Free Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer

the wall, his crisp curls brushing the back of his neck. One hand went up to cover his eyes, the other hand still held the pen, poised over those three words; love, regret, forgive. When he finally slept, lulled by a cyclical computation worked out on the back of his eyelids, the pen went scratching across the paper, one final subconscious underscore. First there was Asimov, and his fictional laws of robotics, all written to protect humanity from the AI they’d created. Then Ito’s laws, excusing the failure of programmers who wouldn’t dare to try to re-create a human mind. Now Maxon’s laws, because he was the only one left with the stones to know when to stop pushing the buttons that he himself had wired. Maxon Mann’s Three Laws of Robotics: A robot cannot love. A robot cannot regret. A robot cannot forgive.

 
     
    7
     
    The contractions stopped. Fluids were drained into her. She went home. Night came and everyone slept. Morning came and the nanny took Bubber off to preschool. He went out the door with his head pointed forward, wearing his helmet, with a snack and emergency pants in a horse-shaped backpack he called “Word.” Sunny was supposed to lie down as much as possible, so she did. She lay down in her pumpkin-colored bedroom. She put her bald head down on the embroidered silk duvet cover, so carefully joined in color and historical context to the weird footstool she’d found at an estate sale, which was itself so carefully coordinated with the Morris chair in the corner, by the pumpkin-shaded light. The theme of her bedroom decor flowed around the space like a gentle ellipse through a series of perfectly oriented points. Not one curtain rod, not one shoe tree, not one alarm clock fell off the graph. On the TV, the NASA channel was playing without sound. But Maxon was not on the screen.
    She fell asleep and dreamed of a matrix of all possible babies that she could be carrying at that moment. The possible babies spread out over a three-dimensional cube. At point zero, zero, zero was a normal human male baby, looking exactly like Maxon. Tall, mad-eyed, long-limbed, and pale. From there, the change in babies radiated out along a three-dimensional grid through the whole volume of the cube. At the intersection of every line was another scrawny infant, crouched and curled, naked and wrinkled. Eye color, hair color, pianist hands, knobby legs, short neck. Along this axis, more and more freckles. Along that axis, more and more hair. Of course, there cannot be an incremental change in gender. So, all alone, the baby at the opposite point of the cube, with her large alien eyes and her bald alien head, and her padded fingers and short legs, was the only female. She rotated like the other babies, but in the opposite direction. Already different.
    The phone rang, waking her up. It was the director of the school.
    “Mrs. Mann,” he said, “I would love for you to spend some time here with us when you pick up Bubber today. I have arranged a meeting with our staff psychiatrist for you.”
    He didn’t know about the car accident, because she hadn’t told him. He didn’t know about the wig.
    She sat up, held up the phone firmly to her head, and said, “No.”
    “Mrs. Mann,” he droned on, “Bubber has had a meltdown this morning. Now he is back in his helmet, and we are all fine. There is no need to worry. But the behaviors we are seeing are becoming prohibitive.”
    “What do they prohibit?” asked Sunny.
    “With respect, Mrs. Mann, we have an extraordinary facility and many resources,” he said, “yet we cannot quite account for Bubber and his behavior.”
    “But I thought Miss Mary had been working with him.” Sunny had spent a lot of money on the school. Miss Mary was one of many resources.
    “You mention Miss Mary,” said the director. “At the meeting today, she’d like to discuss the results of some tests. They need to be read and discussed.”
    Bubber had had many tests, and Sunny had read and