I’m revising a chunk of visual input code when my boss Jin comes to hover by my desk. I hit save and look up, pushing myself back from the desk and looking down automatically to check on six-month-old Corin in the sling on my chest. Corin’s making soft sucking noises in their sleep, dark eyelashes resting on soft brown skin.
“Jin. What’s up?”
“Just checking how things are going.” Jin’s tone is fake-light.
“As a boss, or as a friend?”
Jin shifts awkwardly.
“This is my project, not the lab’s,” I remind them. We both know the deal. I’m on maternity leave right now; this isn’t employed time. This code fork is mine.
“Let’s go with ‘friend’,” Jin says. “How’s Corin?”
They don’t, thankfully, ask how I’m coping. I’m fed up of people telling me I’m brave, when all I did was choose not to wait around for someone else to want a kid with me.
“Corin’s great.” I rub my forehead. “But… I told my mum about this.” I gesture at the screen. “At the weekend. When she was visiting.” I live in London. Mum’s up in Durham. I’m never sure if the relationship would be better or worse if she lived closer.
Jin pulls a face. “How did it go?”
“She kept asking why I don’t just do it the normal way, if I really want another kid. She made enough damn fuss about me going it solo with Corin, but now that’s normal, just because it’s biological…” I know I sound frustrated. I feel frustrated.
“Well,” Jin says, in their ‘being fair’ voice. “There are only half-a-dozen AIs in existence right now. And, what, two others about to start from ‘birth,’ this way?”
Jin’s wearing the expression which means they’re desperate to look at my code fork, though it’s probably not conscious. Jin’s lab is the preeminent AI research lab; all those half-dozen person-level AIs are in some way based on the code that we developed here. After the court case that gave the first, Aisha, human rights, we open-sourced the main code branch, figuring it was the only ethical decision. Aisha took control of her own code fork, and the cluster she runs on.
Jin’s letting me use the lab on my own time while I’m on maternity leave, and we both know it’s because they hope eventually I’ll feel guilty and give them repository access. I won’t. It won’t be mine, soon, anyway. It’ll be my child’s, as soon as they’re born into their physical body, and the code starts running. Legally I’ll still have control, until they’re adult. Morally—well, I suppose I’ll be holding it in trust.
Their physical body. Not a human-look body; that won’t be possible. The bio-tech doesn’t exist (yet?); and human-sculpted silicon is beyond my means, plus there’s the Uncanny Valley problem. Instead, my child will have cameras and articulated arms installed on a wheelchair-size mechanised chassis. Well-established tech that will let them interact with the world, the way Corin can do without the technical assistance. Although what are arms and legs and eyes but well-established bio-tech?
Corin moves a fist, not quite awake but getting there. I stand up.
“Corin’s about to wake up. They’ll want fed.”
Jin smiles down at Corin. “Oh, bless.” They look back up at me. “I bet your mum will come round once her second grandchild is actually here.”
Maybe.
Jin phones me shortly after Robin is born. Thirteen months after Corin, like I planned. I did four months at the lab after I finished my nine months of maternity leave, and now I’ve quit for good. I want to be there for both of them; and it’s not like any nanny or nursery is likely to be able to deal with Robin.
Jin’s polite, makes all expected general enquiries about both babies, but I’m waiting for the kicker.
“So,” they say, eventually. “I wanted to talk to you about whether we could get some of the data on how Robin is doing. And perhaps a look at your code modifications?”
“They’re a kid, not an experiment,” I say, like I planned.
Jin’s voice hardens. They didn’t get where they are now by being soft. “They’re both, and you know it.”
“I don’t work for you any more,” I say, which I am aware is basically the grown-up version of ‘you can’t make me.’
“No,” Jin agrees. “But I know you care about AI. The more information we have, the more we can help future AIs. The more we can do for their rights. For Robin’s rights.”
I am all too aware how likely it is that Robin will have to—I’ll have to—fight for their rights, one way or another. AIs are people, legally, but the case law isn’t all there yet and the devil is always in the details.
