Wire Mother

“Your mom loves you,” Cassie’s father says. They’re in an elevator. They only ever talk about Cassie’s mom in elevators, or when they go hiking and Cassie’s father leaves his watch at home. Cassie doesn’t know if her mom actually doesn’t listen, then, or if she’s got some sort of secret microphone in Dad’s clothes and holding her tongue about these things is just a behavior contained in her parameters.

Mom isn’t capable of love, Cassie doesn’t say. Dad’s been in love with her mother for longer than Cassie’s been alive.

“Sure,” Cassie says. “But you know, the emotional contagion deficit diagnosis.”

“Dr. Russ didn’t formally diagnose—”

“He would have, if it wouldn’t have been bad for my college app—”

“And did you finish—”

“Why don’t you ask your wife simulacrum,” Cassie says, nastily. Simulacrum is a word she’s learned from reading old philosophy books. She likes it a lot. School is a simulacrum of real life. Her mother is a simulacrum of a physical person made out of meat. Cassie’s emotions are simulacra, she guesses, in that they’re all pale imitations of what she’s supposed to be able to feel. She feels real anger at her father, though. She has no problem feeling emotions across human people, who have flesh and blood and bone, and not ones and zeros. She knows this is problematic. If she were able to feel the right things for digital people, if she didn’t have ECD, then she could love her mother, and her father would stop harassing her about it.

“Cassidy Janet Glass,” her father says, and Cassie wants to scream at him, but the elevator opens into their apartment, and Cassie’s mother is leaning over on the console screen and frowning her pixelated smile. The console screen is temporary—the big LED screen that takes up their entire living room wall is broken.

“What on earth are you shouting about again?”

“I’m arguing with him about my ECD diagnosis,” Cassie says.

“You don’t have anything on your official file with your pediatrician, sweetheart,” Cassie’s mother says.

“Let’s not argue, Amy,” Cassie’s father says, and the tired cast to his words prompts AMY to smile sympathetically, to lean her two-dimensional lean and move as if to comfort Cassie’s father.

“Long day, honey?” she says.

“The longest,” Cassie’s father says, collapsing on the couch. “Wish Rina was on shift today. I could use you, physically.”

“Imagine my arms around you,” Cassie’s mom says, and Cassie’s father touches the edge of the console and says, “Oh, Amy,” with such tenderness that it disgusts Cassie, and she has to head to her room before she says something she regrets.

Emotional Contagion Disorder is a condition with no ascribed cause, but scientists suspect that it has something to do with mirror neurons. Autism adjacent. The brain generating a reverse pareidolia, in that Cassie keeps abstracting noise from the meaning. Like most neurodivergences, it was only diagnosed when the condition became aggravating to those around her, which, in Cassie’s case, was when she stopped listening to her mother and began saying that she wasn’t real.

This had been enough for her parents to haul her in front of a psychologist, who had a lot of questions about Cassie’s childhood that her mother answered because AMY’s memory is much better than Cassie’s father’s. Cassie had developed normally, although she had shown very little interest in digital friends, but had listened to her digital teachers, and until recently had listened to her mother until she hadn’t.

When Cassie herself had been questioned, she had said, nastily, “You’re ones and zeroes.”

“I’m going to refer you to my colleague,” the psychologist had said, which is how Cassie met Dr. Russ and got her not-diagnosis.

Cassie considers herself a deviant and a rebel. It’s better than thinking about herself as lonely or socially deficient. She claims it’s a choice to never have made any digital companions, even though most girls her age have run through a whole hard drive of sub-sentient starter boyfriends and girlfriends. Most of the girls in Cassie’s classes are salivating for their eighteenth birthdays. You aren’t allowed to create a real digital person until you yourself are an adult. Only semi-sents.

Instead of digital companions, Cassie spends her time building blocks of code the old-fashioned way. With a screen and a keyboard. She learned to type at the community center as part of a module on ancient technologies. She writes archaic scripts that take thirty times longer than speaking the modern programming techniques. She finds it relaxing, like hand weaving fabric, which is another thing she learned to do at the community center.

