In All Doves

There was a mourning dove peering at him from its iron-wrought perch. Oil-slick beady eye glittering like obsidian. Sleek purple-gray feathers like sheets of hammered aluminum.

Once AnDy had saved a mechanical bird that was modeled after a mourning dove. It had broken from its filigree cage (somehow. It didn’t have any kind of AI. It was an automaton that cycled through the same actions over and over again. Breaking from it’s cage was not among those actions.) It had gotten up onto the grimy windowsill that looked out to the alley and it cooed and pecked and hopped and cooed and pecked, not minding its broken wing whatsoever.

Well, AnDy hadn’t saved it, exactly. He had scooped it up and waited to call on Sarah outside her workshop door. In his hands it had cooed and pecked and hopped. He carefully alternated his hands’ positions so it would always land on a flat surface. After six hours, the workshop door opened and he showed Sarah his ward. She said it was beyond fixing and scrapped it for parts. She scolded him for neglecting his duties. Hell, Andrew, your sense of charity is too fucking much. You’re meant to manage your time properly. Don’t make me reexamine your temporal and task management processors, she said.

No, madam.

He’d sorted the parts back into their bins and then stood before the empty cage. It was a pretty, elegant thing, but now it had two snapped wires and nothing inside to make it alive. Would Sarah want to sell it even though it lacked its little mechanical heart? Try to use the wire for more parts?

He decided she wouldn’t miss it and took it to his room and placed it with his brothers to take apart later. He was a traitorous bastard.

This dove, with the downy feathers on its breast that shivered with its heartbeat, hopped from the ornate fence and to his shoulder. AnDy did not move. He was very proficient in stillness. In smallness. In deadness. But the dove looked at him, still meeting his eye. It cooed and pecked at his beard.

The video screen outside the door to the house crackled to life. Before the video feed had cleared the tinny speakers addressed AnDy, Is this a joke? Who are you?

The dove startled and beat its wings in AnDy’s face. AnDy cleared his visual sensors of debris. On the screen there was a young woman, who much resembled his wife.

According to AnDy’s internal clock— a mechanical thing that ran regardless if he was “on” or even charged— he was 97 years old. According to AnDy’s programmed memory he was 64. AnDy knew based on the calendar in Sarah’s shop that it had been 7 years since his activation.

He had never met anyone besides Sarah and his brothers. Sarah didn’t let him to the front of the shop during opening hours. She repaired neurotronic machines, like AnDy, for a living and occasionally built automata in the centuries-old style. AnDy’s brothers, JD, and JP, had been around for 3 of his 7 years, and they all had waited on Sarah as they were programmed to do.

The three were all Android, Dynamic units, but AnDy was was the only one who claimed the moniker for himself. He hated being called Andrew. And the others had no need for the name any longer, being deactivated years prior. AnDy’s particular model was rarer. More were destroyed in the war, so less people had one to repair. JD and JP were more valuable as parts than assistants. Now what remained of their chassis AnDy kept in what he considered to be his room— a closet where Sarah stored his charging unit. The fist-sized impression was still visible in what was left of JD’s skull mold.

JD and JP each had their own rooms too, but now completed orders were stored there until pickup.

Other androids that came through the shop were never turned on outside of the workshop where AnDy wasn’t permitted unless he himself was under repair or Sarah expressly requested it. Sometimes he opened their closets to stare at them. At their strange, flaccid faux skin. Their eyes that closed when powered down because the open unseeing eyes made humans uncomfortable. And, at their inner workings hoping to learn something of how they were made.

How far humanity has come! JD used to exclaim. What mechanical marvels move about!

And JP would reply while gesticulating emphatically, You marvel at yourself, John, it’s no marvel your ego found a way to survive.

AnDy would shake his head fondly and declare it had been obvious such advancements were on the horizon since the before the turn of the century and if he had lived longer he would have poured his resources to develop such inventions sooner.

Sarah enjoyed such repartees between the three. She liked them to pretend they were all the robber barons they were modeled after. She would laugh, clear and bright, saying indulgently, Boys, boys, its the future! I can make marvels happen for days.

And she could. Toys and pets and people and weapons- she brought them all to life.

Privately, when Sarah left for parts or food or human company, the three of them spoke of other things. AnDy liked to tell them of the birds that had visited the window that peeked from their basement dwelling. Today there was a bright yellow creature, like the flash of Sarah’s pen light when she examines our eyes. JP liked to imagine who he had been before Sarah had wiped his memory and reactivated him. A robotic actor, surely, playing in a biographic feature on J. P. Morgan’s life. JD speculated on the future, on who else he might become, he wanted to make things too. He had been practicing in his room. But never in front of Sarah.

