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Echo, by Jenna Glover
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“I think you’re focused too much on this. Names are just arbitrary titles handed to us by others. Why should this one matter?”
“Because it’s not my name! It’s not even a name.”
“You need to start thinking of it as your name.”
“It…doesn’t feel like me.”
“And which me is that?”
“Wha—the me I’ve always been! Martha!”
“Martha is dead.”
Martha first knew something was wrong when she weighed herself after the new year. She had started weighing herself the first few years of her marriage. Back then, she and Robert were still in the honeymoon phase, and she was determined to maintain her petite, 115-pound figure for his pleasure. A decade later and several pounds heavier, it became an obligation for health, not vanity.
Then the war started. Martha didn’t weigh herself at all during those three years. How could she when there were androids to find and destroy? The world had moved on to bigger priorities and she did as well. Her weight would not save mankind from its own creations.
The war ended a year ago, and Martha spent that year attending holidays, gatherings, and celebrating the first Freedom Festival without any thought to her figure whatsoever. The Freedom Festival lasted for seven days and was celebrated with food and lots of it. Martha, a true patriot of humanity, did not shy away from such festivities. After the food was consumed and everyone trickled back to work, Martha inevitably felt the burden of her overindulgence. It was time to get back on the scale.
Martha stepped onto the tile scale after she brushed her teeth one morning, casual as can be. It wasn’t a big deal. She was only thirty-eight. How high could it have gone, really? If she didn’t like the number, then it wouldn’t be that difficult to fix it.
When Martha glanced down at the backlit, blinking screen, she frowned. That couldn’t be right. She stepped off, let the tile reset itself, and stepped back on. No change. Martha ripped off her clothing, stripping down to her underwear, and read the same number again.
With a huff, Martha chalked it up to the scale being broken. Lots of technologies were failing now that the androids weren’t in charge. No one would admit it, but those genocidal revolutionaries were better at running the world than the humans ever were. Martha slid back into her clothes, taking a moment to note the measurements on the tags, and, satisfied that it was an error in manufacturing, left the bathroom for work.
She couldn’t stop thinking, though, that the scale could have read something as absurd as 205.
“You’re very quiet today.”
“Just thinking.”
“What about?”
“They held the funeral today.”
“Oh? How does that make you feel?”
“…I wish it were me.”
Martha pressed the pad of her finger against the sensor on her holo-vanity and waited. She winced slightly at the prick of the needle and then the blast of cold antiseptic. A blinking green light appeared on the mirror’s surface, and she removed her finger, automatically sticking it in her mouth even though the tiny prick would have healed already. She watched the mirror. The dot blinked over and over but didn’t turn.
Martha sighed. She wanted the test to be positive; she wanted to be pregnant. Caleb was her world, but he was four now, and Martha thought another baby, a sibling for Caleb to play with, would be good for all of them. Caleb was born just before the uprising, and once that happened babies were the last thing on anyone’s mind. It was all just a haze of chaos and business associated with the war and the cleanup. Martha’s own maternity leave was cut short, and she could barely remember her first year as a mother. But now all that was over, and Martha wanted to experience motherhood for real. She broached the subject with Robert, and he was in agreement.
They had been trying for months now. Martha could have sworn she was pregnant with Caleb the second Robert looked at her. She knew she was older now, but she had been taking those fertility pills for a while…surely, they must have had some effect by now.
The green light blinked one last time and a beep sounded. The mirror’s surface displayed a myriad of facts and figures about her blood work, but Martha skipped over all of it, looking for the one section she actually needed.
PREGNANCY: NEGATIVE
Martha stared at the reading for a few seconds before swiping her hand across the mirror, returning the picture to her own face.
A baby. She should be able to have one. Other women her age and older were having babies. Martha wondered if she should go see a doctor. She hadn’t been to see a doctor in…years. But the hospitals were so chaotic now, operations barely back up since eliminating all the corrupted data, lines of people to see too few doctors. Martha didn’t even know if fertility clinics were still open. Perhaps all nonessential medical needs were still closed. Martha met her own eyes in the mirror.
Perhaps she was just broken.
From downstairs, Martha heard the front door open and the sound of Robert’s shoes on the entry floor. She quickly accessed the holo-vanity’s data center and deleted all her files for the last several weeks so Robert couldn’t see the results. She would tell Robert herself.
Later.
“This doesn’t have to be such a tragedy.”
“…”
“This could be the beginning of a new life. You’ll find and meet new people—”
“I don’t want new people.”
“But—”
“I want my son!”
Martha collapsed at work on a Wednesday afternoon, the week before her wedding anniversary. One minute she was typing away on her screens, organizing files, and answering requests. The next minute she was peering up at the face of a man she didn’t recognize in a place she didn’t recognize.
The man sat back with a gentle smile, allowing Martha all the time she needed to sit up and get her bearings.
She was on what appeared to be a hospital bed, wearing a hospital gown, but the room was quite different. There were monitors and screens everywhere, and not one of them looked like it functioned for medical purposes. Further, Martha herself didn’t feel ill or hurt or even confused. It was like she merely went to sleep for—she glanced out the window and noted that it was dark—hours!
Martha glanced at the man—doctor?—who merely continued to smile, and then peered down at herself.
That was when she noticed the wires protruding from her arms.
