We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 3: Chapter 9: Tension

Book 3: Chapter 9: Tension

Howard

February 2218

Vulcan

“You should leave my mother alone.”

I’d been casually examining a store-front display at the mall, so the comment, coming out of nowhere, made me jump. I turned around to find Rosie, Bridget’s eldest daughter, glaring at me.

“What?” Oh, great comeback, Howard. Brilliant.

“You’re a machine. You’re not even human. My mother needs to get over the death of my father, and move on. But not with a machine.”

Here we go. My fertile and somewhat anxiety-ridden imagination had pictured something like this. I wasn’t particularly happy about the validation. “Rosie, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I, the real me, am human. I—”

“Spare me all the scientific double-talk. You’re a recording of a human. I’m not interested in debating the issue. I’m—”

“Then why are we even talking?”

“What?” Rosie blinked rapidly and drew back slightly. I seemed to have managed to derail whatever speech she was gearing up to. I noted out of the corner of my eye that we were attracting an audience. Several passersby had stopped to watch the drama, and at least one person had their phone out. I wondered if I qualified as a celebrity.

“Rosie,” I continued, trying to ignore the gawkers. “You may not be interested in a debate, but I’m equally not interested in standing here being lectured at. To coin a phrase that was around when I was young, you’re not the boss of me. And, more to the point I think, your mother is freely choosing to associate with me.”

Bridget grinned, sharing the moment. “And on that subject...”

“Oh, no you don’t. I’ve already told you that I’ll upgrade Manny any time you say the word. That’s on you.”

Now Bridget was laughing, too. The hilarity fed back on itself until we were both lying back on the furniture, gasping for breath and whooping helplessly.

Finally, after a minute or two, we both managed to recover control. Bridget took my hand. “And that’s one of the reasons why I love you. Even Stéphane often just looked at me like I had a screw loose. I had to bite back a lot of my more lowbrow humor. With you, well, you get it.”

“Minds together in the gutter, forever.” I smiled at her. My God, she was beautiful.

* * *

The internet hadn’t really changed that much in two hundred years. Oh, there were new companies, and old companies had gone out of business. A lot of the jargon had changed. But people were still people, and still had the same interests. There were still forums, you could still follow someone, everyone still had a personal landing page on any of several different platforms, and blogs were still popular. Apparently narcissism and voyeurism were still alive and well.

The point, though, was that it didn’t take a lot of effort to track down some commentary relating to the locally famous—or perhaps infamous—replicant. My android persona wasn’t any kind of a secret, and had become a small but persistent topic of conversation. And there were enough pictures posted to make me recognizable if someone cared enough.

There was no shortage of opinions on the subject, although they appeared to be about evenly split. I was either some kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, or I was just some guy who had the same right to exist as everyone else. There didn’t really seem to be any middle ground.

It looked like my relationship with Bridget was the real sticking point. Most people were okay with me just wandering around, visiting malls and such. But they drew the line at me dating outside my chemical family.

It was unlikely that Bridget was unaware of this. That meant she was protecting me. Crap. I was just chauvinistic enough to want to be the one doing the protecting.

I wondered if she had a plan. Or, more importantly, if I had one. Someone needed to deal with this.