The next morning, Jane went straight to the hospital. There was something about their conversation last night that made her feel more comfortable about Dr. Isles. She felt a positive urge to see her again, to find out how the research was going.
Checking into the hospital, and then the plague ward, and then finding Dr. Isles' lab, had become second nature. Jane barely noticed the eery quietness of the plague wards in her excitement to see Dr. Isles, an excitement that she realized had been growing slowly since dinner last night, when the doctor had implanted so many strange new ideas into her head. In the hallway outside the lab, Jane stopped to compose herself; she realized that she'd been walking more quickly than usual, and her heart rate had risen correspondingly. Then she pushed the button to open the door.
The lab was busier this morning, full of quiet electronic beeps from banks of machinery running experiments, but Dr. Isles was nowhere to be seen. Jane called her name, but there was no response. Around her, solutions titrated, screens filled up with numbers, and no life, human or robot, stirred.
After a moment, Jane moved further into the lab. It had been constructed in the shape of an L, with a short antechamber in which less sensitive work was undertaken and a longer back portion where Dr. Isles worked more directly with the virus. As Jane turned the corner, she noted several fume hoods, and one area at the very back of the lab that was cordoned off. Dr. Isles did not appear to be in this section of the lab either, but after a moment Jane noticed a door standing ajar in the middle of the wall. Jane moved toward it, gently pushed it farther open with her index finger, and looked around the door frame.
Her hunch was right; Dr. Isles was indeed in this room, which was tiny. It reminded her of her own office, which had previously been a broom cupboard, but instead of having a desk wedged into it, there was a cot set up along one wall, with a card table set up next to that, and a neat array of mechanical equipment lying on the table: a variety of cords, a couple of small hand-held computer screens, a couple of instruments that looked vaguely like very small screwdrivers. And in the middle of all this, wearing nothing more than a pair of panties and a bra, and with her back turned toward the door, was Dr. Isles.
She was clearly getting ready for her day; there was a set of scrubs laid out on the cot, and Jane could see the folded edge of something that looked a lot like pajamas peeking out from under the pillow. But before Jane had time to look at anything else, Dr. Isles turned around.
The two women gasped at almost the same instant, Dr. Isles out of surprise at finding an intruder and Jane out of surprise at the doctor's appearance.
She was incredibly lifelike, Jane thought with a shiver. If she didn't know better, she would have said that the naked flesh before her would be warm and soft to the touch; if she hadn't had better self-control, she would have reached out and touched it. Dr. Isles didn't blush, or exclaim; she merely tilted her head at Jane in an inquisitive way and looked amused as Jane, for what seemed like the thousandth time since the beginning of her acquaintance with Dr. Isles, turned bright red.
"I, uh, I called...your name..." she finally stuttered lamely. "I guess you didn't hear."
"No, I didn't," stated the doctor, turning to pull on her scrubs. "Sorry if that was awkward. I was just getting dressed," she said superfluously. "At any rate, it's good to see you, Jane. Even if you do insist on barging in while I'm changing."
"I'm so sorry about that, really," Jane said. "I don't know what I was thinking. I should have knocked."
"It makes no difference to me," Dr. Isles said, standing with her arms crossed in the middle of the room. She seemed preoccupied this morning, an impression that intensified as she brushed past Jane on her way into the lab, where she checked on the results filling up a computer screen before continuing, "I'm simply experimenting in human customs. I understand that it would make you uneasy if I were to walk around unclothed.
"Actually," she continued, as if letting Jane in on a secret, "it's a matter of some controversy that robots continue to be made in the shape of humans. Some of us say that it's pointless, that it's holding us back from what we might become. And since the physical separation of our societies rendered human contact infrequent, there is a sizable faction that has been lobbying for standardized non-humanoid appearance."
Jane had recovered from her embarrassment by now, and was fascinated by this insight into the politics of robot culture. "What do you think?" she asked Dr. Isles.
The doctor's previous monologue had been delivered with an air of abstraction, as if she understood that her actions needed explanation. Before she responded to Jane's question, she appeared to consider her words more carefully than she had ever done before. It was the first sign of hesitation Jane had ever seen about her, and it only endeared her to the doctor.
"I think...we still have a lot to learn from humans," said Dr. Isles eventually. "If existing in this form makes it easier for me to interact with you, then I am happy that I do. Of course, this opinion is quite unpopular where I come from, even with more open-minded robots." Jane, transfixed by this view into the doctor's mind, didn't dare to ask exactly how a robot could be considered open-minded, and after a minute she was forced to remind herself that the doctor couldn't technically have a mind, but she stopped thinking about that because it made her head hurt, and because she wanted to focus what the doctor was saying. "As I said before, many robots believe that our continued...mimicry of human appearance is holding us back from some glorious, unbounded future.
