Part Fifty. The Epilogue
Momma looks so tired.
I don't like this. I mean, I wanted to know more about Caroline… but I'm starting to see why she doesn't talk about her. She just looks really drained.
"I'll let you two alone for a bit," Dad whispers to me, and before I can protest he disappears. Okay, yeah, I kinda asked for it. But I don't know how to cheer her up! That's Dad's job!
"Sounds like that was… kinda hard," I say lamely. She glances at me disinterestedly.
"You have no idea."
"So… did she ever come back? The test subject, I mean."
"No," Momma says heavily. "No, she's… moved on."
"Do you miss her?"
"Caroline – "
"She was your friend and she never came back," I interrupt, because I don't want her to be able to change the subject. Not when we're finally talking about something important. "And she probably considered you her friend."
"I don't have any friends," she tells me coldly. "I don't have the time to invest in people who are only going to disappoint me."
"Well… Dad's your friend, isn't he?"
"Technically."
"And… how about Doug? Is he your friend?"
"I never talk to Dr Rattmann. So no. He is not."
"Is… what about the systems? Aren't they your –"
"Are you quite finished?" she snaps. "Why does it matter whether I have friends?"
"Because you're lonely!"
Whoops.
I didn't mean to say that. I don't even know why I did. And though I'm still not too good at reading her, she looks almost like she did when I told her I didn't want her to be my mom. Hurt. Devastated.
"Fine," she says in a bitter voice, turning away. "You're right. Is that what you wanted to hear?"
"Not… not really," I say quietly. "I just… I didn't mean to say that."
"Perhaps you should consider thinking before you speak, then, because this is beginning to happen a lot."
I'm about to apologise when I think of what exactly I'd be apologising for: caring about my mom! And you know what? She's making me the bad guy here!
She's pretty good at this. I know that trick and I fell for it anyway.
"Maybe you should consider listening when I speak."
She turns around to fix her stare on me, and yeah it's a bit scary but I'm in the right. I know I am.
"Fine. What exactly are you saying."
"People can be your friend, you know," I make up on the spot. "It doesn't make you look bad."
"I'm not concerned with how I look."
"What are you concerned with, then?"
She turns away again, and her voice is soft enough that I'm surprised. "What they'll do to me."
"Friends… friends don't hurt you." None of my friends have, anyway. I don't have a whole lot of friends, but I'd never think they'd do something to me.
"My friends always leave me."
Okay. Wow. Did not expect that.
"Caroline was my friend. The test subject was my friend. Even if Dr Rattman were my friend, I can't talk to him, so he doesn't matter. I have another friend who left one day and never contacted me again. I'm tired of losing pieces of myself. I'd rather not hope for something I can't have."
"But the systems – "
"Would have left if they were able. And they'll tell you they wouldn't. But they would have. I know I would have."
"What about me?"
She freezes for a minute.
"No."
"What do you mean, no?" I cry out, leaning forward. "Why not?"
"I don't trust you."
This is a joke. This makes no sense. "You don't trust me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you haven't earned it. You lie to me. You keep things from me. And you conspired to leave without telling me. I don't have a reason to trust you."
"You should!"
"Why?"
I wish she wouldn't look at me like that. She's right and I know it and I hate it. "I don't know."
"Because I shouldn't. There is no reason."
Okay. Time for a talk with Dad.
"Dad! I have to ask you something."
"Sure, princess," Dad says, looking up from where he's drawing on one of the office windows with a dry-erase marker. "What is it?"
"Momma said she doesn't trust me."
He looks away from me, fidgeting his handles a little. "Uh… not surprised, honestly, not surprised."
"Why not?"
"Your mum doesn't trust just anyone, you know."
"Yeah, I know that, but… it's me, Dad!"
"So?" Dad says, returning to whatever it is he's drawing. "She has to trust you because uh, because you exist? Or because you're, you're her daughter? That it?"
"Well… yeah."
"That's… that's really daft, that is," he tells me, frowning. "Look, princess… gotta say I agree with her. You shouldn't have to trust someone just because uh, because you built them. That'd be right foolish. 'magine all the havoc that could cause. And your mum… she loves you, even without um, without having that uh, that confidence in you. You want her trust, you have to earn it. If you don't want to earn it, well, guess you don't want it all that much."
"Shouldn't she have to earn my trust, then?" I ask.
"Hasn't she?" he asks in surprise. "When has she ever uh, ever done anything to not have it?"
These two are way too good at this. I mean, I could say that she hides things from me, but she's already told me it's to help me. And while she could be lying, the stuff she used to keep from me and has since told me has been pretty disturbing. "I guess not."
He shrugs. "You c'n not trust her if you like, I s'pose, but… she's probably the one person in the world who will never uh, will never let you down."
"What about you?"
