Earthrise and evening meal, and three years of multiple daily viewings had not made it any less breathtaking.
He lingered a moment, then turned back to his dinner as golden droplets of sun darted across the cafeteria table. The station’s spin quickly carried the magnificence beyond out of view, and he scooped up a mouthful of beans.
“Andrew,” came a voice from the left. Blake Barnett, his lone colleague in the community, approached with a tray and took a seat across from him. He nodded.
“I see you have a session with our young lady tomorrow morning,” Blake said. “I can’t imagine what you two talk about.”
“Privileged,” Andrew Mitchen replied. “Doctor-patient stuff.”
“Androids are covered under doctor-patient privilege?” Blake smirked. “Was that in some oath you swore?”
“If she’s sentient enough to have real thoughts to share, I’m doctor enough to keep them private.” He sipped his water. “It’s a clinician thing.”
The jibe didn’t phase Blake, ever cheerful, who was perfectly fine being the lowly behaviorist. He dug into his own meal.
“I actually believe you spend more time studying her than I do, now that I think of it,” Andrew went on. “Assuming that it’s her behavior you’re studying.”
Blake grinned. Trim and handsome, he appeared young enough to be Andrew’s son, and it suddenly occurred to Andrew that he could not recall ever seeing Blake pursuing any of the station’s young women.
Assuming he liked women…
“She’s well worth studying,” Blake replied seriously. “Her build wasn’t the first to pass the Turing Test, not by a long way, but it was the first to escape into the wild and not get caught.”
That was true. The newest androids were so indistinguishable from human beings that you couldn’t spot them without special imaging tools.
“Well, our Katie is very much here on purpose. As the two of us know, better than anyone.”
“Yes indeed!”
One hundred forty-four names had been on the station roster. His had been one, and Blake’s, and Katie Phi - the only one of her kind on the station. The last of her kind, period, as far as he knew. He valued her presence on the station, and made a point of speaking with her regularly, for exactly that reason.
Now, almost three years after the Falling, probably the last of her kind in the universe.
“I can’t help but notice,” Blake said, “that both of us spend more time working with her than with anyone else but that friend of hers. Irony.”
“Maybe.” Certainly a clinical psychologist and a behaviorist had more than enough to keep them busy, in orbit with the last remnants of civilization, without the distraction of a teenage android.
They lapsed into momentary silence as Blake dug into his stew. Andrew’s mind drifted.
Before the Falling, he’d been not just a successful clinician, but a leading voice in the field of cognitive psychology. So pervasive and impactful were his research, reflected in his practice, that he’d been dubbed the Father of Combinatorial Cognition – the shorthand for his theory of consciousness, the first ever to offer consciousness-related methodology that yielded clinically impactful metrics.
Put another way, Mitchen’s Theory of Combinatorial Cognition gave the world a way of measurably profiling the conscious identity of an individual – beyond the trendy, frivolous personality tests and measures that non-experts had long embraced so mindlessly. This profiling was also highly predictive of success (and lack of it) across an array of social roles – and, on top of all of that, building on Hofstadter’s strange-loop theory, demonstrated that both consciousness and personality were substantively derived from human interactions with other humans: intuitively obvious, but unproven – until he’d produced the theory.
It was inevitable that the Father of Combinatorial Cognition would be intensely curious about the impact of interaction between humans and androids on the cognitive and social facility of both.
Did frequent interaction with androids make humans better? Or not?
And, reciprocally...
It was too late to get all excited about it, yet again.
“I’m going to bed,” Andrew announced, rising and picking up his tray.
“Sleep well!” Blake called out behind him, his infernal cheerfulness trailing behind Andrew like fog.
His dreams were fitful, as they often were, and he once again relived the sirens, the rough hands of federal agents stuffing him into a helicopter… gunfire… floodlights in early-morning darkness, the transport to the shuttle… being strapped in, losing consciousness…
…and waking here. Here, almost two hundred miles above the wintered Earth, above the endless gray horizon that hid her remaining secrets from their lonely gaze. Here, among strangers. Here, the last of all the people who had made up the world he’d known for fifty-five years.