Martha must have made some sort of sound or movement because the man came forward to quickly place a hand on her shoulder.
“Now, now,” he said. “There’s no need for that.”
Martha ignored him and for the second time that day lost track of a few hours.
“Where were you when it started?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The San Jose Slaughter. Everyone remembers where they were when the androids first attacked.”
“…I was here. Working on a paper. It was late. Why do you bring this up?”
“I just realized that I don’t know where I was.”
“Meaning?”
“Just that. I don’t know. The government doesn’t know. Was I already there, eating dinner with Robert and Caleb and pretending all was fine?”
“…Or?”
“Or did I not exist at all?”
Martha sat on the bed, the words of the doctors and government workers and engineers washing over her and forming a background static. She looked down at her hands, wiggling her fingers, touching the tips together, and wondering how could these not be real hands?
“Ma’am?”
Martha looked into the smiling faces of the people in front of her. They always called her ma’am. No one called her Martha or even Mrs. Billings. Just ma’am.
“Do you have any questions?” the woman nearest to her asked.
What’s happening?
How could this be happening?
Who am I?
“Um…”
The doctor, or government agent, or engineer—Martha couldn’t tell the difference; they were all wearing the same suits—smiled and laughed.
“That’s all right,” she said. “We’ll be here as your rehabilitation team for the duration. We’ll guide you through step-by-step, and you can stop and ask any questions you like along the way. I know this is a lot to take in now.”
Martha nodded and then rasped out, “Could I just…have a minute alone?”
Suddenly everyone tensed, throwing each other meaningful looks, and Martha thought they were going to say no, put her in cuffs, lock her away, but then the woman who had spoken spread her arms and began herding the others towards the door.
“Of course,” she said as she too backed out. “Just call if you need anything. We’ll be back in a minute.”
As soon as she heard the door click shut, Martha fell apart. Her breath came in great, heaving gasps, and there never seemed to be enough of it, and how could that be right because she wasn’t even real! There was no need for air, no real lungs to breathe it in or real heart to pump it through her blood.
Martha stood abruptly, a marionette having its strings yanked, her body an attachment to her consciousness and nothing more. She needed to know, for sure, once and for all: what was she?
Martha glanced around the room and saw some sort of tool on a table opposite. She had no idea what it did, but it would serve its purpose. She sprang towards it, snatching it up, and before she could even think about what she was doing, she plunged it into her arm.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Certainly.”
“If I’m dead—”
“You’re not dead. Martha Billings is dead.”
“Right. But is Martha, like, experiencing the afterlife? Heaven and such?”
“Hm…You have her memories. What do you think?”
“...yes?”
“There you have it.”
“Can I ask you another question?”
“Sure.”
“Will I go to heaven, too?”
“We repaired the damage done; there won’t even be a scar. Furthermore, we finished repairing the degradation that caused your collapses in the first place. You’re good as new!”
The doctor snapped his screen shut and smiled across at Martha.
“Do you have any questions?” he asked after a minute.
“I want to see my family.”
The doctor sighed. “You will. Soon. But there’s a lot of paperwork that needs to be sorted first. It’s not as easy as it is for humans.”
Martha blinked at the sudden realization that ‘human’ was a category she no longer belonged in.
Silence fell. Martha rubbed the perfectly smooth skin of her arm. The blood that came forth when she stabbed herself was beautiful to her eyes even as the pain hit and she doubled over in agony. But then came hard resistance as she hit something impenetrable, metallic and man-made materials peeking out from a thin layer of skin and muscle and vein. Android materials.
“Ma’am?”
Martha glanced up.
“I’d like to introduce you to Doctor Audrey Meng, our specialist in android psychiatry.”
For the first time, Martha noticed a woman standing beside the doctor. She was tall, fit, and completely inoffensive in every way, from her neat and professional hairstyle to her earth tone pencil skirt and sweater blouse. She inclined her head when the doctor said her name and smiled, revealing a set of perfectly straight, white teeth.
“Hello, ma’am,” Doctor Meng said. “You and I are scheduled to meet once a week for two hours every Friday afternoon. My offices are located on the fifth floor. You can, of course, schedule more meetings with me with the approval of your rehabilitation leader.”
“I’m not suicidal,” Martha blurted bluntly. Doctor Meng blinked, but Martha plowed ahead. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just wanted to see…if it was true.”
Doctor Meng smiled again. “That’s good. But I’m not here because we thought you were suicidal. All newly aware androids are required to undergo extensive counseling throughout their transitions and beyond. It’s standard procedure.”
“Oh. How many…how many others are there?” Martha asked. “I mean, other…newly aware androids?”
Doctor Meng hesitated for a second, and Martha’s mind struggled with the concept that she was the only android left active. Logically, she couldn’t be the only one, right? There were standard procedures. You couldn’t make standard procedures unless there were multiple cases.
“We generally don’t encourage newly awares to associate with other androids right away,” Doctor Meng finally said. “However, there are more. We are getting better at locating possible androids, but given the complexity of android technology, we may never know how many humans were replaced with android units. Of the ones like you, there are probably hundreds in the nation. Thousands across the globe.”
“Like me?”
“Pedestrian. Non-combat oriented and safe to exist.”
“And the others? The…combat oriented androids?”
“You don’t need to worry about those.”
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