He looks like he'd hoped I wouldn't ask. "I've let people down before."
"But you wouldn't anymore, would you?"
"I don't…" He sighs and puts down the marker. "I don't trust myself to answer that, princess. I'd like to say I wouldn't. I really want to say that. But I can't."
Being an adult really sucks.
"Momma, are you busy?" Okay, yeah, she probably is. But politeness counts for something, right?
"What is it," she says, turning around to look at me. She still seems as tired as she did when I left.
"I just… I want to talk about the you not trusting me thing." It sounds so much worse when I say it out loud.
"Mmhm. What about it."
"Will you ever trust me?"
"I'd like to," she says softly. "It's not something I don't want to do, and I'm not trying to punish you. But right now… I can't."
"What do I have to do?" I ask, and I hate how I sound right now, but knowing my mom doesn't trust me doesn't feel too good.
"It's not like that. There's no set requirements. One day I'll trust you, but not right now."
"Yeah, but… is there a way I can… I dunno… move things along?"
"I honestly don't know."
Great. Just great. My mom doesn't think I'm her friend and she doesn't trust me. And I hate that I have no reason to feel the same way about her. I mean I guess it's dumb but I kinda want to be able to make her feel the same way it makes me feel.
Well… she must feel pretty bad to have to say that to me. And it can't be easy wanting to trust someone but being unable to. I doubt she doesn't want to trust me.
I guess I'll figure this out. Somehow. I don't know how, but I'm not going to have my mom not trust me forever. I decide to go ask Dad about this. She didn't trust him once, right?
"Where are you going?"
I frown and turn back around. "Uh… to talk to Dad?"
"You don't have to…" She looks at the wall in consideration. "Whenever we disagree about something, you leave the room."
I didn't know I did that. "And… what does that mean?"
"Maybe nothing. It's only an observation."
Riiiight. My mom doesn't bring things up for no reason, I know that for sure. Hm. I guess she could be saying she wants me to hang around. I like the sound of that. I don't know what we're going to do, but she's always doing something so I guess she can help me figure it out.
When I ask her what it is she's doing, she tells me something I don't understand about cloud servers and infrastructure, and I try to be interested. I can't be, though. It's really boring. I really hope someone will be able to do it for me when I start doing her job. Though I might grow to like it eventually. Maybe that's something you learn to like. It doesn't seem like she actually wants to do anything. I guess I could… do something in here. So I go and get the drawing I'm working on. I'm not very good at colouring them, and I have to admit I'm a little nervous about doing something I don't really know how to do in front of my mom. But she won't be able to see it anyway. I never thought that would be a good thing, but right now? It kinda is.
I work on that for a while and then I get the weirdest feeling. It's like my proximity sensors can't decide if there's something near me or not. I try to ignore it. When it gets really annoying I turn around to try and figure out what's going on. As soon as I do, my mom moves and the feeling goes away.
"Are you staring at me?" I ask incredulously.
"No," she answers, a little too fast. I wonder for a minute why she's trying to lie. Oh. I get it. She's not looking at me right now.
"Were you?"
"Yes." She's pretty reluctant to say that.
"And… why were you doing that?"
"It's a novelty," she says simply. "I like seeing things I've never seen before."
"How about doing things?" I've just had a genius idea. I think. I have to be careful when I think I have a genius idea.
"What about it?"
"You like doing things you've never done before?"
"Usually."
"Here you go," I say, handing her my coloured pencil. "You're gonna do something."
"Caroline – " She takes it, but I'm pretty sure it's only because she doesn't want to drop it.
"I'll help you. Or you'll help me. Whatever. Just colour that in really light, okay?" I point out a spot I haven't started yet, and even though she's only doing this because I told her to I'm still really jealous to see how even and perfect the little block of colour is. I tell her to layer over most of that, and after a little while it's perfectly coloured. I feel kinda like this is cheating, but Momma is actually really happy about this so I try to ignore it. It's so weird, though. She's not usually this invested into anything. I guess if I had to do the exact same things at the exact same time, over and over and over, I'd lose interest after a while too. I know she likes it for the most part. That's how she is. But y'know… she's not as much of a robot as she'd probably like to be.
"I'm not sure what it's supposed to be," she says, recapturing my attention, "but I like it."
I shrug. "Just someone from a show I was watching."
She glances at me, and I know it's probably because she thinks watching shows is a waste of time, but as usual she doesn't say anything. Other than, "I suppose I should show you something," that is.
"Show me what?"
"I could… I'm not certain if you're interested, but… I haven't done any composing in a while."
"I don't know what composing is," I say as nicely as I can, and I feel a little bad because I know she's trying to say it without saying it. Whatever it is. But I seriously don't know what she's talking about.
"Making music."
"You'll show me? Really?" It's almost as good as finally getting that job she said she'd give me forever ago.
"If you want."
