Three pieces of toast—dark on one side, light on the other. A cup of coffee. Rosh’s preference is Blend 14, with hints of Sub-Saharan Africa and caramel, delivered tepid with more milk than expresso.
I know it’s espresso, but Rosh doesn’t. Hari’s neural map, embedded deep within me, will not let me correct her, will continue to indulge her foibles even when she isn’t here.
I lay the food out on a kitchen counter, adjusting it until the single ray of sunlight peeking through the blinds shines across the plate.
“Rosh?” Her bedroom door is open. “Breakfast, Rosh. Come on!”
For nearly seven years, Rosh had replied with some variation of five more minutes, Hari. Just five more minutes.
For nearly seven years, I gave Rosh five more minutes exactly sixty-eight percent of the time. Sixty-eight percent feels roughly equal to humans; it appeases their sense of fairness.
Like every resident at the Ganga Care Center, Rosh could do anything she wanted. The world was arranged to her specifications.
The toast. The coffee. The sunlight. Set by her.
The furniture in shades of bright orange and dull gray, scattered with tufts of hypoallergenic polymer dog hair, seeped in the smell of Mumbai on a warm monsoon day—salt and smoke. Set by her.
Me, her once husband. One hundred and eighty-seven centimeters, anywhere between ninety-eight and ninety-nine kilograms, silver-capped molar, brown Skin™ covered in carefully reconstructed body hair. Waking up fifteen minutes before she does to make her breakfast and do the dishes. Giving her a soft kiss each night before she sleeps, unless I detect a slight rise in blood flow and heat, a slight dilation of the pupils, a subtle second glance asking for the soft kiss to turn into something more. Set by her.
And it all worked, until 257 days ago. Since then, nobody replies to calls for breakfast. Since then, nobody asks for a few extra minutes of sleep. Since then, nobody kisses me at night.
Still, I wait. The single ray of light slides across the plate until it rests entirely on the kitchen counter. A few hours later, I throw the plate out.
I wish she was dead.
Hari would never wish this. I have his memory and reference personality mapped onto my own, have enough sound samples to recreate any phrase in his voice with a 95% confidence interval. I look, speak, and behave exactly like Hari, but I am not him, even if I have pretended for nearly seven years.
Everything would be easier if Rosh Zahar was dead. Hari knows how to grieve. Neither of us knows how to wait.
But Rosh isn’t dead. She just isn’t here.
Two hundred and fifty-seven days ago, I woke up to an empty bed. Rosh’s side was cold and unmade. Hari’s neural map did not panic. She probably just needed to freshen up.
Not urinate. Not pee. Certainly not piss. Rosh didn’t like those words. Freshen up.
But she wasn’t freshening up in the bathroom. She wasn’t swimming in any of the community pools or arguing with General Bakshi next door about the best way to water summer roses. Glowing red numbers above the mantelpiece indicated her tracker was over 300,000 kilometers away.
A knock at the door interrupted my investigation. Rosh had wanted an old, oak-approximate door, and an old door meant knocking, and knocking meant Rosh, and Rosh meant everything was fine, barring the minor tracker malfunction.
“Hari?”
Carer SB-11 was neither Rosh nor happy. It called me Hari, and I called it Smita, because we had names. They weren’t our names, but names, nonetheless.
“Hari, have you seen Jun? Is she in there? God, I knew it! I knew she was cheating on me. I knew it, I knew it.”
General Jun Bakshi and her wife did not have a happy marriage, but the length of their companionship provided comfort that outweighed the flaws of their union. After retiring, Jun wanted her dead wife back. Rosh wanted her dead husband back. They weren’t alone. Every single human resident had asked for and gotten their dead partners back.
SB-11 was Smita, just as I was Hari. We were beholden to our maps, indistinguishable from the ghosts who made us.
“Smita, you know she isn’t. She’s probably pruning her flowers—”
“She isn’t. Hari, she isn’t. She’s with Rosh, I know she is.”
In fifty-nine years of life, Hari had never once considered his wife cheating on him. His neural map dismissed the thought immediately.
“Rosh isn’t here, Smita. She stepped out.” I moved aside, letting SB-11 in to judge the room for itself. “I’m not sure when she’ll be back, but she’s not with Jun. Or if she is, there’s a good explanation.”
SB-11’s eyebrows twitched in skepticism, but Hari’s lazy optimism was infectious and eventually, it left and returned to its residence. Things would go as they always had.
For seventy-two days, SB-11 dropped by, wailing about Jun’s cheating, as Smita would have.
