Page 36 of The Echo Wife
But I couldn’t give her the real answer, either. The real answer was so true as to be cruel, and I was trying so hard not to be cruel to Martine.Don’t touch that, because you don’t belong here.
I deflected instead. “We have work to do. Come on.”
She pursed her lips at me and stood there for several seconds before turning her back on the tank and joining me at our table. It was something she’d begun doing—taking time before following instructions. Putting space between my request and her response.
It was uniquely infuriating to me.
She wasn’t supposed to be able to fight her programming like that. She wasn’t supposed tochange. Neurocognitive programming was intended to be static, immovable, and the fact that Martine was starting to shift hers felt like a direct insult to the integrity of my work.
So I did my best to ignore her moods—moods she shouldn’t have been able to have, although I could chalk that up to Nathan’s incompetent, lazy execution of my early protocols. I did my best to treat her as I would have treated any research assistant, to speak to her the same way I spoke to Seyed. The same way I spoke to anyone who was in my laboratory, participating in my research, using materials acquired withmyfunding.
But even then, she visibly chafed. She made faces at things Isaid, rolled her eyes when I was snappish, and even when she wasn’t being petulant, she hesitated for several seconds before obeying my directives. Every single time, Martine hesitated.
I suppose it would have been virtuous of me to celebrate her developing independence. But the truth is, she was more useful to me when she was obedient. As much contempt as I felt for the way Nathan had programmed her, it was so much simpler not having to worry about her feelings.
I could understand why he would want her pliant, even if I couldn’t respect his cowardice inneedingher that way.
I didn’t need her to be perfectly obedient. I could handle her as she was. But I liked her better when she did as she was told.
That didn’t mean that I was the same as Nathan had been. He’d created Martine to be this way; I was merely taking advantage of a thing that was already there. I didn’t forge the tool. I just wanted to use it effectively. That didn’t make me a monster. It wasn’t wrong of me, wishing she would behave as she’d been designed to.
Besides, even if it did make me a monster, there wasn’t time to think of it that way. I was far too busy for navel-gazing.
There were more important things at hand.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Martine and I were not, strictly speaking, living together during this time. She had her place. I had mine.
But neither of us had a home.
Martine had spent her short life trying hard to make her house into a home, but she had been trying to make it into a home for Nathan, not one for herself. She spent a few nights there, but more often than not, I drove her directly from the lab to my town house.
We didn’t discuss it. We just slept back-to-back in my bed, curled away from each other. As the nights got colder, I began to sleep under the covers, but Martine never did—she stayed on top of them, perfectly still. She woke before me each morning, and by the time I got downstairs each day, she was already dressed.
I didn’t unpack a single box after she arrived. I did tell her that she didn’t have to unpack for me, but I didn’t tell her very many times. I didn’t fight her on it.
She did that work for me, and I let her.
A month into Nathan’s neurocognitive programming—six weeks after we filled a sterilized tank with the treatment that would become specimen 4896-Zed—I came downstairs in the morning and found Martine in the kitchen, washing her underwear in the sink.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “I have a washing machine.”
“I don’t want them to stain,” she muttered, scrubbing the fabric against itself with strong, sure fingers.
“Did something happen?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“Just a little blood.”
“How much?”
She turned the underwear inside out to show me. They were made of lace, the same color as the skin of her arms, and the fabric of the cloth crotch insert was stained the deep rust of saturation.
“I think that’s more than you’re supposed to bleed when you’re pregnant, Martine,” I said, trying to sound calm. I looked at her belly, which became more obvious every day. I didn’t know anything about obstetrics, not beyond the basics, which were functionally useless to me. I didn’t know if she was supposed to look the way she did then, or if something was wrong. Her belly was locked up tight, and there was something in it that I didn’t understand on every possible level.
I hadn’t been able to let go of that—the shouldn’t-be-possible of her pregnancy. It was another subject of my late-night conversations with Seyed, trying to figure out the unthinkablehowof her baby. It was like a blister, and every time she rested her hand on her abdomen, something in my brain stung, because I still didn’t have answers.
