothing, but I looked at them. They were paddling in circles now, and I could see Matilda laughing. Actually, I think Will was too.

  "There was a fourth person who contacted me about the flat," Alfie added. "One of us, I mean. She didn't want to join us, just to see if I was sincere. And I did read of her death in the papers; though months ago, and not of her cremation. Still, I haven't heard from her since, and she may well have been cremated. It's not entirely a lie."

  "Except it is a lie, in fact," I said. "Because cremation does not prevent us from coming back."

  Alfie shrugged, a little uncomfortably. "Well, I don't know that, do I?" he said. "I've never tested it. It may well work. In fact, I don't see how it couldn't."

  "It doesn't," I said. "I happen to have been cremated."

  Alfie looked at me in astonishment. "You?"

  "Mm." I shifted on the bank. "A hundred years before it was legal, of course -- I don't believe my parents even knew the term. They merely disposed of my body. As the seventh son of the Earl of Maltby, firm patron of the Church of England, it could hardly be known that I had committed suicide. I suppose they could have hushed it all up and had me buried quietly, but they took what must have seemed the more expedient course. I'm not entirely sure where they did it, but I believe my ashes were scattered in the woods to the back of our lands."

  "Good God. And you . . . "

  "And," I finished for him, "I came back. It's not so surprising, when you think about it logically. When you return, there's no slow process of healing. It happens in a single burst, with the body remade -- even if some idiot like Will chooses to have a stake through a part of the anatomy. I came to myself in a flash like lightning, fully formed and naked. It hurt like anything, of course; far more, I think, than I've seen it hurt any of you since. When I started to move, the leaves and the dirt brushing against me were like sandpaper. But I was healthy enough."

  "I'm so sorry," Alfie said. He really was, of course. Alfie is very sensitive. "If I had known, I would never have said that --"

  "Oh, it's nothing to be sorry for," I said dismissively. "We all have to die somehow. It won't hurt them too much if they try it, at least not for long, and I think you're right that they won't for a long time. We'll have parted company by then, more than likely."

  "What did your family say?" Alfie said. "When you came back out of the woods?"

  "I didn't," I said. "I had no thought to what I was, at the time -- I only knew that they would force me back into my old life again. So I took some clothes from the washing line out in the servants' yard -- not mine, of course -- and never came back."

  "I see," Alfie said, nodding. "Yes. Very wise, I suspect." He lapsed into thought for a moment. "Mine threw stones at me when I knocked on their door at night. They thought I was a vampire, or a spirit. For a while I
thought the same. But I'm flesh and blood, the same as I ever was. I bleed and catch cold and all the rest of it. And then I thought: maybe I'm here for a purpose. Maybe I tried to end myself prematurely, and I'm not going to be allowed death until it's the right time. I still think that, you know. Maybe that's why we're all still here. Maybe we can earn our right to die by living very well."

  This is why I told you about Alfie, and how seriously he takes things. Because it's very alarming, until you get to know him, and when you do you still feel rather embarrassed. I was embarrassed then, and I'm embarrassed again writing it down.

  "When we get back," I said, "we need to get in touch with the landlord about replacing the washing machine. And it's your turn to pay the rent."

  The Robot Who Couldn't Lie

  by Sunil Patel

  * * *

  I will tell you a true story. You can be sure it is true because I cannot lie. To lie would be against my programming.

  When I first woke, my light bulb turned on. I came into being and said, "Hello," which is the truest greeting there is. "Good morning" can be a lie, and "What's up?" is not an inquiry about the events occurring above a person. Silvi responded with "Hey there, little guy. Don't be alarmed, but you've got a desk lamp for a head."

  She held out a hand, palm out. "Come on, give me a high five." She glanced at my appendages. "High three." I did not understand her command. "Well, it was worth a shot. I can teach you that later. She'll like that."

  Silvi stroked my desk lamp head and cooed. Accessing my initial memory banks, I understood it to be a gesture associated with babies. I was not a baby. I had two arms and two legs, but I was not a baby. "You're the one, little guy," she said. "I finally got it right."

  Over the first twenty-two days of my existence, she would come into the workshop and ask me questions.

  "Where is the Eiffel Tower?"

  "What city do I live in?"

  "What is that?" She pointed to the garage door with its four small windows. I identified it correctly. Along the wall of the workshop hung many instruments, including wire cutters and soldering irons. If I answered a question incorrectly, she used them to adjust the pieces inside of me: microchips, capacitors, pins. Then she ran her thumb across the screen of her smartphone. After some swipes and presses she asked me the question again and I answered correctly.

  "That's the stuff!" she said.

  "That is the stuff," I repeated, adding the word to my lexicon.

  One day she walked in with her hand on her head, rubbing it. "Baseline time's over, little guy," she said, her eyes only half open. "It's raison d'etre time."

  Then she told me stories. A story was not true except when it was, but even a true story could be a lie. Silvi told me stories about a fat man in a red suit who delivered gifts to children around the world, which could not be true because the world is very large and he could not visit all the children in one night. She spoke of creatures from another planet coming down and destroying famous buildings because famous buildings are the best buildings. Some stories she sang, a narrative in rhythm and rhyme, and her voice echoed throughout the entire workshop.

  "I would like to tell a story," I said one day.

  "You can't tell stories, silly," she said with a smile. "At least not your own. You'll confuse her!"

  Within me I had so many facts. I thought I could recite the facts and that would be a story, but no ordering of knowledge resulted in anything comparable to what she had told or sung.

  "The sky is blue," I said, "and the grass is green."