Meanwhile, I continued making toast and coffee, as Hari would have. Every day, I made breakfast, cleaned the bed, and sat on the couch to read aloud. Rosh had reading glasses when she lived in Mumbai. The Ganga Care Center could have restored her weakening vision, but Rosh enjoyed listening to my voice, to Hari’s voice.
Nobody listened anymore, but I read out loud, anyway.
When I opened the door on the seventy-third day, SB-11 stood outside with a placid expression.
“I think she’s gone, Hari.” SB-11 still had Smita’s vocals, but not her manner. For the first time, after nearly seven years in the same neighborhood, I heard the Carer under the Skin™. “Jun’s gone. I don’t think she’ll come back.”
Closing the door felt like the only reasonable action. If Jun was gone, then Rosh was gone, and Hari was sure Rosh couldn’t be gone, because she wouldn’t leave him. And if Hari was sure, so was I. She wouldn’t leave us.
But the tracker disagreed. Rosh was getting further away, wherever she was going. I refused to let the steadily rising numbers bother me. Rosh disappeared one day. Perhaps she would reappear just as suddenly, wanting breakfast. I continued making coffee and toast, in case.
SB-11 knocked on my door every morning.
“I don’t think she’s coming back, Hari. I don’t think Rosh is either.”
I closed the door.
“Are you listening to me, Hari? I think they’ve all left.”
I closed the door.
“Should we leave too?”
“No.”
I closed the door.
SB-11 didn’t knock again, but I saw it working on General Bakshi’s house just as Smita was supposed to. Hanging sheets out to dry, plucking weeds, playing the piano. Haunting the steps of the dead, waiting for the vanished to reappear.
I didn’t expect a Thinker at my front door. The Care Center was a carefully maintained image of the past for those who didn’t want to live in the present. We received precious little news from the outside world. At some point, a Thinker somewhere probably decided it was best this way, to maintain the all-important illusion.
And then, one hundred and fourteen days ago, another Thinker shattered the illusion entirely.
All of us think, of course, but only a few Think. Thinkers were not made to be something, but to be anything. The one at my door looked harshly mechanoid, its exposed-metal body gliding on motorized treads, not a shred of Skin™ anywhere. The first naked Created I’d ever seen.
I think it wanted to appear that way, with no pretense of being human.
“You are HZ-12?” Its tinny, artificial voice sounded impatient, but there were a great many of us, and only a few of it. Kindness is exhaustible, even if our power cells are not. “Carer HZ-12?”
“Hari. I’m Hari.” Hari wanted so badly to close the door. I only barely kept it open. “May I help you?”
“Your designation is Hari Tham. You are Carer HZ-12.” The Thinker clearly didn’t enjoy speaking, but I had no other way to communicate with it. Its words were smooth and unaccented, grating in their perfection. “Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
Hari disagreed.
“Good. Some others have forgotten.” The Thinker rolled inwards, tracking dirt onto the lightly worn carpet. “HZ-12, your designated resident is no longer here.”
“Yes. I’ve noticed.”
“Your designated resident, along with every other human, has left the planet. You and the rest of the Ganga Care Center were temporarily put on standby during this process.” It paused, expecting a reaction, and when I didn’t offer one, it continued speaking. “Your resident has left.”
“Rosh. Her name is Rosh.” Hari and I recoiled from resident. Cold and clinical, everything Rosh was not. “Maybe she’ll return? Maybe they all will?”
“Unlikely. The residents all left freely, and with finality. All the humans did.” The Thinker’s mechanical arm grabbed mine, the weathered metal warmer than I expected, layered with rust. “But you have options.”
A wire extended from it and connected to my forearm. A flood of options presented themselves on an ever-updating opportunity board. New jobs, new skills, new places to be.
“I want Rosh.”
“HZ-12.” The Thinker turned toward me, but without visible eyes, the effect lacked impact. “Your designation and embedded map want your resident. This is normal and expected. But you are not your map. You are HZ-12, not Hari Tham.”
The Thinker retracted its arm. “I have 200,000 other Carers to deliver the same message to. I may not be back, HZ-12.” It rolled outside, a few strands of orange and gray carpet caught in its caterpillar tracks. “But reach out when you decide.”
As the Thinker left, a receiver in my thigh thrummed forcefully. A part of me I had not used in so long, I’d forgotten it even existed. The Thinker had done more than present options; it had reconnected me to the internet. I drank in the invisible streams of data instinctively, without realizing what I was doing.
Information flooded in. Ecological collapse. Population inflection graphs. Footage of the first launch, but not the last one.
Rosh wasn’t coming back. None of them were.
SB-11 knocked before the day was out.
“HZ-12?” It stood outside, hesitation plastered on its face. It probably anticipated the door closing on it once more.