The community center is also where she got the program capable of deleting her mother from every single one of her father’s servers. It’s a little string of code that she has memorized, that her friend Oliver had given to her.

Oliver is one of the boys in the ancient technologies module, who sat next to her most days. He had unspecified personality problems. He spent a lot of time spinning up sub-sentient personalities and being cruel to them. But he had also lent Cassie trolleybus fare when her chip was empty, and was polite to all the parents, digital and meat. And he was funny, and he was handsome, and Cassie liked talking about movies with him.

“Look at this, Cass,” he had whispered to Cassie after class was over. He had shown her his terminal, on which the kernel for a semi-sent was displayed. He typed in a string of numbers and letters and backslashes and symbols. “I got this from a guy I met on a forum.”

“What’s it do?”

“Kills people,” he had said before pressing enter to deploy the code, and Cassie had watched as the kernel blinked out of existence.

“But that wasn’t someone sentient.”

“I wouldn’t do that, that’s fucked up. But look,” he had said, showing Cassie a recording of a digital person being erased. “It’s the same code. It works as long as you have access to the guy’s name—not like, spoken name. The kernel.”

“That’s sick. You’re sick,” Cassie said, to cover up the fact that she hadn’t felt anything at all. And she had made him do it again, two more times, until she could remember the string of code that he had typed in over and over.

Most modern computers are controlled through voice commands. If Cassie wants to deploy this on her mother, she would merely have to speak the words. But Cassie hasn’t deployed the code. She’s thought about using it, but at the end of the day, she has nothing against her mother, only the feeling that there is a gulf between them that Cassie is unable to bridge and her father seems desperate to mend. It’s exhausting. Her father can’t make Cassie love her. Her life would be easier without AMY around.

“AMY’s your perfect woman,” she sometimes wants to tell her father. “You built her to love you and to love the things you make, but you didn’t build me to love her! She’s just words and images on a screen to me. Sorry! She’s not alive to me! Stop trying to make us bond!”

Knowledge of the program to delete digital people is equivalent to owning a loaded automatic machine gun. But Cassie can’t unknow a thing. She’s not a digital person. She can’t just delete these things from her memory.

Cassie comes out of her room to the sight of her dad and mom cuddled up against the couch. Rina’s come over, wearing the headset that connects to AMY so that AMY can speak through Rina and move her limbs. Rina’s a professional Manual Interface. Cassie isn’t sure how exactly it works, only that Rina needed to have a special surgery and now has an implant in her brain and comes over three nights a week. Cassie’s not supposed to know what Rina does on her other four nights, but she’s seen Rina at the grocery store a couple of times. Alone, and walking around with a guy wearing a headset. Maybe she hires her own Manual Interface.

Rina’s in her late twenties. Before there was Rina, there was Wren, and before Wren, there was Agatha, all of whom were pretty, strawberry-blonde women who Cassie’s father had dismissed before they turned thirty. On the screens, Cassie’s mom is forever twenty-five. Some digital people age in simulacrum. Others stay the same as when they were created, and AMY was made the moment that Cassie’s father had the funds to make himself a wife.

It’s one of the ironies of the modern era: it’s an expensive, optional luxury to create a digital person, but every meat person has a legal obligation to create a biological child or at least manage to sell their mandatory child credit to someone who wants a freakishly large family, instead. Population stability was a big issue two generations before Cassie was born.

Rina’s probably too young to have a kid. Definitely too young to be Cassie’s mother.

AMY-in-Rina looks over.

“Hi, Cass,” AMY says through Rina’s mouth. “Do you want anything to eat?”

“I have a class at the community center,” Cassie lies. “I’m heading out.”

“You have bus money?” her father asks.

“I have bus money,” Cassie says.

AMY doesn’t say anything, even though AMY has instantaneous knowledge of the community center’s calendar and knows there is nothing scheduled today.

Cassie holes up in the back of the trolleybus and puts her leg across the adjacent seat to prevent anyone from sitting next to her. She pops in her earbuds and puts an old movie on.

