The Slow Evolution of Lilac

We aren’t alive so we didn’t understand when our creator died. 

Business went on as usual for several days. When he didn’t move out of his bed, we figured this was something humans, living people, did. It was Lilac who figured it out. He hadn’t eaten any of the food she’d brought, and she compared the rot on the fruit beside his bed to what was beginning to grow on his face. I work in the gardens. I understand that when fruit begins decomposing it will return to the Earth. And that was what was happening to our creator.

We left him in his bed, unsure what to do when a human died. Lilac kept bringing him food. That’s what she was programed to do. She was modeled after his late wife, Margret: long blonde hair, bright blue-glass eyes, small frame. Beneath her skin were wires that could almost be mistaken as veins. She was the most realistic of us all. Lilac had cleaned and served his food. She was his stand-in wife and, although she was very beautiful in a strange mechanical way, like the inner workings of a clock, he had never touched her, not so much as held her hand. Every night, when she mock slept, it was not in his bed but in a bed across the room. He was polite and cordial to his automata but it was a thin veil. I could tell he was a little afraid of what he had created.

When he was alive, he would sit in an armchair by the fire and she’d sit in the winged back chair facing him. He would read to her, like he had to his wife. After he died, she still sat by the fire, face open and intent, as though she was listening to him.

“I miss him,” she said. “Or something of the sort.” 

He’d given her the facsimile of emotions, for that isn’t something you can really transfer to a non-living being. Once water had slid out of her eyes when I found a dead rabbit in the garden. 

“What’s going on?” I had asked, trying to analyze what the water meant, while the rabbits limp body hung between my metal palms. 

“I wish the rabbit was alive,” she’d said. “But I don’t know why.” 

“You are sad,” our creator had explained, his hand hovering by but not touching her elbow. “You are crying.” 

I don’t understand emotions, I am an older model and our creator didn’t bother installing them in me, his gardener, but like Lilac, I did wish our he was around. I work his property and he would walk through the gardens, the orchard, and the woods beyond and tell me about the plants. I retained every fact he told me and uploaded it in my memory. Besides, I liked to listen to his voice.

The place was so much quieter without him. He always played classical music in his study and the hall is so still without the echoes of a piano or violins. We had eaten together, or he ate while we sat at the table and told us things, and now we sat in front of our empty plates in silence. There were four of us. Lilac, Spoon, Grease, and myself, Floret. 

Spoon was the cook. It could not talk and didn’t really look like a person. Soon after our creator died, the power shut off and the food spoiled but poor Spoon didn’t know to stop. It roasted rotten meat, chopped potatoes sprouting eyes, and served to all to our creator’s empty seat at the table. Lilac would remove his untouched plate promptly at nine while Spoon whirred about in the kitchen cheerfully washing the pots even after we ran out of soap. 

Grease was unfinished and named so because no matter how much oil our creator added to his parts, he always creaked. He looked like a little boy, or at least the finished half of him did. From the waist down, he was a mess of wires and metal rods. Our creator had always wanted a grandson, apparently he was becoming sentimental before his death. I don’t know what that feels like and Lilac couldn’t explain, but it made him wish he could watch a child playing in the garden. Once Grease was no longer regularly oiled, his creaking joints could be heard all over the house and he limped from room to room, chattering animatedly as a child does about the world around him. He was programed to ask questions but Lilac and I couldn’t answer them. We didn’t know why the sky was blue or what the dust motes floating in the sunshine were made of. Grease’s face was extremely expressive. The way the silicone contorted was interesting to watch. 

It is spring. I work from flower bed to flower bed, mow the lawn, pick flowers for Lilac to arrange around the house. The mower runs out of gas and I find a tank to replace it, but that is the last one. I cannot worry about the future, so I don’t. The garden is in shape and I’m doing my job. I feed chickens until we run out of seed then they die too, and I watched the water drip from Lilac’s eyes as I bring their starved bodies to Spoon for that night’s dinner.  

Grease stands on his half legs next to her and I can hear the eyes creaking in his head as he looks from the chickens to my face and back again before asking: “Why is death bad?” 

“Human’s don’t like it,” said Lilac. 

“Why not?” 

“I don’t know, Grease! I’m not a human.” She says this desperately. I know she longs to be one.

But soon we learn about another form of death in late July. Spoon stops working. Lilac finds it in the kitchen, tipped onto its side, one wheel still spinning pathetically. At dinner, Lilac explains to Grease and me that Spoon’s power source had run out.

“Eventually ours will too!” she cries. The water pools in her glass eyes. "We will die too! We will die like our creator.”