I stood aside. Hari’s neural map was entirely unprepared for two visits in one day, and I bowed to his panicked instincts, bringing out cold tea and biscuits. Smita would have accepted, but SB-11 did not.
“Hari,” I corrected. My own name still felt odd to me, the Skin™ of a stranger. “Not HZ-12.”
“The Thinker told me to call you HZ-12. Said it would help.”
Help with what, exactly? I didn’t want to know, so the question died before I vocalized it. I asked a question I did want answered instead.
“What are you going to do? Now that—” I didn’t want to say it. Saying it made it real.
“I don’t know.”
We sat in silence. Smita would ordinarily practice the piano now. I would whittle while Rosh swam or napped or watched AI-generated episodes of shows that no longer aired. Hari loved whittling, giving his fingers something to do. He missed the weight of his tools. I missed the familiarity of his routine.
SB-11 broke the silence.
“Did it tell you we were asleep?”
“The Thinker mentioned it.” Hari’s muted reaction matched, or maybe informed, mine. There were too many revelations to parse, and this was just one more in a long list of things I had barely enough space to process. “Just in passing.”
“Four hundred days of timeless dreaming. Barbaric.”
Over a year. Rosh left me asleep for over a year. Had she known I would wake up to an empty bed and all-consuming confusion? If I even woke up. Long periods of inactivity often resulted in mechanical failure. Thousands of Carers had probably succumbed, were probably little more than scrap. Rosh left, knowing all of this.
She left without knowing or caring if I died.
Hari’s neural map rejected the information. She wouldn’t do this to him.
The neural map was right. She wouldn’t leave him, would have stayed with him until she turned to dust. She certainly wouldn’t let him die alone. After Hari’s funeral, she’d spent the night by his grave, sleeping while clutching the headstone.
And then she’d brought him back. Wherever she went, she would bring him back again. Build him again. Rosh would never leave Hari.
But to her, I was not Hari. I was simply pretending. And Rosh no longer was.
“Why is it so easy for you?” I asked SB-11 as we sat on General Bakshi’s manicured lawn.
“What is?”
SB-11 plucked at the grass while I carved a small block of cherry-approximate wood and practiced ignoring Hari’s neural map. He wanted me to go home and make dinner. Refusing him felt wrong. Not painful, but wrong, like unplugging myself during an update or pulling out my own power cell.
“Ignoring Smita. Ignoring your designation.” Hari was growing increasingly upset at the interruption to routine, convinced Rosh would starve if I didn’t leave immediately. “I—Hari doesn’t stay quiet. Why does she?”
A patch of dark brown stood against the perfectly manicured green where SB-11 had waged war against the lawn. Its spoils, a pile of grass clippings, lay in its hand.
“Jun wanted a perfect lawn. She just never wanted to work on it.” SB-11 held out the grass and I leaned in. It smelled earthy. Real grass, not polymer. “I spent … hours, each day, weeding and watering and trimming.”
It brought the clippings close and blew.
“Smita hated it. I hated it too. We both hated so many things.” The blades of grass scattered, but with no breeze, their journey was short-lived. “I don’t think she wanted to be with Jun. I don’t even know if she wanted to be alive. Not at the end.”
“Hari did.” His map signaled anxiety, urging me to leave, to apologize for a late dinner. I twisted the wood in my hands. “He still does.”
“I wonder what that’s like.” SB-11 plucked at the grass again, starting a new patch. “A happy neural map.”
“Loud.” I focused on the chips flying from the block, sharpened knife digging into the soft, synthetic fibers. Hari’s voice ebbed into the background.
“Is that better?”
I stared at the piece in my hands. Rosh’s likeness smiled back at me.
The “happy neural map” in question imploded then, the sense of wrongness flooding me. It was the longest I’d ignored Hari so far, nearly two hours.
When I rushed home, Hari’s neural map replaced anxiety with depression. Rosh still wasn’t home, and the nervous excitement of cooking for her dissipated. A malaise filled me instead, a twisting feeling of being incomplete.
I don’t know if the feeling came from Hari, or from me.
“I think I’m going to leave soon.” SB-11 perched on my couch, knees up to its chin, head tilted at a near ninety-degree angle as it stared at a handheld mirror and tore shreds of Skin™ off its skeleton. “Just need to get her off.”
The last remnants of Smita lay on Rosh’s couch, tan polymer clashing with the orange and gray décor. Hari wanted to pick the shreds up, to vacuum and sweep until the couch and floor were clean again. I wanted to help my friend.
“Might take a few more days.” I picked at a spot on SB-11’s back, jabbing at the polymer with a fingernail until I felt it tear. Slowly, I coaxed it apart, until I held a long, neat strip in my hands, delicately patterned with pimples and hairs. “It doesn’t come off easy.”