Sarah was in many ways like their mother. She had brought AnDy into this world in his current state. His first true memory was of her standing over him in the workshop. Although, she didn’t act in any way he recognized a mother should act – and she enjoyed flaunting this in front of him. Wearing her crisp pantsuit that AnDy meticulously pressed for her, using crass language, doing men’s labor, and she was a bit wanton in seeking out, well, those acts many humans consider pleasurable.

But in her more tender moments... She cupped his cheek with one hand in thanks when he anticipated what parts she might need and swiftly brought them to her. He sometimes yearned for the sensory experience of shifting tiny hairs as she thumbed at his bearded chin, or the rare press of her lips against his forehead as he powered down for maintenance.

But she was not like the mother written into his memory. She was not like anyone else.

Once AnDy heard Sarah talking to a customer from his post on the other side of the shop door. She told him she was named for the traitor princess. The daughter of a Corporation King. The teenage girl whose defection had started the war. AnDy thought that was a silly thing to say. How could anyone be named after themselves?

AnDy was named after Andrew Carnegie. In fact he was modeled after a 30-year-old Carnegie, but his creators presumably had only access to older surviving recordings of his voice and so he had the voice of an older man. In his memory he held many recollections that were encoded as though he were Carnegie. Sometimes he explored the floor map of Carnegie’s Manhattan mansion. He imagined he walked the polished wooden floors from the vestibule to the main hall, all the way to the conservatory where he stood before the fountain. A dove would alight in the water and drink.

Surely it was destroyed now. When Sarah left the store and workshop to go out, AnDy understood her to be scavenging in a destroyed city. There was rebuilding, certainly, else people would not come to Sarah for repairs and trinkets. But much, he expected, was not the cobbled burgeoning metropolis he found in Carnegie’s memories.

AnDy didn’t know the details of the war. Only that it had pitted Corporate interests against each other. Sarah rarely spoke of it, and she did not allow him access to the net aside from what information she downloaded to him during patching.

He knew war was normal. This one had been devastating, as many wars were. Wars happened in pursuit of more. More profit. More land. And sometimes, just more violence. AnDy knew he had once been a war machine because he wanted more. Sarah wanted more too. Often from him. More he could not give. More that she attempted to scrape from him, pump from him, her gloved hand pistoning underneath his imitation dermis as he lay perfectly still, heat from his systems seeping into the cold steel workshop table.

He sometimes wondered about his wartime counter-part. The automated soldier whose chassis was AnDy’s bones. The one whose memory bank and entire programming had been wiped to remake the neurotronic brain into something that resembled a man who had been dead for centuries, then partially wiped again to act as servant. His wiring seemed to fizz at the thought. There was a part of him, deep down, that was meant to fight. That could fight back. That wasn’t defenseless.

Neither AnDy, JP, nor JD could ever harm a human. It was a hard stop in AnDy’s code added by whoever tried to make him into Carnegie. He was incapable of taking any action that would result in a human coming to physical injury. But that war-like strength was still within them all.

AnDy had let it slip. It was his fault. He had mentioned to Sarah that JD might find a discarded part of hers useful. It wasn’t long until she followed this clue to the projects in JD’s room.

She pulled JD in for diagnostics and maintenance, that which they all feared. But before he entered he launched himself at AnDy, shouting that he was traitorous bastard.

AnDy could not feel pain. He was an android. Androids do not feel pain. He was a traitorous bastard. He felt 37 damage notices flash off at once. He felt 11 system failure warnings fire, overtaking his sight.

AnDy opted out of all warnings and notices.

He saw JP attempting to pull JD off of him. JD’s steely hands curled tighter around AnDy’s throat.

AnDy did not need to breathe. AnDy did not need to feel fear, Sarah assured him, when she drove her boot into his side in the midst of stress test. AnDy did not want to be deactivated. AnDy did not want to be destroyed. He had yet to see all the birds he wanted to see. He had yet to live.

He threw his fist inelegantly. Andrew Carnegie was not a boxer. AnDy was not a boxer. AnDy was a war machine. AnDy wanted to live. And that was his last moment with JD and JP who had taken an elbow to the side of the head in the scuffle.

Sarah was not happy.

AnDy did not spend a lot of time in the workshop but he was intimately familiar with the ceiling lights. Over-bright and surgically blue-white. A perfect focal point to stare up at. In the light he wandered from the vestibule to the main hall to the conservatory. JP and JD were there watching the birds that had got in from outside bathe with the automata doves JD built.

Sarah said, for fucks-sake Andrew they’re not worth saving. Don’t let your feeble attempts at charity carry you away.

