~~~
I smelled pancakes when I woke up.
“I didn’t know how to make them, but the instructions are on the box,” Sarah said. She looked proud of herself and I told her thanks. I couldn’t help noticing she hadn’t changed from the sweatshirt.
“Ethan, I’m sorry about last night. I only wanted you to feel better, and....” Her gaze fell to her plate of overdone pancakes. “It’s what I’m made to do.”
“Don’t worry about it.” I moved on, anxious to forget the lingering temptation. “Sarah, does the name Nancy mean anything to you?”
“Nancy,” she said it carefully, tasting the sound of it. She blinked, and her eyes lit up. “Being called on in class, a lover’s whisper, a scolding from my mother. They all called me Nancy, but it’s slippery too like neither it nor Sarah quite fit. Where did you get the name from?”
“It’s just a hunch; I need to check it out before I’m sure.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t hold out on me.”
“I want to be certain first. I'll tell you everything once I know.”
I left Sarah in my apartment and told Vickie to drive me to the Hoffman place. The house sat way back from the road, hidden by a small forest of trees. When I pulled up to the gate, Vickie told me I had an incoming local link. A man’s face appeared on the Mitsu’s console screen.
“Please state your business,” it said in the impersonal tones of a HAB.
“I’m Ethan Pollard with the police department. I need to see Dr. Hoffman.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“No, but she’ll want to see me. Tell her it’s about Sarah.”
The HAB’s face disappeared, and the console turned solid blue as the link paused. A few moments later, it returned. “I’ll meet you at the front door.”
The gate opened and Vickie drove to the house. Angular surfaces and large windows made up most of the structure with the trees around it leaving everything dappled in shade. It looked like serenity painted in architecture.
At the front door, the HAB waited for me. It looked young and handsome with neatly arranged dark hair. The expression on its face bespoke efficiency and politeness as it led me up a set of stairs and down a hall.
It opened the door to a large corner room with walls of glass, the shade from outside lying across a woman in a hospital bed. An I.V. fed into her wrist from some sort of machine, and a panel showed what must be her vital signs. I could barely make out the Nancy Hoffman from online pictures in the worn face. A nurse sat in a chair nearby, reading a book.
“Grace, I need a moment to talk with Mr. Pollard alone,” Dr. Hoffman said.
The other woman left and the HAB closed the door, leaving us by ourselves.
“Please sit down, Mr. Pollard.”
I took the seat Grace had vacated while Dr. Hoffman pressed a button to raise herself. She peered over at me, the eyes sharp despite her condition. “How did you find out she belonged to me?”
“Finding things out is my job.”
“It’s good to see my tax dollars aren’t wasted. Have you located her?”
Her, I thought, not it. “No, but we know it wasn’t stolen. It ran off on its own.” I had to concentrate to keep from calling Sarah she.
“HABs don’t run away.”
“This one did. Why?” I asked.
Dr. Hoffman paused a long time before answering. “Sarah is special, Mr. Pollard. She has the usual hardware and the proper programming, she’s perfectly legal, but she has a much larger cerebral cortex than a normal HAB and it’s been constructed to have memories. The memories won’t make much sense to her until her brain makes the proper connections. The poor thing must be awfully confused right now.”
“Whose memories?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“Mine. The HAB is my property, as is my mind. My lawyers assure me there is no legal issue here.”
“Why?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do the police need to know my motivations?”
“It might help to find her.”
“I doubt it,” she said. “But I’ll tell you Mr. Pollard; I’m not ashamed of my reasons. I’m dying, as I’m sure you’ve guessed.
I waited as she lifted the cup of water next to her and took a long sip. She closed her eyes for a moment as if gathering strength. "I married my husband, Scott, three months after I met him. It sounds impulsive, but it wasn't. After that first day we spent together, I knew he'd be the man I’d spend the rest of my life with." She smiled, and, for a moment, the illness receded from her features. "It sounds silly, but I knew that we were meant to be together. Have you ever felt that Mr. Pollard?"
My thoughts turned to Chloe. I loved her, I didn't doubt that, but we had something constructed, something that had needed time to build. "Maybe."
