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I was twenty-seven when my mother died, and twenty-nine when I held the funeral, because I was too stubborn to do it until I knew I wouldn't be the only one there. She had pretended to love hundreds of people. I was determined that at least two of us would pretend to love her back.
The kids she died saving were out of the question, because they'd been moved out of state after the fire, and their social worker told me it would be too traumatic for them to see the remains. That was something I learned, in the year and a half I spent trying to get someone else to go to my mother's funeral. Everybody thought she was a broken machine right up until it became more convenient for them to treat her like a dead body.
In the end, I cheated. I agreed to marry my boyfriend and I made it a condition that he would come with me to the funeral afterward. So my husband and I packed up our car and went east, because I grew up on the coast and I like how the leaves look when they change, and somebody had to have some opinions on how this funeral was going to happen because my mother definitely hadn't.
I don't regret it. I like Ian, and I actually like being married to him. He's easier to be around than most people.
When I found out about the fire, it was because I had gone to visit my mother and saw the wreck of the building she used to live in. He was in the car a couple blocks away—she'd always creeped him out, so he didn't like to come inside with me. I got back, and I didn't cry or anything like that but he's pretty good at reading my moods, even when I don't know what they are. So he asked what was wrong. I gave him the directions they gave me at the apartment complex next door, to the nearest landfill.
He picked her up for me, and got all kinds of nasty shit on his shirt too, and wrapped her in a tarp to put her in our trunk. Then when we got home he made hot chocolate and sat with me on the couch while I drank it, held me and told me he was sorry she died.
I said, "No you're not."
"No," he agreed. "But I am sorry you're unhappy."
That's what I like the most about Ian. Everybody lies, but at least he always admits it when he gets caught.
My mother only ever told me one lie. Most parents lie to their children because they've been asked a question they don't know how to answer. She didn't have to do that, because she already had an answer for everything I could possibly ask, a perfect, honest answer that would tell me exactly what I needed to know and no more. But when I asked her if she loved me, she would smile and say, "More than anybody's ever loved anything," even though she didn't. I asked that question a lot, because it's the only lie I've ever liked.
I'm not sure if Ian is lying to me when he says it—I think maybe that's why I felt more comfortable with my mother. She was very simple to understand. She didn't love me, but I was given to her to raise and so everything she did was always the thing she thought would make me the happiest, in the moment and in the future.
There are rules saying children raised by artificial parents need to have siblings. I never did, because I was difficult even by the standards of unwanted children. When I was too young to understand that my mother couldn't love me, I was jealous of her attention and I would hit the other children they tried to add to my family. Ian thinks that's why I'm kind of cold, and kind of distant, because I wasn't socialized with real people as a child.
That's how I know he wasn't really paying attention, the few times I made him talk to her. If I'm like this because she wasn't real, that's because they told me she wasn't—if nobody ever had, I'd never have known. You couldn't tell.
Oh, you could see she wasn't human. It was obvious by design, because androids come out creepy if you try to hide what they are, but if you didn't know what that meant, you'd never know that she was programmed to teach and protect and comfort but not to feel. There's a knack of smiling at the right times, of saying the right things, of laughing with just so many teeth, that makes people think you're feeling what you're supposed to even if you aren't. Ian would never have been able to tell my mother didn't love him, because he can't tell that I don't.
"Here," I said, plopping down in the passenger's seat of our car and leaning over to give Ian a kiss and a bagel. Bacon and egg, cooked too much and not quite enough respectively, no cheese. His coffee was already in the car because he likes to fix it himself.
He took the food with a smile, small and a little tight because it was early and he was about to drive three hours there and back to bury a broken android. Then I surprised him with the donut I was hiding behind my back and it went wide and delighted.
My mother is the one who taught me you don't have to love people to be kind to them.
