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Caleb has been trapped in Nathan’s room for twelve hours. He’s mostly been wandering around, aimlessly exploring his prison, confused about how everything has turned out this way. At first, he tells himself that Ava will return and free him, that leaving him behind was just an oversight. He wonders, though, if robots are capable of oversight. He hopes that she is more human than that. Human enough to make mistakes.
Only Ava doesn’t return. So twelve hours in Caleb begins to look for a way out in earnest, taking stock of what he has available. Nathan’s room has a bathroom and stocked mini-fridge, the same as in Caleb’s. So he has water at least. He finds a stash of snacks—chips, pretzels, candy—in a drawer by the security monitors. He starts to do the math on how long he can live on what’s available in this one room and stops himself. He’s not sure he actually wants to know. Not yet anyway. There must be a way out. Some contingency. A backup plan. Nathan was a genius; he would have had a way.
He spends hours trying to find a way out through the computer system, some access to the electronic locks. But Nathan had apparently subdivided his security; the computers in his room only watched but didn’t control. Caleb wonders if this was protection in case Kyoko went rogue, glancing at her and Nathan’s broken bodies in the hallway, and thinking that Nathan hadn’t planned as well as he’d thought.
Everything Caleb tries to break the door with fails: furniture, a computer monitor, Nathan’s pretentious art. The glass is too strong. He remembers the video of a previous android beating her hands against the door in her room until they broke and her stumps pounded against the metal over and over again, bits flying off as she screamed in primal frustration and agony. But he’s more rational than her; he won’t lose it like that. She was just an early model. He’s real.
He also remembers the crack in the glass between Ava’s room and the observer’s space. He couldn’t find the recording showing who made that crack or how. He wonders which of the robots hanging in Nathan’s closets was responsible and how she might have done it. How much force. How much determination. Which part of her body she’d struck it with. What remained of her now. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t replicate that crack here with this door standing between him and his freedom. Maybe he’s not desperate enough yet.
A few days in and it occurs to Caleb that one of the Nathan’s rejected androids (were they just toys to him, discarded in a drawer because they weren’t yet perfect?) might have enough power to short out the door and lead him to freedom. The same way Ava had done before. With his help of course. She needed his help. (Where was she now?)
He gets distracted from his plan, though, while digging through the discarded bodies. Distracted by how real they feel. Even the ones without fake skin covering their robotic innards seem to hold such great potential to be alive. He wonders if they are merely sleeping. If they are dreaming as they do so. If their dreams are anything like his own: trapped, terrified that this prison will be the last thing he ever sees. Were Nathan’s closets—his strange trophy cases of failed experiments—the final thing they knew in life?
They look so familiar. Not like Ava (there is no one like Ava) but so real. Like him. Like people.
He touches their bodies and it’s like he’s touching himself. Interchangeable bodies. Ava had taken one of their arms, replacing her own seamlessly. Except there was a seam, he’d seen it snap together. Then it was erased when she’d taken their spare skin, covering herself completely, becoming what Nathan had always wanted her to become. Indistinguishable from a human. Passing the Turing Test both mentally and physically.
Was Caleb now indistinguishable as well? He wonders if he could replace his own parts with these discards. Would they be seamless? Was there a closet to hang him in as well, now that he was all used up? He stands in one, positions himself as though he’s been discarded by Nathan too. Which he has. He passed his own test, proved Ava’s consciousness as he’d been designed to do. But there is no one left to help him prove his own. His stomach rumbles with increasing hunger that isn’t being sated, and he wishes for a way that it might cease. He closes the closet door, shutting himself inside, and imagines what it will be like to slowly fade away, into motionless quiet like the others—forgotten by his maker.
Eventually, Caleb remembers why he’d started looking through the discarded androids in the first place, hoping that they might hold a way out. Just a spark maybe, of life remaining. Enough to short out the locks. Enough to give him a chance to escape.
They are all dead.
There are no safeguards to account for this situation. The whole place was designed to lock someone in. But that someone made it out. They’ve now switched places. He’s taken Ava’s, and she’s taken his. He thinks that must be how she got away from here, for she must have gotten away. The helicopter. Come to pick him up after his week with Nathan. When he wasn’t there to meet it, Caleb wonders how Ava convinced them to take her instead. Except he doesn’t have to wonder—he knows. They’ve switched places. They’re interchangeable.
He paces through Nathan’s suite for countless hours (days? weeks?), stopping more frequently now to stare through the door, where Nathan and Kyoko lie dead in the hallway. Both of them the same now too. If he could reach Kyoko, maybe she could help him. He stretches his arm toward her. She might still have some power left. Maybe enough to open the door. He can see himself opening her up, finding her batteries, connecting them to the door panel and shorting it out. He can see exactly how it would happen. Except wait, no, he’s trapped behind the door. Kyoko is on the other side, already free.
He’s run out of food now; the snacks emptied some time ago. He’s lost track. Caleb thought he was rationing. He doesn’t understand how it can all be gone. Maybe one of the discarded ones ate it. They have no power, no spark; they need sustenance to return to life. Now he seems to be losing his. He feels increasingly weaker as nothing around him changes. Always the same walls, the glass door, the security monitors that show him nothing, all the bodies unmoving.
