Hardware by Electra Shepherd

Author:Electra Shepherd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ellora's Cave Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2014-06-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

He reached across and straightened Green’s bow tie, which had gone slightly askew as they walked. Then he shifted his attention back to the people in the park. Under a tree, a mother was reading to her small child. It was a book about tickling, and after every page, the mother would tickle her son on his belly, sending the boy into gales of laughter. The mother, though she was not being tickled, laughed too.

“Look over there,” Dallas said to Green. “That’s love. Can you see it? They’re laughing because they love each other.”

Green observed. “I can see that the ritual of physical contact between parent and child reinforces the bond between them.”

The child reached up and tried to tickle his mother under the chin. He missed and hit her in the nose instead.

“It’s sweet,” said Dallas.

“It is necessary,” said Green. “Bonds between parents and children maximize the chance of the offspring’s survival, as parents will defend and look after a helpless creature in whom they have invested. Love, in this case, is an evolutionary strategy in a social animal whose young are too weak to survive by themselves. It assures the continuance of the species.”

“Yes, I know that, Green. But it’s more than that.”

“It may be for those involved. It is irrelevant for our situation. Two robots, whether they are in love or not, are never going to raise young or create life. There is no gene pool, there are no genetics. Two robots in love are an evolutionary dead-end.”

“If you argue like that, two robots have no reason to have sex with each other, either.”

A passing man in a suit shot them a glance and diverted his path to give them a wide berth.

“I have been equipped and programmed to have sex and to enjoy it,” said Green. “That is the reason.”

Dallas cast about for something to refute Green’s argument and spotted another two humans walking along together. The man moved slowly; the woman was stooped over with age. Both had gray hair and wore spectacles.

They were holding hands as they walked along.

“Look!” he said triumphantly. “That couple is past childbearing age. Their feelings for each other don’t help perpetuate the species, either.”

“It may be a relic from their child-rearing days.”

“There’s still no evolutionary reason for it to continue.”

The couple paused beside a rose bush. A blossom had fallen off and lay on the path in front of them. Slowly, gingerly, the elderly man bent and retrieved the flower. He tucked it into the woman’s hair, pink against gray.

Wordlessly, they carried on, holding hands. Dallas and Green watched them as they passed.

Dallas felt something rising up in him. It was, by now, entirely familiar. It was the feeling he experienced when he was in the same room with Ilsa and Hal, or Cally and Blue—not to be them, but to have what they had. It was the feeling he’d experienced when he had first set eyes on Green.

Yearning. A sadness for something he had never had, but wanted more desperately than anything.

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