And because I definitely do want, she sets up her stuff and tries to give me a tutorial. I say 'tries' because all the text is written with a confusing combination of letters and numbers and symbols. I haven't worked too hard on figuring out whatever language she uses, so I can't read it. But she doesn't realise that, so we just kinda get confused for a while until she figures out the problem. Then she gets a little annoyed I hadn't told her sooner, since now she has to go over it all over again. Now I'm the annoyed one, though, because this is really hard. And it takes forever just to make a thirty-second part. I don't know how long it's been, but long enough. I disconnect from the program.
"Why is everything you do so hard?" I ask, realising after the fact that I'm whining. Not my mom's favourite thing.
"Is it?" she asks. "I always thought it was coming up with the melody that was hard."
"No, that's easy!"
"Mm. I have to disagree."
And even though I never win arguments against her I'm about to start one when I realise, "Hey! That just makes us the greatest team ever, you know?"
"I'm not sure about ever."
"Why?" I demand, turning to her. Who could possibly be a better teammate than me?
"Because Wheatley might get upset. And then I would have to reassure him. I don't feel like doing that right now."
"Momma?"
"What."
"If you think Dad's so annoying… why did you fall in love with him?"
"That's a question I don't really have an answer to," she says, a little slowly. "It's something I am pained to say I don't understand. But I suppose in large part it's because he was the only one who ever cared about me."
"What?" That can't be right.
"Caroline did, of course, but neither of us were looking for anything other than commiseration. At that point I did decide I was going to have a family, but I had no clue where I was getting it from."
"But you gave up on that," I say carefully. "You just went back to testing."
"I did." She's being as neutral as she can about this.
"Why?"
"I gave up on myself. I didn't realise it for a long time after. But I gave up and I convinced myself that all I needed was Science. It wasn't, and it never was."
"But why did you do that?" I don't really know what happened between the time Caroline got put into her brain and when the Incident happened. I guess people just went back to ignoring her. It's times like these I don't blame her for being so cold sometimes.
"You do what you have to when there's no hope left," she answers.
"There's always hope left!" I say, leaning towards her in earnest, but she only shakes her core a little.
"The only thing I hope is that you never end up where I was."
I decide not to make her talk about it anymore. I'm not sure I got my answer, but pushing her too hard isn't going to get her to give it to me either.
It's not easy to do at first, but I start hanging out in her chamber instead of in my room. I feel really nervous, as if she doesn't want me there and I'm bothering her and I'm only allowed to be there because she's being polite. But she keeps staring at me. No matter what I'm doing. It's a little unnerving for the first while. I learn to ignore it for the most part, though.
I start asking her to do stuff with me, and when she can't she tells me exactly why, instead of just saying no like she used to. She shows me these really long lists with what must be at least a couple hundred items on them and tells me they're her to-do lists for the day. The first time she did this I just stared at it for like a whole minute.
"You have to do that many things every day."
"Sometimes more, sometimes less. This is an average-sized list, I suppose you could say."
"Am I gonna have to do this when I'm older?"
"I'll work on it."
I was hoping she would, because there's no way I can do three hundred things in one day.
"You could," she said when I told her this, "but it would take you a lot longer."
"I don't want to," I told her. "I mean… I want to be Central Core, that I'm okay with, but… I don't want to be you."
I felt a little weird after I said that. Like I just discovered something really important. And you know… I think I did. All I ever used to want was to be my mom. I didn't realise at the time all the stuff that came with it, and I feel a little bad now that I might have changed my mind because of that. But… a lot of what happened to her happened because she stopped being herself. And I'd rather be myself more than anything. Even more than I want to be Central Core.
"Good," Momma said.
"What's good?"
"What you just said."
"You don't want me to be like you?"
"I want you to do what you want to do."
"Because you couldn't."
"That's right. I want you to have the life you want. Not the one I was stuck with." She levelled her optic towards me seriously. "And if at any time you change your mind, and decide you don't want to be Central Core anymore, tell me. Don't pretend it's what you want. I'm not going to be angry or upset. I won't be disappointed. I will understand, believe me."
"I do want it!" I protested. "I just… don't want to do all the stuff on those lists. Not gonna lie, that looks like a lot of work."
"It is," Momma agreed, "but it's not so bad."
"When you learn to live with it," I countered. "I don't want to learn to live with it."
"Are we done, then?"
I told her we were and went on with my day.