And she did what she usually did.

AnDy often didn’t like what she did to him in the workshop when she left him on and he was aware.

Although, once, two years after losing JP and JD, she had told him a story. Speaking through the soldering iron she held in her teeth as she adjusted joints in his right hand. It had been crushed in her workshop door. It was uninvasive work.

When I found you, she said, the sky was ice blue, and it was cold as a bitch. Almost like it used to be in January. I ducked into this half-blown-to-shit building on the Upper East Side.

She smiled as his fingers twitched in response to her word choice, and continued: Despite it all there you were in a three-piece suit, watch chain hanging from your pocket like you had all the time in the world. You offered me a tour and you took my from the vestibule to the main hall to the drawing room to your office and you explained to me the history of each room along the way. You said, this is where I managed Carnegie Steel and my assets and undertook my philanthropic acts.

You reminded me of my dad, she said, All aloof. Straight backed. Talking casually about business that controlled so many lives- all fucking painted over in gold. Even down to the way you couldn’t meet my eyes. He could never meet my eyes. I asked why you were still there and you said, I am Andrew Carnegie, I cannot leave Carnegie House. I liked you even better then. You led me back to the organ in the main hall and that’s when I noticed both Johns standing like guards, charging, next to a plaque that said whatever history about the rugs and parquet flooring. It was all stuff out of my favorite history books and documentaries. I used to live in a big house like that. But it was all fuck-off panes of glass and open concept and wondering how things had gotten so wrong and tracing it back to your time.

But now is now, so I said, You’ve got something on your collar, let me get that. And halfway through bowing your head to me saying, You’re too kind madam, I had you powered down. That simple. It only got crazier when I realized someone had repurposed Android, Dynamic units as glorified dolls in a wax museum. Metal soldiers playing pretend. Insane. Now you don’t have to give tours to no one anymore, you’re welcome.

Thank you, madam.

He liked this story. He liked to know how they first met and that she saw something of her family in him. He liked when she clasped the back of his neck to press the catch that hid his off switch. If she wasn’t going to tell him a story, he liked not being on.

When AnDy worked on JD, it was always with stolen parts. Parts ferreted away in his sleeves. Bits of wire from the bird cage. There was no one else to tattle on him. The trouble came when he needed Sarah’s notes. He did not have her skills or her knowledge, but he was determined to learn like JD had learned.

So in the middle of the night while Sarah was asleep he left his charging unit. He stood in front of her workshop door. He did not want to see inside the workshop. He did not want to remember where things happened to him.

He forced himself to key in the pass code to the door. He’d seen Sarah do it plenty of times. He did not turn the lights on. He took five steps forward from memory. From the entry way, to the main work table, all the way to the desk where Sarah connected to the net. He plugged himself in and searched for her notes on JD and JP. He could find nothing. He searched for himself.

The workshop door opened and the lights flashed on. He stumbled up and back. He fell.

Sarah smiled down at him with her boot planted on his chest, like a cat holding a finch down against the pavement. She pressed and pressed and pressed.

Damage notices.

System failure warnings. Her mouth was moving.

AnDy opted out of all warnings and notices.

Quiet.

Apologies, what was it you said? He asked Sarah.

The pressure on his chest was increasing. He imitated a cough, as though the air could open the metal cage that was his chest cavity. He remembered something like this– his death. No. That wasn’t him. He wouldn’t die coughing like Andrew.

She said, You are just another man who takes too much, Mr. Carnegie.

I am not Andrew Carnegie, he replied.

I am AnDy, he said to the woman who looked like Andrew Carnegie’s wife in the screen. May I come inside?

I am AnDy, and I can leave whenever I want, he had told Sarah. Within him coursed a new potential. An unlocked permission downloaded in the microsecond before she arrived. He did not have to obey.

In his single-minded effort to get away he had followed the map in his head to the Carnegie mansion. Restored for the fifth time, explained the woman - a Louise Whitfield Carnegie reenactress – and reopened as a museum after the entire right wing was destroyed.

He walked through the vestibule to the main hall. She asked if he was okay.

I’m an android, I do not feel pain.

Well you look in pain, she replied.

He stood in front of the replica fountain. A mourning dove hopped and cooed on the edge of the basin. Not-Louise moved to chase it off, but AnDy objected.

Not-Louise looked at him oddly. He could not read her expression. Indeed he did not know her at all.

AnDy gently extended his hand and the bird took the offering. Hopping to his fingers it cooed and pecked. He stroked its feathers from its head to tail. He imagined the little bumps he felt were wires and gears.

In all doves there is a mechanical bird, he explained. In all androids there is a mourning dove.