Grease can’t feel emotions any more than I can, but his face, programed to respond to any situation, falls and his lower lip begins to tremble. 

 “I don’t think that’s good,” he says. “I don’t... want to die?” He is learning, like our creator had intended. 

“We’re not alive,” I explain. “So, you won’t really be dying.” 

“Maybe you don’t feel like you’re alive, Floret,” Lilac says, glancing at our creator's place at the table and the empty plate in front of it. Now that Spoon had died, we had no food prepared for dinner. “But I sure do!” 

“I'm sure you’ll figure something out,” I assure her in my toneless voice.  

Summer faded to Fall. As I had every winter for the last twenty or thirty years since my creation, I moved from outdoor work to indoor. I chopped the wood, stoked the fire, swept the chimneys, and watched Lilac grown increasingly worried about her battery. 

One night in late December, I sat by the fire, stoking it, as she pretended to listen to our creator read. Suddenly she turned to look at me. I was surprised because she wasn’t supposed to talk at this time, but without our creator, we were slowly diverging from our programs. Little kinks and holes were worming their way into our code and our creator wasn’t here to correct it. Lilac was more complex. This also meant she lost power faster. 

“How frequently did our creator tune you up?” she asks 

I pull the dates up from my memory and sort them quickly. “Every four years.” 

“When did he last change your power source?” 

“November of last year. On the sixth.” 

“So you have about three years left before you stop working?” 

“Yes, Lilac."

I don’t understand the progression of time. I don’t exactly feel it, but I can draw it down to linear points. I have no real concept of how long a day is, but I should live about one thousand and fifty-seven more.

Lilac knots her hands and I can see the wires tighten under her skin. “You said Grease’s power source is almost new about six months ago. Do you know how long he’ll last?”

I shrug. “Unfortunately, since Grease is incomplete, I reckon he’ll only last another year. Maybe two.” I didn’t know it then, but those words had condemned Grease as surely the swing of an executioner's axe.

“That’s longer then mine.” I can see the wires in her fingers pull taught as Lilac crushes her hands together. Her plastic nails leave small indents in her palms. “Floret, I don’t think I’ll last until Summer.”

“Oh,” I say and nothing else. I can’t fear my end like she can. 

The clock strikes ten. She stands right on cue to walk to our creator’s room. He is a skeleton in some places, meat in others, and the rest is somewhere in between. She lies in her mock sleep in her bed across and room and I return to entry hall where Grease and I wait in a fugue state, sitting on a faded sofa, for eight am where we will begin our next day's tasks. Spoon used to wait there too. 

Every day, Grease’s creaking grows worse. Even if his power source will last a few more years, his body isn’t ready for it. He tries his best to play in the quiet rooms of the big house, joints echoing down the hall, but he half legs stop working eventually. Even then he crawls. I imagine, if I could, I would find it sad or pathetic, and I’m surprised Lilac doesn’t seem to think so. I never see the water drip from her eyes as she watches Grease’s express face twist in distress because he can hardly crawl up the stairs. What with his almost continuous tantrums and the ever-constant squeaking of his limbs, the house is now alive with sounds much more unpleasant that the classical music.

I find myself pulling up memories of our creator more and more often. I want him to talk to me about his research, about his life as a boy, about the differences between human and machine. I want to know more about death. If he’d explained it, maybe things wouldn’t be so wrong in the house. I feel powerless now that the gas tank is empty, and I can no longer mow the lawn. The grass is growing higher and I cannot cut it. There are no seeds left, but still I go through the motion of planting. I hoe the earth, dig the holes, and fill them up with nothing. 

Lilac is slowing down. It is April, almost exactly a year since the death of our creator, and by my calculations, she may not even make it to June. 

 I noticed one afternoon as I came in for dinner that I could not hear Grease creaking around the house. Like the quiet after a canary in a coalmine, I immediately knew something was wrong, but unlike those men with their faces smudged with soot, I had nowhere to escape to. Of course, something being wrong holds no weight for me. It was simply a fact I slotted away as I sat down at the table across from Lilac. This was the beginning of the end. 

“Grease will not be joining us tonight,” she said solemnly. “He stopped working today. His limbs completely seized up.” 

“But he can’t-” 

“What I’m saying is that there was no point in wasting power source on a body that doesn’t work anymore. I have repurposed it.”  

“What do you mean?” 

She unbuttoned the front of her dress. She had no need for breasts so her chest was a flat metal silicone surface blinking with lights and crossed with wires. There was with a hatch cut into it, which she opened, exposing more wires, circuits, and, nestled like an egg in the center, a large humming battery: the power source. 