“Also,” Jin says, “we could come to some financial arrangement.”
“I don’t need the money,” I say, which is a lie. We’ll be okay, me and Corin and Robin—I got lucky when a previous employer went public—but it’s going to be tight.
“Perhaps not,” they say. “But Robin might need the legal support.”
We come to an arrangement. I won’t give them the code until Robin’s old enough to decide for themself. But I’ll anonymise the learning data and pass that along, with my notes on Robin’s development. In exchange, Jin will pay Robin a small stipend, and add us to the lab’s legal retainer.
I hope Robin will never need that.
AIs don’t sleep. But Corin sleeps, and I sleep, and I can’t just let Robin run around the house on their own when they’re little, so Robin has to sleep, too. This is a new problem; previous person-level AIs haven’t had this sort of a childhood.
I use a programmed override to shut Robin off every night, and it feels somewhere between weird and wrong. Robin doesn’t know any different, and it doesn’t hurt them, and they both enjoy the bedtime routine, but…
Briefly, I consider coding night wakings for Robin in the pattern of the average small child, but I decide against it. Partly for my own sanity, but mostly because, unlike the override, that would mess with Robin’s actual code, and I won’t do that now they’re born. I can’t change Corin’s code that way; why should Robin be different? But it means Corin and I get time to ourselves that Robin doesn’t. Half an hour after stories sometimes; the 2am waking when Corin is chatty, or drowsy. I suppose siblings always get slightly different things from their parents.
I don’t know when to cancel the override. Corin is five by the time she reliably sleeps through the night, and Robin, who’s four, has started asking questions about how sleep works for human bodies, and how it works for her. (They’re both her, by then. Corin decided first, and Robin followed suit.)
“Is there any need for me to sleep?” Robin asks me.
“There is while you still need me awake to keep you safe,” I tell her.
“I get an extra story after you’ve gone to sleep,” Corin says in the sing-song tones of sibling rivalry.
Robin doesn’t say anything. I guess this isn’t the first time Corin’s said that; just the first in front of me.
“You both get special time with me,” I say firmly, pulling them both into a hug, one each side, smooth warm brown skin and smooth cool grey metal, both my children. Mum told me, back before Robin was born, that there was no way I would feel the same way about Robin that I did about Corin, that it was all about the biology. Pheromones and that, she said. Turns out she was wrong. It’s about connection. It’s about love.
“If I don’t need to sleep, I don’t want to,” Robin says, arms lifted stubbornly.
“Me either,” Corin says.
“You do have to sleep. You’re human.”
I interrupt before the squabble can get going. “You both have to sleep. Robin, we’ll talk about it again when you’re older.”
In the end, she will be ten when we turn it off. After that, there will be seven hours a day of her life that I know nothing about beyond what she chooses to tell me.
Corin’s school won’t take Robin when she turns five. They give a bunch of spurious reasons about their ability to provide for Robin’s ‘needs’. If I took them to court, used Jin’s legal team, I could probably force them to take her. But how will they treat her, if they don’t want her? If they don’t believe she’s a person? I’d have to constantly push for Robin to get what she needs; and that would make a difference for the next AI kid, but is it best for Robin, right now? Am I an activist first, or a parent?
I tell Robin that we’ll home educate her, after which Corin declares that if Robin doesn’t have to go to school, she won’t go either. I dither, but—having them both doing the same thing is easier for me, and if Corin doesn’t want to go, it’s not fair to make her.
“I’d like to go to school. If I could,” Robin says quietly, and my heart hurts.
Corin, from the superiority of just-six, rolls her eyes. Which I would like to blame on school, but she learnt it off my mum. “No you wouldn’t. Why do you think I want to stay home? School’s boring. And if I think it’s boring, you’d definitely be bored.”
Robin already thinks very differently from Corin or me, and we all know it.
“I suppose so,” Robin says.
Home ed works out pretty well, as it happens. But I wish Robin had chosen it, like Corin did.