Cassie watches a lot of old movies. It’s all people made of meat in the past, and if you go back far enough, they aren’t even using the deepfake actors that preceded the semi-sentients and the digital people. Just meat and bone, glitzed up with postproduction. Cassie can’t imagine making movies back then, when you had to get a physical set and physical actors and individual physical people had to painstakingly sit at keyboards (imagine sitting at a keyboard all day!) to manually stick in all the special effects. Crazy, for something that only takes two hours to view.

There’s all sorts of artificial intelligence in the old media, androids and voice AIs and things that are half AI and half meat person, like Rina and the other Manual Interfaces. They’re so interesting. They’re explicitly not people, not like they are now. They’re treated as something foreign. They’re still loved and depended on and feared. The closest Cassie gets to seeing something like her mother is in this ancient film about a guy falling in love with an artificial intelligence organizing software thing. The only weird thing in the movie is how everyone, including the guy, treats their love as an anomaly, when pretty much every adult Cassie knows has their own digital partner.

When Cassie watches the movies with all the meat people, she wishes she were the sort of person who could commune with everyone or that digital people didn’t exist. But that wish would delete two-thirds of the human population. It would be genocide. It would be obscene. That’s what people tell Cassie about her inability to sympathize or develop human bonds with digital persons.

Twenty minutes into the movie, the trolleybus stops at the corner of the community center, and Cassie gets out and nearly runs into Oliver, who’s walking out of the front doors. He drops his thermos, and Cassie bends down to pick it up, and for a moment they’re both saying “Sorry!” and “Whoops,” and then Cassie is handing Oliver his thermos back, and their fingertips touch.

“Why are you here?”

“I was using the console for a project,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“My parents were being gross and couple-y,” Cassie says. “I just wanted to get out of the house.”

“Oh,” Oliver says, and then pauses. He knows about her ECD. She’s complained about her parents before. “Do you want to come over instead? We could watch a movie.”

“Yes,” Cassie says and smiles.

Oliver’s mom is out, and his LED wall isn’t broken, so they camp out in the living room with popcorn. Oliver sneaks a handle of vodka out of the freezer while the popcorn’s popping, pouring a bit of clear liquor into a cup before popping the bottle back into the fridge. Cassie watches his actions with interest—they’re so archaic. He doesn’t even try and cover the kitchen cameras first.

“You don’t have a digital parent?”

“No,” Oliver says, handing her the cup. “Mom’s old-fashioned. You want to try?”

Cassie’s had alcohol before, a couple times, at parties. She takes the cup and drinks. It’s gross and compelling, a line of fire down her throat and into her stomach. She hands the cup back to Oliver. He knocks it back and then sputters, bending over the sink.

“That always looks easier in movies,” he says between coughs as Cassie giggles. “Can you pour more?”

Cassie takes the handle out and tips more vodka into the shot glass. Takes a sip before handing it to Oliver, who drinks more, slowly. Their eyes meet. The world feels like it’s going warm, but maybe that’s just Cassie’s imagination. She takes the popcorn out of the microwave and walks over to the couch and collapses onto it.

“Let’s watch something,” she says. She eats a couple of pieces of popcorn to chase away the numb-gross taste in her mouth.

“Sure,” Oliver says, sitting down next to her. He’s brought the handle. He takes a sip right from the bottle and doesn’t cough this time. “What do you want to watch?”

“Whatever,” Cassie says, even though she doesn’t want to watch whatever. It’s his house.

“Cool,” Oliver says, passing her the handle before flicking the screen to the latest James Bond movie, the one with the stunts that are generated differently every viewing. This time, it’s a bunch of helicopter-to-helicopter actions, all midair stunts and rope tricks, the type of thing they would never let a meat person do.

They watch a helicopter blow up. Oliver puts his arm around Cassie’s shoulders. She drinks a little sip of vodka before handing it back to him.

They watch Bond climb up a rope attached to one of the surviving helicopters. Oliver hands her back the vodka, and Cassie takes another small sip. It feels very grown-up to be drinking and watching a movie with a boy.