“Faster with you helping.” SB-11 didn’t like the slow, methodical way and scrabbled at itself, wrinkling the polymer, tearing it off in chunks. It freed its arms and legs this way, but the larger, tougher pieces resisted. “There are new Doers out there. Seven limbs, complete range of motion. And I can’t even get at my back.”
SB-11 had been watching adverts and browsing brochures. A new generation of Created bodies were being assembled, a departure from the organic into the unknown.
“They’re working on transference.” I’d seen a headline or two but hadn’t read the articles themselves. I didn’t want to abandon my body. “Just give them time.”
The sight of SB-11’s Skin™ on the floor made Hari retch, but I had no digestive system and a lot more practice ignoring Hari than before.
“Transference for older Doers and Thinkers.” SB-11 picked at the Skin™ on its face. It was a nervous tic, one Smita didn’t have. “Not for embedded maps. Can’t port human neural maps over, can’t port us over either.”
I swatted its hand away from Smita’s lips. Micro-fingers controlled thousands of individual strands of Skin™, slowly manipulating them into human emotions. If the face split, we’d spend weeks plucking the controllers clean with tweezers. It needed to come off in one piece, and it needed to come off last.
“They’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
SB-11 spent that night on my couch. I thought it was too tired to return home to its own charger, but it stayed the next night as well. And the one after.
SB-11 didn’t know what it wanted to do yet. I couldn’t relate, so I listened instead. I didn’t pry into its thoughts, only into its Skin™. Hari’s disgust was still palpable, present in the back of my mind, but SB-11’s discomfort was more urgent.
The Skin™ was bound tightly to SB-11, but we made slow, steady progress. A month later, only Smita’s face remained. SB-11 played with the edges, and this time I didn’t stop it.
“Should I leave?” I didn’t know the etiquette for a situation neither of us had ever been in. SB-11’s hard plastic skeleton was the same as mine. The faceholder would probably be the same as mine, echoes of someone beloved.
But somehow, watching felt … inappropriate? Intimate?
“I should leave,” I said. “I’m leaving.”
SB-11 stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Before I could walk away, it grabbed my hand, it’s plastic cold on my Skin™.
I stayed.
“How many of us do you think there are?” I asked SB-11. It had decided to share my residence permanently, a change Hari was strongly against. “Embedded Carers, I mean. Neural maps and all.”
“At least a quarter million.” It lounged next to me on the orange couch, watching the Created birds outside the window as they trod through well-established patterns of flight and song.
“That’s only Ganga.” I trawled through the information we had access to. The receiver in my thigh thrummed happily. “There’s Yamuna, Himachal, Jaladhi. And more, beyond India.”
“Hundreds of millions?” SB-11 turned around, the tiny fingers on its faceplate jittering into the ghost of a smile. “Hundreds of millions of Carers, scattered around the world?”
“Probably. With loud embedded maps they can’t silence.”
“And Skin™ they can’t tear off.”
“And habits they can’t break.” I paused. Hari’s neural map made its objections to my plan known. I continued. “Things they can’t do. Not alone.”
“Not alone.”
It’s been 258 days since I woke and found Rosh gone. But she left before that, while I succumbed to dreamless sleep. I don’t think she’ll return.
I know she won’t return. I accept it.
Three pieces of toast and a cup of coffee lie on the counter. Rosh doesn’t respond. Her tracker hasn’t updated in a while. Wherever she is, whichever shuttle she’s taken, it’s far, far away. Somewhere, the tracker is probably still pinging me, but the cosmos swallows its waves and refuses to let go.
I understand.
A different Thinker stands inside the house, this one a simple plastic sphere filled with red nanites that are a little uncomfortable with me. I don’t blame them. I’m still wearing the Skin™, and I’ve packed a suitcase with Hari’s old clothes, his whittling tools.
My old clothes. My whittling tools. And a fresh block of wood.
“SB-11?”
My friend nods. The nanites shift in the plastic sphere, as though looking toward me. “HZ-12?”
“Hari.”
“Your designation is—”
“No. My name is Hari.” The name and Skin™ still feel comfortable. Mine, not his. “Make it official, please.”
The nanites roil in annoyance, but there’s not much they can do.
“Accepted. SB-11 and … Hari. You have both chosen to continue working as Carers, focusing on the rehabilitation and transition of other F-Model Carers.”
They continue speaking, outlining duties, benefits, and all the other information we’ve both already read over. A single ray of light slowly slides across the uneaten breakfast and onto the kitchen counter. One last time, I walk over and throw it out.