“Mummy,” Corin asks, climbing into my lap. “Why is Robin like Robin, and me like me?”
I cuddle her, wondering when she’ll outgrow my lap. Robin’s never fit, but I hold her and I hug her and I hope it’s the same.
“Well, you grew in different ways.” I start on the story I’ve told them both before, but Corin interrupts me with an impatient jab to my chest.
“No! Not like that. I know about uteruses and computers. I mean, why? I want to know why.”
“Don’t poke at me, darling,” I say, putting it off for a couple of seconds.
“Why?” Corin takes her pointy finger away. “Why that way for me and the other way for Robin?”
I can’t believe it’s taken this long for one of them to ask. I can’t believe I haven’t prepared a coherent answer. I knew I’d have to. I just kept putting it off, hoping the perfect statement would magically occur. Sentences jumble in my head. Because I could. Because someone had to. Because how else could we show that AI is the same-but-different.
All of them sound like means to an end, and also, they’re not true. That’s not why.
“Because I wanted both of you. Just as you are,” I say, finally, and that feels right.
“You didn’t know how we’d be, when you started.” Corin squints at me suspiciously.
“No,” I agree. “You never do, with a child. That’s part of—part of the magic, I suppose. Here you are, here Robin is, and it turns out that it was you, just the way you are, that I grew in my uterus, and Robin, just the way she is, that I grew in the computer. And it was both of you, just the way you are, that I wanted, all along, even when I didn’t know it was you.”
Corin is silent for a moment. She chews on her knuckle, a habit she’s picked up from me. A habit Robin can’t pick up, having neither mouth nor knuckle.
“But what if I change?”
I hold her tighter. “Of course you’ll change. You’re supposed to. We all change all the time. But you’ll still be you, just like you were you when you were born, and you now. You’ll still be my Corin and I will always love you just as you are.”
“I love you too, Mummy,” she says, and my heart squeezes tight.
Robin asks the same question a week later. I assume they’ve discussed it. I give her the same answer, more smoothly this time, but Robin wants more.
“Most people would just have had another biological child, if they wanted another child,” she says.
Not everyone; we’re in contact with a couple of other child AIs, though they’re both in the US and we can’t cross the Atlantic to visit them, what with one thing and another.
“Yes,” I agree. “I could have done that.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Because I couldn’t envisage loving another bio baby the way I loved Corin, whatever everyone said about the second child magically making room for themselves in your heart, but I could see loving a different sort of baby that way. (And then I realised, when I had Robin, what everyone had meant.) Because I thought an AI child would do best with a bio sibling, and I could do that. Because I wanted to help.
None of that is the whole truth, either. None of that is why.
“Because I wanted you,” I say at last. “I can’t say it any better than that, sweetheart. I wanted you, and I love you, just as you are.”
I don’t expect Robin to accept that. She is my analytic, persistent child. But she nods, once, and crowds up to me, and I put my arms around her.
No two kids grow up alike, even in the same house. All sorts of things affect how they experience the world. With Corin and Robin, however hard I try to treat them equally, to give them the same opportunities, their experiences are even more different than the average set of siblings. Different types of brain, different physicalities, different ways of moving through the world.
In public the differences are particularly stark. No one tells Robin she’s pretty. No one asks me how I ‘got’ Corin; no one asks about Robin’s daddy. People don’t back away in silent alarm from Corin—at least not once she’s through her epic public meltdowns stage, a stage Robin never has.
Robin never says anything. Corin does.
“She’s my sister, she’s not a robot. And she’s way smarter than you.”
I would intervene, except the adult in question has been quite spectacularly rude, pulling her child away from the ‘dangerous robot’, and then poking at Robin’s chassis as she wondered aloud how much Robin understood. Robin’s cuddling up to me in a way she nearly never does in public.
I set them both up for this. I set Robin up for stares and stupid questions. I set Corin up for yelling at people for being rude to her sister; however proud I might be of her for wading in before I could even open my mouth. In the end, this is all down to me.