They watch Bond grab the girl, and Oliver puts the vodka down and brings his hand to Cassie’s breast, and at first, it’s okay, but then he’s grabbing too hard, squeezing like it’s a water balloon.

“Ow, stop—” Cassie says, but Oliver doesn’t stop. She grabs his forearm. He’s stronger than she is.

“Oliver, stop,” she says again, and he doesn’t stop, and his arm around her shoulder is like a vice, and he’s shifting so that he’s above her lap, and digital James Bond is saying something on the screen, and Cassie didn’t know that human boys were so strong, this close, she’s never been this close to a man before, and her breast hurts, and she’s suddenly scared, and—

“Stop,” Cassie shrieks and punches Oliver in the dick. He crumples, and Cassie scrambles from underneath him, pushes the meat of his body off of her own. He falls to the floor. He’s whimpering. He squints his eyes open. Oliver looks like an animal, like a piece of awful flesh and bone, like an ape.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I forgot. They never mean it when they say you should stop, I thought, when I did it with the semi-sents—”

“I’m going,” Cassie says and turns. Her heart is racing. She can feel tears at the corners of her eyes.

“I thought the ECD meant you don’t have feelings,” Oliver calls after her. “Cass, wait—”

Cassie storms out of Oliver’s house, ignoring him calling after her. She strides furiously down one, five, ten blocks, tears welling at the corners of her eyes, headache blooming in her temples. She shouldn’t have drank. She shouldn’t have gone home with Oliver. Why didn’t he stop when she wanted him to? She wonders how he’s been fucking the semi-sents. Where he hires the Manual Interfaces.

She wipes her tears and gets on the trolleybus. She wipes tears all through watching more of her old movie. She’s never going to watch any more James Bond. And she can never go back to the community center now, it would be too embarrassing. The trolleybus winds its way through the city and deposits Cassie back at her apartment. She goes into the building and straightens her clothes in the elevator.

Rina is in the kitchen, drinking a cup of something while she cooks. Her hair is disheveled, and her lipstick is a little smeary at the edges. She glances at Cassie and frowns.

“Your parents are showering. Are you okay?”

Cassie doesn’t want to tell anything to Rina. She’s angry that Rina isn’t someone she can talk to, that Rina rents her body out to pretend to be her mother. She wants Rina to be someone she can talk to. She wants Rina to be older, to have been the mother Cassie could have talked to.

“Do you like getting screwed by my dad?”

Rina puts her cup down. She lowers the heat on the stove. She turns around.

“It’s nice, getting to help your mom out,” Rina says, evenly. “Do you want me to get her for you? Being insulted isn’t in my contract.”

“I don’t want her,” Cassie says before walking away from the kitchen and into her bedroom, slamming the door before Rina can see her tears. She flops on the bed. She buries her head in her bedspread. She imagines being younger, when she didn’t know there was something wrong with her, when it was enough to feel the warmth of the Manual Interfaces’ skins as they held her in their laps as Cassie’s mother read picture books through their mouths.

“Cassie, what’s wrong?” AMY says.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Cassie says. AMY has never been seventeen. AMY has never had to deal with boys who were made of meat. AMY has only ever had one lover, who made her. AMY can’t imagine being in her position. AMY can’t imagine anything at all. And even if AMY could understand, all her words would fall on Cassie’s stupid, deaf ears.

“Try me,” AMY says, and she sounds so perfectly sympathetic and kind and caring, just like anyone would want in their mother.

Cassie looks up. AMY is all around her. In the walls, in the microphones, and in the camera in the corner of her room. Cassie wipes her eyes. Cassie imagines being her mother. Cassie imagines not having a body made of meat. Cassie imagines being made of code. Cassie imagines always knowing the right thing to say. Cassie imagines being able to be soothed by the right things AMY says. Cassie wishes she were like everyone else. Cassie wishes she could read love in the ones and zeros. Cassie wishes she had a mother who was made of meat, who was an ape made out of flesh and bone. Cassie imagines the rest of her life, all the conversations, all the pretending, all the broken expectations. Cassie takes a deep breath.

“Backslash backslash colon eight five zero zero—”