Potenkiah, the deathgiver

Chapter 3.2

No, they couldn’t send her away, she reasoned later. She had not even been allowed to leave the palace once in her life. Nor her or Annie. Her sister looked cross each time someone spoke of travelling for vacation, as she was the one to sacrifice the most to keep up appearances. If it was necessary for Daphne and Greg to travel, both were left under Bertaliz’s care, but Annie and Bridget never did.

When she opened the secret door, Bridget found Daphne Britter focused in her reading. To her, her foster mother looked like an ethereal marble statue wrapped in satin; it was her floor-length skirt and her bright jade green hair. She walked in slowly, mentally prepared for the scolding she would get, but it never came. Daphne glanced at her without a word and went back to her reading on her screen.

“I’m sorry, mom, I wasn’t feeling well this morning,” she lied.

This time Daphne did not lift her eyes, but her silence screamed that she disapproved of not being told, at least, of her whereabouts, and of course that made her feel worse than if she had been scolded.

“Is Annie home?”

Without altering her posture, Daphne pointed at the door on the left; she sighed when she saw her enter the room. Again she had not had the courage to correct her. She loved her more than she should, her stomach shrank from worry each time she was late or had a new bruise.

Although the ultimate responsibility for her education did not lay on her, she thought she ought to adopt a more active role in it. In many ways the Princess already behaved with exceptional maturity, but she was still a teenager and, as such, prone to outbursts, mood swings and the occasional mistaken decision… She would feel better when she had nothing to report to the Queen about her, except that she had a wonderful daughter.

Being her fake mother had been a heavy burden. The first two cycles she had cried every night, remembering her own baby girl, dead a few weeks before carrying to term. The next six or seven she spent fighting her own nature, to avoid falling into the trap of believing the girl her own. As soon as the girl could walk she distanced herself from her by putting her in her nana Bertaliz’s care, and limiting their meetings in public. Why? She did not know, maybe another defense mechanism. But there was still time to redeem herself.

***

Annie was not at her desk, but she had left the electronic board on it, where she had been drafting an essay. She had crossed out three titles and the fourth was just as bad as the previous ones:

Laws regulating capabilities of robots, androids, artificial intelligence and their relation to the movement of “The Natural”.

Below, it read:

Machines should not learn, ethics cannot be taught to a silicon neural network without feelings. Machines exist to facilitate certain tasks.

It was a trending topic: the followers of this philosophical current declared themselves against all artificial forms of mimicking thought. Their struggle to limit the capabilities of information processors had led to a set of laws that banned their reasoning and autonomy. Therefore, they had no place in planetary defense systems, their use in automatic transport was questioned, and their application in medicine condemned. At least in Eloah the ancient AutoDocs had been taken apart for recycling.

The more orthodox naturalists, with their fixation on the artificial, also rejected from synthetic products to reproduction outside of consensual sexual relations. While they did not go against medical science in general, they disapproved of cosmetic surgeries. To Bridget they were no more than consummate hypocrites.

“Where have you been, Brid?” Annie asked her, stepping out of the bathroom.

With a finger, Bridget pointed upstairs.