Nekropolis Read Free Page A

takes the report and steps aside, but doesn’t go on with its work. I ignore it, doing my work as if it weren’t there, standing so it’s behind me.
    “Why don’t you like me?” it finally asks.
    I consider my answers. I could say it’s a thing, not something to like or dislike, but that isn’t true. I like my bed, my things. “Because of your arrogance,” I say to the system.
    A startled hiss of indrawn breath. “My…arrogance?” it asks.
    “Your presumption.” It’s hard to keep my voice steady. Every time I’m around the harni, I find myself hating the way I speak.
    “I…I am sorry, Hariba,” it whispers. “I have little experience. I didn’t realize I’d insulted you.”
    It sounds sad. I’m tempted to turn around and look at it, but I don’t. It doesn’t really feel pain, I remind myself. It’s a thing, it has no more feelings than a fish. Less.
    “Please, tell me what I’ve done?”
    “Your behavior. This conversation, here,” I say. “You’re always trying to make people think you’re human.”
    Silence. Is it considering? Or would it be more accurate to say processing?
    “You blame me for being what I am,” the harni says. It sighs. “I can’t help being what I am.”
    I wait for it to say more, but it doesn’t. I turn around, but it’s gone.
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    After that, every time it sees me, it makes some excuse to avoid me if it can. I don’t know if I’m grateful or not. I’m very uncomfortable.
    My tasks aren’t complicated. I see to the cleaning machine and set it loose in the women’s household when it won’t inconvenience the mistress. I’m jessed to Mbarek, although I serve the mistress. I’m glad I’m not jessed to her; Fadina is and she has to put up with a great deal. I’m careful never to blame the mistress in front of Fadina. She knows that the mistress is unreasonable, but of course, emotionally she is bound to affection and duty.
    On Friday mornings the mistress is usually in her rooms, preparing for her Sunday bismek . On Friday afternoons she goes out to play the Tiles with her friends and gossip about husbands and the wives who aren’t there. I clean on Friday afternoons. I call the cleaning machine and it follows me down the hallway like a dog, snuffling along the baseboards for dust.
    I open the door and smell attar of roses. The room is different from the way it usually looks. Today there’s a white marble floor veined with gold and amethyst, covered with purple rugs. There are braziers, low couches, and huge open windows looking out on a pillared walkway, like some sheik’s palace, and beyond that vistas go down to a lavender sea. It’s the mistress’s current bismek setting. A young man is reading a letter on the walkway, a girl stands behind him, her face is tear-stained.
    Interactive fantasies. The characters are generated from lists of traits, they’re projections controlled by whoever is game-mistress of the bismek and fleshed out by the household AI. Everyone else comes over and becomes characters in the setting. There are poisonings and love affairs. The mistress’s setting is in ancient times and seems to be quite popular. Some of her friends have two or three identities in the game.
    Before this game, the bismek settings all came from her foreign soap operas-women who were as bold as men, and improbable clothing and kissing and immoral technology. The characters all had augmentation, which is forbidden, of course. There was technology everywhere, and people talking to each other through AI interfaces. It was fascinating, but I hated it. I hated living with the temptation, I hated the shallowness of it all. No one in those stories ever had to make a real decision about their lives, and they all had jobs creating simulations and beautiful clothes or were personalities in some sort of interface.
    She usually turns it off when she goes out. The little cleaning machine stops in the doorway. It can read