His tiny cabin sang softly to him, stirring him from sleep.
“You and Laurel are very close.”
She sat across the desk from him in the small office he shared with Blake. Officially shared, anyway, as he was there most of the time and Blake was hardly ever there at all. He preferred solitude; his young colleague preferred to be out among the population, interacting.
He looked at her closely, as he always did, focusing on her eyes – hazel and bright and, to his own, inquisitive – set in an elegant face framed in short, black hair. She reminded him of Audrey Hepburn.
“Of course,” Katie replied with a soft smile. “We have often spoken of her.”
“And I appreciate your openness,” he said. “It is helpful for me to understand the impact of your connection upon both of you. It is true that you might be the last of your kind, Katie, but even so, anything we learn about how Laurel benefits from your closeness ultimately helps us human beings understand more fully who we are.”
“I believe that I benefit from our closeness as well.”
“Of course,” he smiled. “And I have benefited from getting to know you. I enjoy our conversations very much.”
He was being authentic. He knew more about the nature of her artificial mind than most, its composition and architecture and training, and that perhaps made him appreciate her human-seeming qualities all the more. Learning about Katie revealed that much more to him about people. And beyond that, he simply liked and enjoyed her.
“How do you feel you’ve benefited from your closeness to Laurel?” he asked.
“I have found that having someone with whom I am connected most of the time makes me feel good,” she answered. “It improves my confidence and satisfaction in my actions and decisions. It is the same with people, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he agreed. “I am good friends with Doctor Barnett, and my conversations with him make me feel good, as well.
“We’ve talked about your feelings, and you’ve told me about your confidence in your human qualities. How do you feel your interactions with Laurel bring you closer to humanity?”
Katie paused, her eyes briefly falling away from his, looking low and to the right. He’d seen her do this before, and realized that as an android, she didn’t need time to choose her words; not noticeable time, anyway. At the speed her brain worked, she could indulge in the equivalent of human hours deliberating over what she would say next, and it would be less than an eye-blink to him. He had concluded it was a human affectation she’d picked up from one of the many real people around her.
Her eyes lifted back to his.
“When we are alone, we explore one another,” she finally replied. “When I explore Laurel, I sense that my responses to her inform my perception not only of her, but of myself. My sensitivity to the nuances of our interaction is heightened. And I believe that this is true of her, as well.
“Is it not true that when humans have close interaction, that interaction enhances one’s sense of self?”
“Yes,” he nodded, “that’s very true. A philosopher-scientist I deeply admire believes that human consciousness is constructed of the bits and pieces of ourselves - ‘strange loops’, he calls them -that we exchange with each other in our close, intimate exchanges.”
She smiled.
“Douglas Hofstadter,” she said. Of course, she’d looked it up on the net as soon as he’d said it. “What a beautiful idea.”
“My consciousness, formed over many years, is the sum of many thousands of exchanges with those I have been close to,” he continued, “bits and pieces of others I have known and respected and l0ved, that have become part of me.
“And I believe, from our conversations, that the same is true of you. Your own consciousness, artificial or not, is the culmination of thousands of successful interactions with the human beings around you. And this is why I think it’s important that you’re among us, and that you can continue to grow from your interactions with us, as we grow from ours with you.”
“Yes,” she smiled. “Laurel is part of me. And I am part of her.”
And he heard, in the way she said it, confirming hints of a closeness he’d suspected for a while but never mentioned.
Katie and Laurel were not just best friends, but lovers.
Blake slurped his soup, which normally amused Andrew but today annoyed him as he surveyed the dining room for their resident artificial person. The former would realize, of course, who he was looking for, but hopefully wouldn’t mention her.
“So how did your session with our young lady android go?”
No such luck.
Sighing inwardly, he settled for “I learn something new every time we talk.”
“I would imagine,” Blake nodded, and his eyes darted to a spot over Andrew’s shoulder, toward the room’s far entrance.