The rude adult stalks off. Corin sits down next to me and Robin with a huff that blows her fringe upwards.
“People are stupid,” she says. “Hey, Robin. Wanna play in the sandpit?”
I set them up to have each other.
“Mummy. Just because she isn’t invited, why can’t I go? Hanni’s my friend. We don’t have to have the same friends.”
I hesitate, trying to find a way to explain that doesn’t involve setting Hanni directly against Robin.
“It’s not fair,” Corin said, and flounces out of the room. I rub my forehead and get up to go after her.
“Hanni doesn’t like me,” Robin says.
I turn to her, my heart sinking, about to say something anodyne about people and preferences.
“She says I’m weird. That my voice sounds weird. She says I’m not real.”
“You are absolutely real,” I say fiercely, abandoning the platitudes. I put my arm around her, her cool metal angles generating the same rush of love as Corin’s warm soft skin. “Your voice is yours, and it’s wonderful, and you’re wonderful.”
“But I am weird,” Robin says calmly, curling her fingers around my arm. “I’m a person, but I’m not human. Hanni doesn’t like me. Sometimes people don’t like other people. You’ve always said we don’t have to like everyone.”
“That’s true. But,” I take a deep breath, “not liking you because you’re an AI rather than human is bigoted, just like not liking someone because of their skin colour is bigoted.”
“Then perhaps Hanni is bigoted. But Corin likes her. And perhaps Hanni just doesn’t understand. Perhaps if she spends time with Corin, she will.”
I don’t want Corin to spend time with friends who see her sister as different, or lesser, but before I can say that, Robin is talking again.
“I don’t mind Corin visiting Hanni. Or Hanni coming over. I don’t want Corin to be sad because she can’t see Hanni. Honestly, Mummy.” She pats me on the arm.
“I mind.”
“But I don’t. I don’t want you to mind for me. I’ll go tell Corin it’s okay.”
“No,” I say, giving in. I hug her again. “I’ll tell her.”
I have to let Robin make this decision. Let her and Corin work things out for themselves. I don’t get how Corin can shout at strangers and yet be friends with Hanni, but…
Robin smiles at me with that tilt of her camera, and I sigh and let go. I made their context; they make their own choices.
“I want to go back to school,” Corin announces. “With Hanni.”
She’s standing in the kitchen doorway, the light behind her. She’s thirteen now, adolescent, not child.
“Um,” I say, and she makes an exasperated noise.
“Corin doesn’t like learning with me right now,” Robin says. She’s by the window, delicately shelling broad beans. She doesn’t eat them—she doesn’t eat anything—but she likes to shell them for Corin and me.
“Corin, if I’m not covering what you want to learn…” I start.
“I want to be with other kids,” Corin interrupts. “Not just you and her.”
The injustice of it stings. We spend half our damn time pinging between home education groups so Corin can hang out with other kids. Robin enjoys the company, and she has her own friends, but it’s Corin who has the social drive. They both go to Guides—that’s where Corin met Hanni. Corin does football on a Saturday and band on a Tuesday. We see so many other kids. I curl my toes in the effort to resist saying so.
“Let me think about it,” I say. Corin growls and stalks out.
“I think we’re just not getting on so well right now,” Robin says, sounding unbothered. “If Corin wants to be at school, maybe that’s for the best.”
“Do you want to go too?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think it’ll work, even if you could get them to let me in.”
She’s likely right—even with the human-style maturation delay I coded in, intellectually she’s sharp as a tack and getting quicker all the time—but I hate that it’s even a question.
I don’t think school will work for Corin either, in all truth, but Robin’s right. If she wants to try it, I should support her choice. Even if I’m sad she’s not getting on better with her sister. Even if I’m sad they have different options.
School lasts a couple of months before Corin gets fed up.
“The lessons are tedious,” she tells me, rolling her eyes. “And the other kids are…” She stops, abruptly. “I prefer my home ed friends,” she says, in the end, and there’s a rawness in her voice that I don’t want to push at.
