More subtlety, however, was required with my father. He knew I was fundamentally harmless, averse to confrontation, and STD-free. Furthermore, he could often tell when I was lying. On top of that, the threat he represented was different from that represented by others: I did of course fear that if he caught too long a look at Blank he’d best me physically and overload on it, but what I feared far more was that if he learned Blank’s age he’d best me with guilt, perhaps even litigiously, and compel me to sell Blank. I was, after all, his financial dependent, and although we weren’t by any means poor, we weren’t set, let alone rich, plus he was my guardian, and thus upon Blank he might have had a legal claim, regardless of whether I thought he had a moral one. So what I’d do whenever he caught sight of Kablankey—he’d sneak up on us every couple of years or so (though not usually, if ever, on purpose, I don’t think)—and express surprise at its adorability, was tell him the kind of clumsy, overworded lie that seemed to shed light on its own motivation for being told when in fact the “motivation” itself was a lie in which was nested a second “motivation” that was also a lie. Specifically: after claiming that Blank was a recent clone (my father had little interest in overloading on those that were two years or younger, so I’d divide Blank’s actual age by two, add one, and claim that number was the “clone’s” generation’s), I’d say that “like I[’d] told [him] last time,” I’d really wanted us to overload on Blank together, father and son, to strengthen our bond, but that the moment in which the sweet compulsion overwhelmed me, he wasn’t around, owing to which—i.e. owing to my failure to wait for my father to get home from work/the brothel/the tavern to join me in the pleasure of overloading on Blank—I already felt weak and guilty enough, so would he please stop making me feel even worse, and let me, for Christ’s sake, forgive myself at last. This rant would incite my father to accuse me of being selfish, and a lousy liar. He’d assert that I hadn’t thought twice about sharing in the destruction of my umpteenth-generation-cloned cure, that I’d planned from the beginning to overload on it alone, and that my whole transparent song and dance insulted his intelligence. I’d insist that his assertions were false, but would, as with the telling of the initial lie, do so in as stammering and clumsy a manner as I could manage. A day or so of the cold shoulder would follow, and I would feel guilty for having made him feel insulted, but the guilt was worth it: he never suspected Kablankey’s true age.
* * *
How were you able to overcome the urge to kill Blank, yourself?
I won’t say it was easy, but it certainly got easier as time went on. Or maybe not easier, given Blank’s perpetually increasing adorability, but more automatic, more habitual. Like the monk did with Basho, I developed a regimen, early on, of staring at Blank for extended periods, getting right up next to the point of overload, staying at that point for as long as I could tolerate it, then turning away til the feelings diminished. Afraid the sound of its painsong could defeat my resolve, I also went to great lengths to protect Blank from injury, rarely allowing it out of my sight unless it was inside its PillowNest or sleeve.
Why I wouldn’t want to kill Blank is at once much simpler and infinitely more complicated to explain. In case it hasn’t already come across by my use of the word kill to describe the action in question, I’ll state it more plainly: I didn’t think it was right to dact a cure. (It’s probably more accurate to say that I didn’t feel it was right to dact a cure.) Despite all that we’ve always been told about them, they seemed to me to be sentient creatures—higher-order animals. A cure denied water did not, to me, look dry, but thirsty. A cure denied pellets looked hungry, not empty. An expired cure, pleasant smells aside, did not appear to me to be deactivated, but dead. You might guess these sensibilities owed to my psychotic disorder, and it’s possible that, to some extent, they did (that’s the infinitely complicated, unknowable part), but I believe they must have owed at least as much to the peculiar situation in which I’d been introduced to Blank.
You see, I hadn’t been just any early adopter; I’d been one of the earliest. Maybe the sixth. Maybe the seventh. Certainly one of the first seventeen. A couple months after the last of the swingset murders, I participated, however briefly, in the now-(in)famous Graham&Swords Friends Study at the University of Chicago. When Dr. Manx, the study’s lead researcher, assigned me the marble that Blank would emerge from, he said it was an egg from which an animal would hatch, a “new kind of animal” that would require my affection in order to survive, and I believed him. Why wouldn’t I believe him? Granted, he told me the animal was called a Botimal, but look: he told me the animal was called a Botimal. And, yes, he was indeed explicit (as was the owner’s manual) about its being “a robot made of flesh and bone,” but, given the context—I was getting a pet! a new kind of pet!—the information seemed parenthetical to me, parenthetical enough to pretty much forget about until some eleven or twelve weeks later when, amidst the eruption of press and publicity preceding the nationwide product rollout, I couldn’t help but hear others, in public and private forums the both, referring to Botimals as “flesh-and-bone robots.” Few of these others had ever met a Botimal, let alone owned one, but all of them, it seemed, had reached a happy consensus about what it meant for a Botimal to be a Botimal. My response to this consensus—or so I would imagine—resembled the response a loyal daughter must have upon hearing others brand her father a war criminal. At first, the daughter thinks it can’t be true at all, but then, as evidence seems to mount, and everyone around her insists that it’s true, she either tells herself that even though her father may have done what he’s said to have done, he was somehow fundamentally different from others who do those same things—i.e. maybe the father had committed war crimes, but nevertheless he was not a war criminal—or she begins to question the very meaning of war criminality, developing arguments against the notion that there could even be such a thing as a war crime. And maybe she’s right. Probably not, but maybe, just maybe. And maybe’s enough to keep on believing—she loves him, he raised her, she loves him, she loves him. In either case, I, correct or confused, have never been able to believe any cure, let alone Blank, was a robot.
I didn’t fancy myself a protector of cures, though, and I never stopped anyone from killing their own. I never judged anyone for killing their own—not a lot, anyway. My convictions, I guess, weren’t all that strong. Few of my convictions ever really were. Had I been a vegan, I would not have been the kind to bomb factory farms, nor even the kind to write letters to Congress to protest the practices of factory farms. I’d have probably drunk a soda at McDonald’s now and then.
Blank was my pet, though. My friend. My sibling. I didn’t want to kill it, even when I did.
For those squint-prone, harder-hearted readers among you, that doesn’t likely suffice to explain why I’d never endeavored to profit off Blank. Since losing my companionship would, obviously, kill it with grief, you can see how I wasn’t willing to sell it, but considering the offer George Lucas had made to purchase little Basho in 2007 (or, for that matter, those offers made earlier by Oprah Winfrey and Prince Al Saud), just renting Blank out a couple days at a time probably could have earned me at least a few hundred thousand dollars—Blank was, after all, years older and more adorable than Basho—so why not do that? Why not rent it out? Well, I thought about it, sure, about trying to contact Industrial Light & Magic and offer them some kind of very short lease at a very high rate, but the risk of Blank’s death—if not by the hand (or mouth) of an overloading Lucas once he’d gotten his footage, then by the hand (or mouth) of any one of the hundreds of people who worked for him—was way too high. Ditto the Saudi prince and Oprah.