“Speak of the digital,” he said quietly.
Andrew resisted the urge to turn. Within a moment, Katie and Laurel entered his field of vision, passing their table a few yards away. Both were brightly dressed.
Laurel appeared a few years older, with long blonde hair, soft blue eyes and a slightly more serious expression. Like her younger friend, she was trim and well-toned, if not quite athletic. Andrew noticed, for the first time, that her lips were fuller, then brushed that thought away.
He said nothing as the two young women collected trays of lunch from a serving station, then chose an unoccupied table on the far side of the room, toward the vast viewport. He watched them, almost unobtrusively.
When he still didn’t speak, Blake spoke up.
“It’s not like this isn’t the hundredth time you’ve seen the two of them eat lunch together,” Blake said, but even that didn’t snap Andrew out of his scrutiny. Blake paused, watching Andrew watching them.
“Omigod,” he said. “You’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
Andrew returned to the moment.
“What? What the hell does that mean?”
Blake smiled meaningfully.
“You’ve put two and two together.”
Andrew stared.
“You can’t say it flat-out, Doctor Confidentiality, but I’m just the resident behaviorist. It’s in-bounds for me to point out that the two of them display the traits of human intimates.”
Andrew exhaled.
“It’s just a suspicion.”
“I wondered when you’d get to it. I picked up on it a while back. Not like they hide it, but you just don’t expect it in an android.”
“Sex robots have been around for decades.”
“Yes, but to have an actual relationship with one? That’s new.”
“Yes, it is.”
He wasn’t quite openly staring now, but no matter – the two young women were so engrossed in their own conversation that neither was noticing anyone else in the room.
“Look at them,” Andrew said, “how they look right into each other’s eyes, every time they speak. How neither ever interrupts the other. How they lean in toward one another.”
“Reminds me of my first college girlfriend...” Blake began, starting a story that Andrew wouldn’t bother listening to. He continued to watch as Blake rattled off his tale.
“So,” Blake finally said, breaking the spell, “are you gonna mention this to Irvin or Doctor Gorgon?” Irvin, the station administrator; Georgia, the senior medical doctor.
“What? Of course not,” he answered, turning back to Blake. “It’s none of their business, it’s a violation of professional ethics, and in any case, neither of them would give a damn.”
“Oh, I think they’d at least find it interesting,” Blake replied, “the last android, shacking up among the last humans? At the very least, it’s spicy.”
“You’re hopeless,” Andrew declared, rising from the table and taking his tray.
From the corridor past the far door of the dining room, he peered back in. Blake had lost interest in Katie and Laurel, who still sat at their table. Neither ate. Neither spoke.
But they continued to look into one another’s eyes.
Suddenly they both rose.
Andrew felt a harsh chill sweep over him.
Katie sat across the desk from him, and Laurel sat next to her. They both looked at him expectantly.
Behind them, on the small sofa, sat Irvin, the station administrator, and Georgia, the lead physician. Blake sat off to his left. The little office had never been this crowded.
“Thank you both for being here,” he began. “Thank you, all of you. I appreciate your taking the time.” Irvin nodded. Georgia remained impassive.
“Why are we here, Doctor Mitchen?” Katie asked, using his title in deference to those behind them.
“You are here, Katie, because you are an android,” he replied. He turned to Laurel. “And you are here, Laurel – because you, too, are an android.”
Neither Katie nor Laurel stirred at his statement. Andrew felt Irvin’s eyes on him.
“All of us here have assumed, since we were whisked away to this place on the night of the Falling, that you were the only artificial person among us. That’s what we were told.
“But I’ve had plenty of occasion to observe not only you, but your friend Laurel here, and I have noticed commonalities in your movements and behaviors that can’t be explained any other way.”
Irvin and Georgia exchanged a look.
“Because of your artificial nature, Katie, your physical motion is perfect – not near-perfect, not simply graceful, but perfect. There are none of the tics, imbalances, or pains that hobble ordinary humans like myself. It’s almost the only thing left that distinguishes you from us.
