The Receiver

9 - F I E L D T R I P

Iris and I are watching the color of the floor change when Frank rounds the corner of the hallway and says he has a surprise for us.

"A surprise?" Iris asks in a cautious voice, her fingertip sliding off the color wheel on the smart tablet.

That doesn't make sense. A surprise suggests a secret and robots can't have secrets. It conflicts with the Third Law.

"Please," Frank says, "follow me."

Iris passes me a wary glance, but we follow Frank down the hall anyway.

"I know how much you have missed home," he says, "so I took the liberty of recreating it as best I could."

Across from the main bathroom between our bedrooms is a room like Zander's simulation room.

"This has been here the whole time?"

"I'm sorry, miss Rho. I assumed you knew."

"Don't assume she knows anything," Iris says.

Frank ignores the comment and gestures for us to enter first.

Inside, is a near-perfect replica of the apartment back home.

"My measurements are not exact," Frank says.

"You're a robot, Frank," I say. "You don't have to be modest."

Other than some slightly skewed furniture, the room is just how I remember it. Only it's like seeing it through warped glass, the simulation glitching at the edges where Frank had to guess at the exact shapes and dimensions. Despite it being nothing more than a projected image, it's still incredible.

"There are some advanced settings I'm still playing around with," Frank says as Iris and spin in circles, taking it in, "where a 3D printer is utilized which would allow your surroundings to take physical form, albeit of the same hard material."

"Phobos and Deimos, Frank!" I exclaim, swiping my hand through a wall. It looks real enough to touch. "You got skills."

"If by skills you mean a photographic memory," Frank says, smiling, "then yes."

Iris and I finish out little tour within a minute and park it on the living room floor. He even got the view from the circular window right. We sprawl out on our backs and pretend for a while. My eyes land on the spot on the ceiling that used to have those little dots of black mold on it before Dad scrubbed and bleached until he eventually rubbed through the paint.

"I'm so bored," Iris says after a while. "What do these people do all day?"

"They have jobs," I sigh, thinking about our Mom now.

"Not all of them," Frank corrects from somewhere behind us. "A technocracy operates under a gift economy. Citizens are given a set amount of credit each month that corresponds to the number of individuals in their household, but their basic needs are provided by the government. Some of them offer their labor in exchange for luxury items like finer clothing or larger properties, but most document their lives on camera to share with other citizens. When they're not doing that, adults busy themselves with activities such as shopping, viewing films, and/or travelling to other vertical cities while school-age children and teens attend the robotics academy. While attendance is encouraged, it is not required."

"How do you know all that?" I say to the ceiling.

"I ran a search on an interconnected computer network called the World Wide Web."

A pang of homesickness hits me for the first time. It must be mine because it wouldn't be Zander's.

"Would I sound loca if I said I want to go back?"