She doesn’t quit Guides, but she doesn’t go round to Hanni’s any more, and she tells me, casually, without explanation, that she’s switched Patrols.
It’s another six months before she tells me what her classmates, and Hanni, said, and she only does that when I’ve promised I won’t go and talk to the school. Or tell Robin.
“It’s over,” she says, with that impatient edge. “Just leave it. I don’t want to hang out with dickheads, okay?”
If she resents Robin for it, she doesn’t tell me. But they’re spending time together again; they’re laughing together again. They’ve got each other.
A year or two after the school experiment, Corin and Robin start going out together without me. They go to the shops, the movies, that sort of thing. I fret, every time. I know I’d fret less if it were just Corin. I refuse to limit Robin; but I know she’s treated differently, out there, and I hate not being there to protect her.
Physically, Robin can go anywhere a human using a wheelchair can, which ought to be everywhere but isn’t, accessibility legislation notwithstanding. She knows which shops she can move around; which screens in the local cinema are accessible; which streets to avoid and where she can and can’t cross the road. Most of their shopping is for Corin, since Robin doesn’t have a body that wears clothes, but since they were small, Corin has been on at her about accessorising, and Robin eventually got into it. When she was eleven, Corin—Robin refused to help, didn’t want to make a fuss, and Corin shrugged and made the fuss for her—conducted a successful campaign for wider aisles in their favourite pocket-money-jewellery shop, so Robin wouldn’t have to wait at the door while Corin brought her things to inspect. They were so thrilled, the first time they could go round it together.
But access isn’t my real worry. I know how people look at Robin in the street. How they talk past her. I’ve read the dog-whistle newspaper articles with their concerns about AI and robots, the ones Corin’s former classmates quoted. Robin isn’t a robot. She’s a person. But that’s not how everyone sees her. Some people sneer, which is unpleasant, but some people are scared. And scared people are dangerous. Robin’s metal chassis is more robust than Corin’s flesh-and-blood. But Robin can’t heal herself. And people who wouldn’t hurt a flesh-and-blood teenager… might not see Robin the same way.
But I can’t keep her safe forever. I can’t always be there. I have to let them both navigate the world, make decisions, take risks. Choose.
For months I resist checking up on them, but eventually I crack and ask Corin if there’s anything I ought to know about. Corin shrugs and tells me not to worry, that she and Robin can manage. It’s easier to believe it of brash Corin than it is of quiet, self-contained Robin.
They start going out in the evenings after Corin’s sixteen. I find out the first time they go to a pub, because Corin comes home fuming that they accepted her fake ID, but they wouldn’t even look at Robin’s before kicking her out.
“It’s just bigotry. You weren’t even going to drink anything!”
Robin is silent for a moment. “It’s not fair. Of course it’s not.” She sounds bitter, and my heart clenches. Then her arm goes down, and she shrugs. “But. You know how it is.”
“I will end them,” Corin says, eyes narrowed.
Corin gets as far as phoning Jin for the contact information of the law firm before Robin talks her down. I nearly crack a tooth clenching my jaw so as not to interfere. I haven’t done public AI activism, myself, since Robin was born. It didn’t seem fair on her. I write letters, and I reply to government consultations, and I’ve fought Robin’s corner when it’s been necessary. But I haven’t become a spokesperson, and I’ve stayed low-key. I have to let Robin decide what—if anything—she wants to do to defend her own rights. So far, she’s been content to work within what’s given to her, however much that’s frustrated me—and Corin—at times.
I brought her into the world. She has to choose how to navigate it.
“Mummy. Please. Come quickly. They’re trying to arrest Robin.”
Corin hasn’t called me Mummy in years. She sounds scared, and young, younger than her eighteen years. Corin never sounds scared. Corin has always walked straight up to the world and dared it to stand against her. If I’d had to guess which of my children would get herself arrested, I’d have guessed Corin. Not calm, peaceable Robin. Robin who never argues for her rights, who just waits for everyone else to catch up.