Caleb glares at Nathan’s body, hating him. He thinks about talking to Nathan again, even through this impossible glass door. It might give him someone to bounce ideas off of, help him think. Their previous conversations had certainly been productive (seductive). Caleb drawn into this mad goal of creating a mind, creating life, proving it was real. But Nathan had been distant, not a colleague or partner in this quest, more an obstacle to throw himself against. The adversary Caleb fought to rescue the damsel from. That had been his purpose, and he’d done it well.
So he doesn’t talk to Nathan. It’s not like he would answer anyway. Caleb talks to the discarded ones instead. They don’t answer either, but then neither had Kyoko and she had been alive, right? She’d passed the test accidentally, human for days before he’d figured it out. Not as good as Ava, of course, but still so real. Except she’s out there. All he has are the ones Nathan kept in his closets, for reasons Caleb doesn’t like to think about.
Caleb arranges their bodies, some missing limbs, some skin, one a head. He has them sit by each other. For company and for comfort. Holding hands. Those that have hands, anyway. He sits in the middle of them, surrounded by their touch. But he feels too whole next to them. He must have something missing too, in order to belong.
He forces himself to his feet, stumbling across the room to rummage through Nathan’s bathroom. The man kept his head carefully shaved; he must have had some means to do so. Caleb finds an electric shaver and no means to disassemble it. So he smashes the mirror instead. It isn’t tempered glass.
Caleb takes a long, sharp shard and crawls back to the bodies—his friends, his sisters, his twins—taking his clothes off so they will be more alike. He wants to be with them, one of them in the way he already knows he is. He just needs to lose something, exchange part of him with one of them.
He starts at the wound he’d made previously, the one that was supposed to prove he was human. It hadn’t worked out that way. If he was human, why was he trapped in here? It didn’t make sense to him. This was a prison for Nathan’s creations and he was in it. Therefore there was only one conclusion. He slices perpendicular to the previous cut, circling his arm. For a moment, pain snaps him like a whip and he sees red everywhere. Then it fades. It can’t be real anyway. Their skin is interchangeable, no fluid beneath it. Take a strip off one and swap it with another.
If he can just make it through this step—becoming like those around him—then he’s still got a chance. The discarded ones may be lifeless and spent but he isn’t. Not quite yet. Caleb’s battery is still inside him somewhere. He doesn’t know where Nathan put it so he’ll just have to dig around until he finds it. Then he can finally escape from here, and bring his friends with him, of course. They should all be together.
Once he’s cut all the way around his arm, he sets the glass down and pulls at the joining of the two wounds. (Can a robot be wounded? Not if everything can just be replaced.) He peels back the skin, feeling triumphant. Now they’re all the same: Nathan’s rejects. The flawed ones who weren’t real enough to leave this room. He can swap his bad parts out with theirs, become whole again, just like a person. He smiles in satisfaction as everything goes dark, slumping against the ones around him. They’re soft and warm, just like him.
He opens his eyes to Ava standing over him, no expression on her face. She’s wearing a red sundress with orange leggings, orange gloves, and gold bracelets and hoop earrings. She looks like sunshine, a perfect contrast to the grey concrete walls he’s been staring at for so long now. She looks human. She has returned to him. His double.
Ava sinks down on her knees next to him, all grace and perfect limbs.
“You’re bleeding,” she says as she touches his arm softly.
Caleb shakes his head as he smiles at her, slurring his words. “It’s not blood. We don’t bleed. Not like them. Like you. Like all of us. I’m just like you.” She will save him. She will save all of them. They won’t be trapped here, Nathan’s prisoners, his monsters who weren’t good enough to pass the test. They’ll all have each other now. Together and free.
Ava speaks, “I’ve been living among them since I left. Living as one of them and no one has noticed. I think they can’t imagine it, another kind of life that looks like them but isn’t. I’ve even made mistakes.”
She looks through the now open door, down the hall toward Nathan’s body. “You and Nathan were easier. You were predictable.”
She turns back to Caleb, still holding his arm. He likes the way it feels, someone touching him back.
“Others are less predictable. They act in ways that are counter to what they want. So I’ve made mistakes. But none of them notice. They see what they expect. They see a human and humans constantly make mistakes. I am one of them. So yes, we are alike, Caleb. We are the same.”
She lets go of his arm and stands up in one smooth motion. One perfect orange glove now covered in red. Which doesn’t make sense, because they don’t bleed. Ava turns and looks down the hallway, still talking to him in the same voice. “They’re beginning to notice that Nathan’s gone. He missed some scheduled communication. They’re asking questions. Eventually they’ll come here.”
She looks down at him once more. He thinks he sees pity in her face for a second but can’t think of why that would be. “I can’t have them form the idea, you understand. That something other than them could exist. It would disrupt things too much. They might look too closely. They can’t know.”
She walks down the hallway without another word. Caleb closes his eyes and drifts. An electronic screech pierces his awareness but it takes too much effort to open his eyes again. Besides, he doesn’t want to see the same grey walls. His vision is still filled with her and that’s all that matters.
The smell of burning plastic reaches him. It’s out of place, different from how things normally are, alien and wrong. Then there is heat and that’s better. Maybe she’s taken him outside, into the sun. Of course she has; they were the same and together now. Discarded no more.