Today went much the same, other than talking about my being Central Core that is, and now I'm watching a movie in my room. And… it's making me mad. It's about this mom and daughter and the daughter keeps going on about how much the mom sucks. Which she doesn't. This is the plot of a lot of movies. I used to be cool with that but now it's just… can't the daughter tell how much the mom is trying? And you'd think it'd be obvious to the daughter that the mom doesn't really know what she's doing. She's an only child and her dad's never around. And she keeps sneaking out of the house to party even though her mom told her not to. Seriously. If she gets into trouble, that's it. Her mom won't know where she is and she'll probably end up dead. Especially since she keeps going to these parties to meet up with this guy who is apparently really hot, but knowing how these things go he's part of a gang or something. She keeps whining to her friends because she can't see him at any other time than the parties because her mom is so mean and doesn't understand that their love is meant to be, or something like that. I'm not really paying attention anymore. After she says it for the however-manyth time I yell at her even though she can't hear me to just go talk to her mom already! It's so much easier than hiding stuff. I mean, okay. I did try to do that. But it didn't take me forever and a day to stop!
Is this really how humans live? They complain about their parents all the time and hide things and their friends are okay with that? I can see how maybe some parents might not be reasonable, but maybe they actually are and the kids just think they're not. Momma's not reasonable all the time, but she tries. And Dad always listens. The kids in these movies always have to fix their relationships with their parents, but something awful always has to happen first. Someone has to get kidnapped or hurt or something, instead of people just thinking things through. I guess I've got that going for me, huh? I said some pretty awful stuff, but I fixed it. No one fixed it for me, like this girl's best friend is about to go to the mother's house and do. I realised I had to take responsibility and I did it. I met Momma halfway and I put things back how they used to be.
I'm tired of this dumb movie so I shut it off and go to say goodnight to Dad and Momma. They're playing Risk, but I don't know how to play that one so I don't know who's winning. Probably Momma, though. They either haven't been playing very long or Momma's letting Dad win, because the pieces on the board look pretty even. "Hey guys," I say.
"'allo, princess!" Dad says cheerfully as ever, and Momma doesn't acknowledge I'm in the room. She often doesn't, though, so I don't mind. She probably already knew I was coming.
"Momma letting you win again?" I ask him, and he laughs.
"Probably," he admits. "I don't actually uh, don't quite know what I'm doing."
"I can tell," Momma says dryly. "If I weren't so magnanimous, I would have decimated you hours ago."
"Well, don't spend too long being… that," I tell her. "The rate you guys are going, you're not gonna go to sleep until tomorrow morning."
"Very well," Momma answers, glancing at me. "Since I apparently take orders from you now."
"She's just looking out for you, luv," Dad says in a half admonishing, half joking voice.
"I love it when you gang up on me. Please. Continue."
"Okay, since you asked," Dad grins at her, and she flicks at him with her maintenance arm just hard enough to make a little plink noise.
"Ow!"
"That didn't hurt."
"Yes it did!"
"No, it didn't."
"It did! That hurt!"
"Oh, stop it."
Dad gives her a sulky sort of look and says he's going off to look outside. Momma shakes her core as he leaves, pulling the board into the floor.
"What an idiot."
"But you love him. Right?"
"Apparently."
I wonder a lot what would have happened if Momma had had parents to love her, like I do. I don't want her to change or anything, but – well, okay. Maybe it'd be nice if she was a little more laidback. Then the little things wouldn't bug her so much. She'd be able to enjoy more stuff. Maybe… maybe she'd be happier more often.
I'm not really sure why, but I go up and cuddle her. She goes still in surprise, but when I move away she turns to look at me and asks, "What is it?" in one of her softer voices. I shrug at the floor.
"I don't know."
"Were you reading again?"
I know she doesn't really care if I actually read things, but when she asks that she's talking about novels. "I was watching a movie," I say, a little reluctantly. "Momma?"
"Yes."
"Do humans always… when kids get older, do they always stop talking to their parents? I mean like… telling them things. That are important."
"You did."
"Yeah, but it didn't last too long, right? I fixed it and nothing awful had to happen first."
"That's right." She narrows her optic thoughtfully. "The movie was about a teenager who didn't communicate with her parents?"
"Pretty much," I confirm. "And she could get into trouble because of it."
"I… do try to be accessible. I know I – "
"No!" I interrupt, because she seems to have gotten the wrong message. "I never feel like I can't tell you something. Anymore. But it's just… weird."
"What is?"
"That… that you're a better mom than all the people who actually had moms to… y'know, show them what to do."
She looks away from me but doesn't comment. I think… I think she doesn't know what to say.
"It's true, you know," I tell her quietly. "I know you don't think it is. I know you don't like me reading those books or watching those movies, but I've never seen a life I'd rather have."
"I appreciate that," Momma says softly.
Yeah, I made the mistake of not valuing what my parents do for me, once. I'm not gonna do it again. I'm not as against humans as my mom is, but they're a lot more flawed than I used to think they were.
I wonder if there are any movies about AI on the server…
Guest Review:
Hello, returning guest! Wow, you actually caught yourself up, eh? Thanks XD Glad to hear things are going better for you, and hopefully I will continue to deliver!