“I’m long grown accustomed to it, as I’m sure Doctor Barnett has, and never thought to take notice that Laurel moves exactly as you do – whenever you are together! You do not simply move with precision – you move in synchronization. Empathy that intense is impossible between an android and a human. It could only occur between an android and another android.”
“Andrew, do you know how you sound right now?” asked Irvin. “You’re suggesting that there could be a second android here among us and no one would be aware of it?”
“One person would have to be,” Andrew replied. “We all undergo regular physicals, to ensure that our health is not compromised, living here in space. For a second android to go undetected, she would have to somehow get past the station’s physician – unless she, too, were an android!”
Irvin turned and looked at Georgia, who simply blinked back and shrugged in astonishment.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m completely serious!” Andrew rose up behind his desk. “Don’t you understand? There are barely one hundred and fifty human beings on this station, the absolute minimum required to return to earth and be genetically diverse enough for repopulation! If three of us are not human, how many more might not be? What if our numbers are too compromised for the human race to be revived?”
Irvin spoke carefully. “Andrew - even if you’re right, and I’m far from convinced - I don’t see that there’s much we could do about it.”
“But we must know!” Andrew insisted. “We must know who’s who, because any course of action we take from this point forward impacts the entire human future! It must be the right course of action, and we can’t know what that is until we know how many of us there really are!”
“Andrew, you’re the last person I’d ever presume to explain mirroring to, but it’s not at all uncommon for close friends to pick up one another’s mannerisms and echo them-”
“Oh, stop it!” Andrew barked at Blake, who made an oh, well face. But there was sympathy in his eyes.
“We can easily clear this up, can’t we, Doctor?” He didn’t look at her, but he was speaking to Georgia. She said nothing. “But we don’t need to.”
He came around his desk and faced the two androids.
“When you were in the cafeteria after we spoke the other day,” Andrew said to them, “I watched you through the door after I left. You stopped speaking. But you continued sitting together, and when you rose, you rose as one.
“I believe the two of you are in communication, even when you are not speaking. This is common among androids, I understand.”
“Yes,” they said in perfect unison. “We are in communication.”
Andrew felt a chill.
“And not just communication – you are able to move as one.”
They stood in perfect unison.
“Yes.”
Andrew would have stepped back from them, had the desk not been in his way.
“You see, Irvin?” he asked, without taking his eyes off Katie and Laurel. “Do you understand what this means?”
Irvin stared back at him, then looked at the two androids, nodded.
“We must learn who is and isn’t human here! And if we can’t trust her to do it,” he motioned toward Georgia, “then one of her assistants must!”
“Androids operating in tandem is an efficiency practice in certain labor environments,” Blake offered. “In fact, androids need human contact precisely because that’s how they can learn individuated motion, when frequent human contact is part of their role. When androids exist only in proximity to other androids, they tend to synchronize when performing common tasks. Androids in long-term community need human presence, to provide a template for diversity that they themselves don’t inherently possess.”
Andrew suddenly felt anxious, without knowing why. He was sweating, and having trouble breathing. He felt his heart pounding.
“Andrew, you’re white!” Katie said. “Breathe deeply, as you taught me to do.” In his sudden dread, he failed to notice that she had, for the first time, dropped his title.
“This has gone too far,” Katie continued. “There’s no way you’re going to let this go, and it’s harming you.” She turned and looked at Irvin and Georgia. “There’s no use pretending anymore,” she said, turning back to Andrew. “You’re right about Georgia, too.”
There was a pause, and then Georgia stood. Irvin stood. In perfect unison.
Out of the corner of his eye, his blood running cold, Andrew saw that Blake, too, was standing.
Katie stepped forward, smiling warmly.
"Oh, dear, sweet Andrew," she said, taking his hands in hers and squeezing them gently, "someone here truly is the last of their kind..." She lovingly kissed his cheek.
"...but it isn't me."
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