"But if we don't understand where we come from, how can we understand where we're going? Is the only purpose of a robot's life the perpetuation of some rigid, sterile ideal of efficiency? I'm intrigued by the—admittedly often futile—attempts humans have made to find 'meaning' in their lives: the creation of art, the exploration of the subconscious. Love." For a moment the robot wore an expression of longing, and then, as though remembering the way in which this story must end, her expression hardened.
"There are very few opportunities for robots to study these attempts. The closest we get to studying human culture is an abstract interest in biology, which the government continues to fund for reasons I don't understand even as I am grateful for them. My decision to study human biology was extremely unusual. Studying medicine...was considered insane, pointless, suspicious. Why would I want to try to understand humans? To help humans?" She sighed, as if her efforts in this respect had failed too many times to count. "Humans don't want the help of a robot doctor." Now she sounded bitter. "They find me creepy, inhuman. Alien. And they're right, of course. I'm merely a facsimile of a human, and not a very good one at that."
"I don't know—" Jane started to say, but Dr. Isles cut her off.
She'd been about to say, "I think you make a pretty good human." The effect Dr. Isles had had on her a moment before, when she'd walked in on her changing, was not the reaction of a human to a poor copy, and the sympathy she was feeling for Dr. Isles now was real, as though she were hearing the story of a human trapped within a robot's body. She was beginning to realize that Dr. Isles was more than just...what was it? A chunk of silicon and wires. But before she could fully articulate this thought, Dr. Isles was talking again.
"That was the real reason I volunteered to come help out," she said. "I turned to virology when I realized that humans would never accept me as their doctor. And it turned out to be a good decision for other reasons. Robots can accept virology. We understand viruses. And virology turns humans into," she waved a perfectly-articulated hand, "figures, statistics. Not flesh and blood. Not everything that threatens us most.
"And when there came a time that my specialty was exactly what the humans needed," she continued, turning to look at Jane with a musing look in her eye and a slight smile on her face, "I felt something like...joy. Finally, I would be able to give something back. I would feel like I was a part of human society. I would be one small step closer to understanding..." For a moment there was silence between the two women. Jane waited for Dr. Isles to finish her sentence, to explain what, exactly, it was she wanted to understand, but she never did. Jane was beginning to forget that so much of this was impossible: robots didn't think, they didn't have feelings, they didn't have minds.
"It was an illusion, of course, as so many things in my life are illusions," said Dr. Isles eventually, and Jane, lost in thought, jumped. "I am incapable of feeling human emotions, although I have become proficient at—" she turned to look at Jane, as though appealing to her, "I have become proficient at pretending, at using the language of human emotions to express myself. Most of the time, that does not seem like a problem. But—" and here she stopped, looking down at her own hands, the slick black surface of the lab bench they rested on.
"But sometimes you feel the lack," said Jane quietly.
"Yes." The doctor paused. "I don't know why I am the way I am. Why I want to feel things, and why I can't." Again she turned to Jane, her eyes large and shining. "Tell me, Jane, do you think your life has a purpose?"
Jane didn't usually feel capable of articulating her lack of satisfaction with her own life. It wasn't something she thought about a lot, actually, the way her life could have been different, or better, or what it would have meant to do something different with it. She hadn't been raised to think about things that way: as long as she did her duty to her family and her country, she didn't feel the need to probe her feelings about her own life.
Did her life have a purpose? It had used to; her purpose had been finding bad guys, solving mysteries, helping people who were in pain. Until now, the job of robot-human liaison hadn't offered any kind of replacement for that sense of drive and purpose, and she was beginning to realize that her life was empty in other ways too. After she was gone, who would remember her? Who did she spend her days with? Who loved her?
Something in her face must have changed to reflect her internal conflict, and now that the doctor was focused on her human companion's reactions rather than driven by some strange need to tell her own story, she realized that Jane was uncomfortable with something about their conversation. Instead of listening to her painful thoughts about her own purpose, she changed the subject. It was as if Jane was a sample of something precious that she didn't want to use up.
"I must apologize, Jane. I'm sure you came here to hear about the progress I've made on A99, not about my personal problems! Let me update you on the situation."
As Dr. Isles turned away to pick up a clipboard filled with sheets of data, Jane felt a stab of disappointment.