  "Cool story, bro," she said, giving me a thumbs-up gesture of approval. A story cannot have temperature but I had learned that language was full of lies. Had I told a good story after all? The sky was blue, and the grass was green. I knew these to be true within a 5% margin of error.

  When I had asked Silvi if a truth could be true if it was not 100% true, she gently tapped my light bulb and said, "Close enough for horseshoes, hand grenades, and hand-me-downs." She stood up and muttered, "We're all unreliable narrators of our own lives."

  Now Silvi adjusted her goggles, and the sunlight illuminated her blue eyes that were blue like the sky. The colors were at least 95% similar on the chromatic scale; I am not engaging in simile, which can be a lie. "You want to know a word that sounds cool but isn't?" she said. "Neurodegenerative."

  After she told me about the world, she began to tell me about herself. Her own story did not begin like mine. She was not made from a car and a lamp and coins but from William and Ashley, her parents. She told me of playing in the snow in Pittsburgh, riding a horse in Madison, flying a kite in Raleigh. "This is all the kid stuff, little guy. You've got to remember the kid stuff." I had never been a kid so I did not know how to differentiate kid stuff from other stuff. As she grew older, she met a man and had her own kid to have kid stuff.

  That was you, Greta. You are now having kid stuff.

  Silvi's story was a true story according to her, but all stories are lies, even true ones. I had no way of verifying that she flew a kite in Raleigh. I did not believe her to be falsifying any data, whether it was about the world or herself, but my experience of truth did not extend past the workshop. The only truth I did know was that Silvi and I existed and so did the workshop. Any other story was unverifiable.

  I longed to tell my own story about Outside. What if I were to ride a horse in Madison? Was considering this against my programming? It could not be since I was allowed to do it. "What is a horse?" I asked.

  She laughed, the sound reverberating in the room of metal objects. "It's a big animal with four legs, and you can put a saddle on it and ride it. I told you about horses already!"

  "I want to know more about horses," I said.

  She knelt down, her face next to my bulb, and whispered, "Then you should know how their muscles feel against your thighs as you bounce up and down, how their eyes hold so much heart, how they have so much majesty as they gallop toward you. Tell her all that."

  And then her eyes rolled up, and she put her hand to her head, and she fell backward. She reached out to the table but did not touch it. For thirty-seven seconds after the thud there was silence. Then her face came into view again.

  Your mother has a message for you, Greta: Bellasyn does not work. She hopes that when you are older they have more effective therapies.

  On some days she came into the workshop in tears. "You're going to remember it all, right, little guy? Don't forget anything I told you. Not a single thing. Not about the sky, not about the cheesesteak, not about the dinosaurs." She grabbed my arm and squeezed, a gesture that did nothing to the non-pliable material. "Don't forget my favorite dinosaur: it's the triceratops."

  She told me many beautiful stories, of princes and princesses, of fakirs and genies, of witches and banshees. These were the stories her mother told her, she said. And Silvi was my mother.

  That is not a lie. She did not birth me, but she did create me, so it is truth. If it is truth, then we are family, Greta. Silvi spoke to me of her own family, her mother the nurse and her father the chemist. With no siblings, she was an only child. You are not an only child after all.

  I like your laugh, Greta. It sounds like hers. They have a similar timbre. High five.

  She said you would like that. I am glad that I learned it.

  When Silvi was not in the workshop, I sifted through the data she had given me and put it in chronological order. First, she was born. She did not tell me she was born but because she was alive she must have been born. She did not remember it. The first memory she had was of kid stuff: she took apart a toy truck. As she told it, it did not require much work to dismantle, but it was significantly harder to put back together before her father came home. She did not succeed, but her father helped her, and then they had cake. Silvi liked cake. "Red velvet is the best," she said. "Silky smooth." But the cake was a lie because the red was false and velvet is a fabric. "Lies for me, truth for you," she said. "Truth for her."

  Here i
s a story I can tell you: I sat in the workshop and stared at the wall across from me. It was grey stone with none of the vibrancy of Outside, as Silvi described it. I sat on a table five feet off the ground and dared not jump down because the impact of the fall could cause me damage. So I did not move. My entire life with her, I did not move.

  I do thank you for taking me out of that workshop and bringing me to your bedroom. It is much brighter here, softer. This is a place where humans live.

  Silvi's visits became less frequent. Sometimes when she arrived she looked at me with fear and curiosity, her pupils alternately widening and narrowing to diameters I had correlated with human emotions. "What the hell are you?" she said. Then: "Oh, hey, little guy! How you been? I've got a good one for you today; it's about Chicago." I had seen her eyes for so long that watching them shift from fear to recognition was comforting, yet frightening. I was becoming unfamiliar to her.

  One day the shift did not occur. She touched my cold metal and recoiled. "Junk in the garage . . ."

  "Silvi," I said, "it is me. It is Little Guy."

  "Holy shit, you can talk!" She stepped closer.

  "Can I tell you a story?"

  "Can you tell me a story? Tell me a damn story, you weird robot thing, show me what you got."

  I did not know what to do. She had never given me permission to tell a story, and I did not know what kind of story I was allowed to tell. I struggled to combine all my data into a narrative but in the end I accessed one of Silvi's favorite memories, which she had told to me several times. Each time it contained a new detail, sometimes conflicting with previous details, and I was unable to reconcile the truth. But I did my best.

  "In Chicago you went to a store called The Boring Store. It was a lie because it was not boring. It only pretended to be boring. The store sold toys that let you pretend to be a spy. You bought spy binoculars and asked the girl at the counter where you could get a milkshake. Or you asked the boy at the counter where you could get a sundae. Or you asked a customer where you could get frozen yogurt."