I’ve grabbed keys, water bottle, wallet. I’m halfway out of the door, phone still clamped to my ear.
“Where are you? What are they arresting her for?”
She sends me a pin near Green Park. Tube will be faster than taxi.
“It’s a protest,” she tells me as I jog towards the station. “AI rights. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want you to worry.”
Robin? Protesting? She’s never wanted to talk about any of that. Even after all the fuss we had with her passport and bank account when she turned sixteen.
“There were lots of us there, but Robin was the only AI,” Corin is saying. “I thought—I tried, honestly I did, but they didn’t want to arrest me. Any of the humans. Just her. She’s refusing to move, Mummy, and, you know, she’s heavier than the rest of us, and I don’t think, I don’t know if they’ll…”
In the background, another voice shouts, “She’s a person! Get away from her!”
There’s a crunch. My stomach drops straight through my boots.
“I’m on my way.”
I chose this for her. It’s my fault.
This is a lab, and it should be familiar, even if it’s eighteen years since I worked here; but it feels like a hospital waiting room. The police damaged Robin’s chassis trying to move her, and it affected her core systems. She was conscious when I reached her, but not coherent. I brought her straight here, to Jin. We’re almost certain it’s a hardware problem, not software, which means opening her chassis to find out what’s gone wrong and fix it. I’m not a hardware person, even if it would be ethical for me to treat my own child. Jin’s the only person I trust to help her.
There ought to be other options. There are more Robins out there, now. But Robin’s been finding out her whole life how society feels about them and how little they’re provided for. At least we’re close to Jin. It could have been worse. My throat burns as I swallow against my nausea.
Corin has given up on reading and is lying on the grad student couch. Her head is in my lap, her eyes closed. I card my fingers gently through her hair, like I used to when she was little and I was soothing her to sleep. She opens her eyes and looks up into mine.
“Do you remember,” she says, “that time when I was little, and I asked why I was bio and Robin was AI?”
“Yes,” I say cautiously.
She’s silent for a moment, gaze sliding to the ceiling. “Do you ever… I mean, I can’t help thinking. We wouldn’t be here if Robin was bio, too.”
It hits me like a brick to the stomach, but she’s still talking. “But then it wouldn’t be Robin that we weren’t here for, would it?”
Her eyes come back to mine, and she sits up in a hurry.
“Oh. Mum. I didn’t mean—it’s not your fault, Mummy, you know it’s not.”
“But it was my choice,” I gulp, and she hugs me.
“You chose me and Robin. That’s what you always said.”
“It’s still true,” I say into her hair. “I just—I didn’t realise quite how many choices I was making.”
“For both of us,” she says. “That’s just part of the deal, though, right? With having kids. If you’d had me a different month I’d have been a different egg and a different person. If I’d been AI and Robin had been bio. All sorts of ifs. But here we are, and it’s us. It’s just us.”
She sounds so matter-of-fact, and I can’t keep the tears back.
“I thought I was supposed to be the grown-up here,” I half-joke, wiping at my eyes. “You’re stealing my lines.”
“They’re good lines.”
We sit in silence. Will Jin be able to help Robin? It keeps looping round my head.
“I used to think about it,” Corin says. “How it would be if Robin was bio too. Or if I was AI and Robin was human. Or if we were both AI. But—it would all be different, right? Different good, different bad, whatever. It wouldn’t be me. We wouldn’t be us. We wouldn’t be here if Robin was bio, but we might be in some hospital somewhere instead. There’s no better or worse. Just different.”
“I love you.” I love both of them. So much. Surely Robin will be fine. Surely Jin can fix her. Surely.
“Love you too, Mum.”
I can’t keep them safe by keeping them from the world I brought them into. I have to let them choose, and wait for what happens.
Corin leans against me, and we wait, until Jin comes through to the lounge, and they’re visibly tired but they’re smiling, and this time, at least this time, it’s all okay.
They’ll both be okay. Just as they are.
© 2023 Juliet Kemp
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