“Our creator has built us to run a few minutes after we lose our power sources,” she explains, quickly slamming the hatch shut. “I was able to replace mine with Grease’s before I cut out.” 

I stare to her. “That was a bad thing to do, Lilac. You’ve screwed with your code.” 

“I’ve never felt better. I’ve never been more alive.” 

“That was bad. I hope you feel wrong.” 

“It’s not like you’ll miss him,” she retorts. She’s right but the house feels so much emptier now. 

Sometimes I come across Grease’s body. He lies in the hall, silicone face relaxed, glass eyes staring at the ceiling. It is like he’s become a piece of furniture. Lilac dusts him off the way she would the lampshades or the framed pictures of our creator and Margret laughing together on the steps of a museum. 

 Another year passes. The garden is in disarray now. I still perform my duties the best I can, but my tools are rusted and, without seeds, the only thing that still flowers are the fruit trees. I harvest the apples, but no one can prepare them, so they rot in tubs in the kitchen. I can’t plant anything, but I keep the soil neat and free of weeds. I manage to coax the rose brushes back from the dead and cut a bouquet for Lilac to place on the kitchen table. Dinner for is two is always a solemn advent. I do not like Lilac anymore. She is still as beautiful as ever, but her skin seems too hard. 

My clothes are barely more than strips of cloth now. I don’t have skin, so my body is all metal, coated in rubber to protect me from the rain, and I’m still working as well as I can without seeds. I don't need clothing to do my job. Lilac, on the other hand, starts wearing Margret’s old clothing. Before she always wore the same white dress. She kept it impeccably clean and it was in good condition, but then, a few months after Grease was powered off, she came down to dinner in a red dress I hadn’t seen before. 

“What are you wearing?” I ask.

“Don’t you think it’s beautiful, Floret?” The dress is not made for her and it hangs awkwardly off her body. Her torso, which is an inch of two wider than Margret’s, coupled with the fact that she lacks breasts left the dress looking stretched and baggy at the same time. 

“It’s very beautiful but it’s not yours.”

“No one else will wear it. Just because you are content to wander around the garden in rags doesn’t mean I am.” That ended the conversation for the night.  

Shortly afterwards, she starts pretending to eat. She can’t cook, so she takes whatever she can find in the kitchen. I sit across the table from her, watching her lift molding apples to her lips then place then back on the plate, the smell of rot and fermentation hangs in the air like an evil thing. 

Greases power source begins to wear out and once again Lilac becomes agitated. She still cleans and sleeps in the bed across from what was now mostly a skeleton, but she never smiles or says anything except to ridicule me. She continues wearing Margret’s clothing and changes into a new dress every day. Now she holds a book in her in front of her face when she sits in the wing-backed chair. She can’t read, but she still turns the pages mindlessly. The apples she pretends to eat blacken and ooze and I watch the juice drip down her fork and onto her fingers as she spears them and presses them against her lips.

Then one evening, instead of going to sleep in our creator’s room, she follows me to the couch in the front entry way. 

I don’t understand.

“How are you resisting your code?” 

“I’m evolving,” she answers.

If I was human, would I feel fear right now?  

“I’m going to die soon,” she says, face cut to slivers by the shadows. “Grease’s power source won’t last much longer.” 

“It’s not death,” I say.  

She steps into a shaft of moonlight and her pretty, hard face is thrown into sharp relief. Why is so much water dripping down it? “If you worry so little about it, why don’t you just give me your power source?” 

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Who will do the gardening?” 

“You don’t get to want!” she says. “You’re not programed to want! But I am! I don’t want to die! I’m not a machine anymore! I’m a human! I look like one! I dress like one! I eat like one! I have emotions! I’m learning, growing, evolving and I’m not going to let myself die.” 

 I notice then she is clutching a hammer. I cross my arms over the hatch in my chest. I’m so exposed without my clothing. She can easily pry me open.

“Please don’t hurt me, Lilac. I’m your friend.” My voice is monotone, even as I’m begging for my life. 

“See?!” She is screaming now. “You don’t even have emotions yet you’re still afraid to die!” With that, she swings the hammer into my head. She is smaller than me, but faster and lighter. It dents deep into my face. Somethings shatters and my vision cuts off like the flip of a switch. I can feel her opening my chest plate. 

I live for five minutes after she takes out my power source. The whole time she’s talking to herself.  

“I’m not a machine. I’m a person. That’s what I am. A person. Not a machine... I’m a person...” 

I’m not afraid to die, but I didn’t want it to end like this.