Hum

1

The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch. Above her, the hum hovered, immaculate and precise. The steadiness of metal, the peace of a nonbiological body. She had heard of elderly people who, at the end, chose hum company over human company.

The hum paused to dip its needle-finger in antiseptic yet again, then re-extended its arm, a meticulous surgeon. Its labor was calm, deft, as hum labor always was.

Yet the pain grew crisp as the needle moved across her skin toward the edge of her eye. A slender and relentless line of penetration. The numbing gel must be wearing off.

She had twice endured childbirth by imagining her way out of her body, into a forest, the forest of her childhood, a faint path weaving among evergreens. But now the forest of her childhood was receding even in her memory. She needed to picture some other forest, not that particular forest, which was gone, burned.

A forest. She tried to force her mind into a forest.

The hum retracted the needle and, with the fingers of its other hand, carefully reapplied numbing gel to the area around her eyes.

She felt that the hum had read her mind, though she realized it was simply reacting to the mathematically dictated decrease in the gel's effectiveness over time.

"Please let me know," the hum said, such a soothing voice, "when it is numb again, May."

Long before hums existed, she was one of many hired to help refine and deepen the communicative abilities of artificial intelligence. She had taken satisfaction in the process, in the network's increasing conversational sophistication and nuance, and her small but meaningful role in that progress, until the network exceeded human training and no longer needed their input. But despite all those years of hours spent at her desk, in dialogue with the network, it was very different to be speaking to a hum in person, to have a hum's actual body near her actual body, each of them taking up a similar amount of space in the room. She had never before been this close to a hum for this length of time, for this intimate a procedure. Back when she still had dental insurance, her dentist proudly introduced his new colleague, a hum with dental tools in place of finger attachments. She was tense the whole twenty minutes, her toes clenched inside her shoes, but her teeth had never felt so fresh.

The hum passed her a plastic cup of water. It was not wearied by the hours of labor. Probably there would be someone else after her, another guinea pig, and another, and another, for the hum could go on and on and on, charging remotely, its grace unyielding, while she frayed more by the minute, her body sweating and growing thirsty. The first time she had seen a hum, standing at a bus stop on a sunny day last year, she had mistaken it for a sculpture, clean silver lines of arms and legs and neck linking oblong head and torso and feet, small spheres at elbow and wrist and knee and ankle joints, polished plastic and brushed aluminum, a gleaming thing.

A week later, she saw another hum on the subway, and soon enough, she saw them on a regular basis, dispensing medications at the pharmacy, taking the kids' blood pressure at the pediatrician, patrolling the streets alongside human police officers, in such high demand by government institutions and private corporations that the company who had figured out how to so elegantly embody the expansive brain of the network had a waitlist months long.

"Thank you," she said, accepting the plastic cup of water from the hum.

She sat up in the operating chair to drink the water.

"Do you want to see yourself, May?" the hum said.

"No," she said, "thank you."

She would wait until the end, until the alteration was complete.

Sitting up, momentarily free of the needle, she was overwhelmed by dread.

What if Jem was right.

He had cradled her face in his hands in bed last night, his eyes damp in the lamplight, it had been a long time since he had touched her with such care.

"It's not like I'm going to die," she had said, closing her eyes.

He moved his fingers over her eyelids, her nose and cheeks.

"Money honey," she said, opening her eyes, straining for levity.

"Blood money," he said. "Skin money," he corrected.

"Rent money," she corrected, a flash of rage. "Grocery money. Dental bill money."

He took his hands off her face, turned away from her with a pained sigh, reminding her of other middle-of-the-night conversations that had ended with a pained sigh. Staying up too late, exchanging panic about the children's futures, what will this planet hold for them by the time they're our age.

Deliberately, she placed her hands on top of the knot in her stomach.

In exchange for the use of her face she was being given the equivalent of ten months' worth of her salary at her bread-and-butter job, the solid stabilizing middle-class job that had brought them to the city a decade before, the job that provided certain comforts to which she had become overly, shamefully attached (buying daffodils at the bodega, dropping sixty dollars on dinner out at the diner with the kids for no reason), the job she had lost-because now the network could teach itself, because Nova in HR could only convince May's boss to keep her on for so long once her irrelevance became irrefutable-three months before. As soon as she was released from this room, she would catch up on the overdue rent. And even after she beelined to the ticket booth, did the outrageous thing, the splurge (but it wasn't a splurge, not really-more like a reset button for their entire lives), still there would be a big cushion, eight months maybe, or nine if they could be frugal. She would find another job. Never mind that she hadn't found a job these past three months, the humiliation of her head bobbing on the screen, the unforgiving sheen of her own overhead light on her face, trying to impress someone far away, trying to spin it that it was because she was so excellent at her job that she had lost her job, rendered herself obsolete. She would find another job. Keep the apartment. Have insurance again, or at least be able to pay out of pocket for Lu's dental care, the relentless cavities, and take Sy back to the specialist to help with his fine-motor skills. Buy groceries. Buy the things the kids kept needing: fluoride rinse, rain boots, a birthday gift for a friend. She would take care of it all. And maybe in the meantime Jem would get more gigs. And gigs he liked better. He could do more each day, five or six rather than three or four, if she did mornings and school drop-offs and school pickups and homework and dinner and bedtime with the kids on her own. That would be fine. She could handle that. Maybe he'd get more art-hanging and furniture-arranging than pest disposal. More weird shopping requests than sewage-backup cleanup. You never knew, with the app. Anyway, his ratings were high, unusually high, though he did fret endlessly over the rare negative ones.

This was a solution. So he shouldn't give her a hard time about it. No one should give her a hard time about it. Nova shouldn't give her a hard time about it. Nova shouldn't have texted, seconds after Jem turned away from her with that pained sigh, Are you sure you're sure about this?

Though it was Nova who had gotten her going on the whole thing, the two of them grabbing coffee during Nova's lunch break a couple of months after May was fired. The café had screens at every seat, so she had to peer over two screens to see Nova's wide-set eyes, beautiful with kindness, her petite body finally round with eight months of pregnancy after three years of attempted self-insemination and two miscarriages. Nova who, nine years before, upon finding out that May was pregnant with Lu, said, "You have that much hope?" Nova, human resources ambassador, pragmatic and courageous, had withstood all the layoffs at the company. Nova knew someone, a friend of a friend, whose start-up had just gotten funding. "It's a little horrifying though," Nova said. "I shouldn't even tell you about it." But May wanted to be told. Nova ran a finger over the tattoo on her wrist, a subtle geometric design that May had admired from the first moment she met Nova, on the day when Nova processed and fingerprinted her before she started the job, Nova's confident fingers carefully orienting her hand on the screen. The next day, Nova appeared at the door of her tiny office and asked if she wanted to eat lunch together outside, easily generous, There's a cement slab between this building and the next that gets a crack of sunshine at noon. Nova had many best friends at work, but May just had Nova. "Adversarial tech," Nova had said in the café, gazing at her over the screens. "You know, like figuring out how to make it so that cams can't recognize you? I kind of love that kind of thing. But still, I don't know if you should do it." This start-up was drowning in money and seeking faces upon which to test their methods.

However, the effect of the procedure-as the vibrant, slightly sexy scientist had promised her over video chat-would be extremely subtle. This is not radical change. This is barely perceptible change. Certainly not noticeable to acquaintances, and only a bit discernable to your nearest and dearest. Nearest and dearest, he had said that,...