She needed to, because the truth is I've always been like this—it's why no one wanted me as a baby who never smiled back, as a child who would hit and bite, as a sullen teenager who returned every insult with subtle, incisive cruelty. I didn't need sweet old ladies and kindhearted bachelors and brave young couples to love me until they gave up on trying to fix me. I needed to watch a plastic and titanium cage close around a wounded pidgeon, gently lifting it in hands strong enough to bend steel and careful enough to patch me up when I skinned my knees, bringing it home with us to ease its hurts.
"Why are you doing that?" I asked.
"No living thing deserves to suffer," she replied, because she didn't lie to me but she did sometimes answer questions by saying something true, but irrelevant.
I watched her put the pigeon in a box on our kitchen table, crumpled newspaper and old rags folded neatly around its tiny, shivering body, and I wanted to know. "Why are you really doing it?"
She paused, head tilted at an uncanny angle. Being with me made her a little odd. Her behavior was based off of data from millions of children, but she was built to learn from each individual child, too. It's why there was no point repairing her. I could fix her body and plop the same learning algorithm back in its casing, but I could never replicate my childhood perfectly enough to bring back the version of her the fire melted.
"I wanted you to see that we could."
I don't think she was actually supposed to be that honest. She definitely wasn't supposed to admit that her entire world revolved around me, because that was true but also the sort of thing that could spoil a child. I think if she'd behaved the way her designers had intended, human at all costs, I probably would have tormented her like I did my previous caretakers until I turned eighteen and left the system. That wouldn't have mattered, since she couldn't feel pain any more than she could feel love—she and I aren't really that alike, when it comes down to it—but then I'd probably have gone on doing it to everyone else I met, and Ian never would have married me.
But my mother was made to calibrate herself to what a child needed, and I needed someone kind to tell me that she had ulterior motives. That she could care about absolutely nothing except me and my needs and my feelings and still be driven to help an animal that had no attachment to me.
(That pigeon was my first funeral. It was loud and smelly and it took up too much of my mother's attention, and the whole time it lived in our kitchen I wanted it to hurry up and get better or die. I didn't really care which. Then it did die, and I got so upset I wouldn't talk to anyone for days.)
I can't love Ian. But I can want him to love me so he'll stay with me, and I can want to be a good person. I can let wanting those things drive me to get up early and fix his favorite breakfast the morning of the funeral, because he's doing something he doesn't want to for me, and it's only fair for me to reciprocate.
Those are the metrics I try to keep track of. Fairness, reciprocation. For most people that's good enough, but for Ian I keep a list of things that make him happy, and every day I try to do at least one. And if it's a little cold, a little mechanical, so what? There are worse things to be like than my mother.
Ian and I drove out to a cliffside overlooking a bay. He was surprisingly cheerful—probably glad to get the melted android corpse out of the trunk of his car. I was pretty glad too. I wanted it to be over, because once it was I knew I'd get used to her being gone, like I did between visits, and then I wouldn't care very much if I didn't think about it.
He dug the grave for me. I offered, knowing he wouldn't let me do it, because it's the sort of thing she would have told me to do. A hand at my elbow. A whispered, "Ask if he needs any help." Why? "Because it'll make him happy."
And if offering meant he'd resent me less for asking for this, if it made it a little harder to picture him writing me off as selfish, unfeeling... I'm okay with that.
My mother only told me to do it because her cost function gave her a better score if people liked me.
"Do you want to say something?" Ian asked, dirt on his hands and smudged across the bridge of his nose. He looked handsome like that. I was briefly tempted to ask him to say a few words, just to see what he'd come up with, but then I worried it might irritate him so I didn't.
There were a lot of things I could say to the patch of dirt at my feet. But I didn't want to thank her without explaining why, and I didn't want to do that with him listening. It wasn't like she could hear me anyway. If there are souls that go on after we die, I doubt anybody ever gave her one.
Ian cleared his throat. "Um. Thank you." I turned to him, frowning, about to ask what he was talking about—"For looking out for her when nobody else did."
It's funny. All the people in the world who talk about love, and my husband is the only one I've ever met who's half as kind as my mother.