She laughed, and it made her cough. Another sip of water cleared her voice. "If you have to think about it, then you've never known it."
I came looking for answers, not ruminations on the nature of love. "What does this have to—"
"It has everything to do with it. Death is taking me away from the love of my life, the most precious thing I've ever had, Mr. Pollard. I don't want to lose those years with Scott."
"Do you think you'll transfer your mind into Sarah?" I wondered if illness had addled her wits.
"That's the stuff of science fiction; I'm not a wide-eyed schoolgirl. I know my time is over, but there will be another me who'll have those lost years. Scott has been so good; he's been by my side the entire time and never complained. He'd be here now if I hadn't insisted he needed to get some fresh air and play a round of golf. I don't want to leave him alone, and I'll still be with him in a way."
"What if that's not what sh—it wants?"
"I know what she wants, Mr. Pollard. She's me. Her brain is modeled after my own, and my memories drift among her synapses. With my help, those bits of me will connect and she'll find that she's with the love of her life and everything of mine will be hers; Scott will see to that."
Dr. Hoffman lifted her back from her bed and her eyes hardened. "I cannot stress enough how important it is that you find her. They kept her away from stimulus during her recovery after construction—even kept her away from her true name. Now she's out in the world, and her brain will be making connections. The damage of a couple of days can be undone, but the longer she's out there the more her mind will drift from its purpose, perhaps even from sanity. The poor thing is so vulnerable. There wasn't time to design something totally new, so she's modified from an advanced pleasure model. She's programmed for physical desire and to fall into emulated love. Part of my work with her would be to overcome her hardwired functions.”
“We'll do all we can, Dr. Hoffman; thank you for your honesty.” I stood up.
“I’ll be certain to contact the police and let them know what a fine job you’ve been doing.”
She knew. I should have known she’d see through me, all the articles called her a genius. The illness may have taken off her edge, though; she’d made a mistake and now I held the cards.
“You need to fire your lawyers. They should have told you any HAB that can overcome her hardwiring is an illegal design.”
Her expression changed in a heartbeat, pleading. "Mr. Pollard, I have to work with her personally to control her mental development, to build the right connections. I'll be dead before another suitable one can be constructed. This is my only chance."
I left feeling more conflicted than ever. Somehow, I'd been expecting something more sinister than the dreams of a dying woman. If Sarah had never fled, she'd be on her way to making sense of her memories. Rich and with the love of her life, there could be a lot worse fates. It still didn't feel right in my gut; she deserved to have a choice.
When I entered my apartment, I found Sarah lying on the couch. She'd changed back into the sundress and apparently found my book reader. From what
I could see, she'd been passing her time with a mystery.
She smiled at me, flashing her even, white teeth. "I think I've read this before, but at least I can't remember who did it."
The smiled faded when she got a good look at my expression. "What happened?"
I grabbed a chair so I could talk to her face to face. On the way home, I'd decided to tell Sarah everything; she had a right to know. So that's what I did, I recited my conversation with Dr. Hoffman word for word.
Sarah listened, frowning. At the end, she leaned back, her gaze lingering on her knees. She sat like that a long time before she looked up. Her eyes held the same sharp seriousness that Dr. Hoffman's had.
"I'd like to have all these jumbled bits in my mind put together, and if I became Nancy it sounds like I might be happy eventually. But I like being Sarah, even with the crazy swirl of fragments in my head. More than anything...." She bit her lip and paused, nervous. "I love you, Ethan. I feel about you the way Nancy felt about her husband after that first day. Maybe that's my programming, but it feels like me; I'm not even sure there's a distinction."
The words hung in the thick silence that followed; I didn't know what to say.
Sarah fixed me with those vivid eyes of hers. "It comes down to you, Ethan. If you'll have me, I want to stay and be Sarah. If you don't, then I'll go try to become Nancy. What do you say Ethan? Do you want me?"
A thousand thoughts whirled around like a shaken-up snowglobe—maybe that was how Sarah felt all the time. I could get away with it: move to a new city, remove the