Chariya was subject number twelve out of twenty-five. She didn’t seem that different: on the passive side, but less out of it than others we’d seen. She was young, but not the youngest in the program. Her apartment was run down, but not the worst we’d been to in the eleven previous interviews. She was another knocked-up child of immigrant parents, living in the Tenderloin in a dirty studio apartment where the smell of sewage rose through the damp floorboards. An orphaned nineteen-year-old who’d fallen between the cracks until Child Protective Services took an interest in her, and now they were thinking about taking her unborn child away.
The lock on the front gate had been busted open. The stairwell was littered with condom wrappers, empty bottles of vodka. Corwin and I walked up the stairs to Sherry’s third floor room.
Corwin, my RA, was in his second year at Berkeley. It was our first time working together, and I was still unsure of his reliability. He was assisting me in a study of the unmarried, low income pregnant women who were the test subjects of the Gonzalez-Fischer initiative. I had the public outcry over the initiative to thank for my funding. The outcry was mostly due to the unease that follows any novel government program, the painful wages of innovation, but the media lapped it up. Hello research grant.
As Chariya let us in, I put on my best face for dispassionate field work. It was just as I’d lectured Corwin in my first year class on research methods: Get a sense of the location, the subject’s home environment. Keep eye contact at all times, whenever doing so was within the bounds of cultural sensitivity. Confine everything to the realm of sharp, observational professionalism.
“Chariya,” I said.
“Sherry. My friends call me Sherry.” Her voice held no trace of an accent.
“Sherry. Sherry, Kurusarttra, is that right?” I read her surname off hesitantly, but she didn’t correct my pronunciation. “I’m Professor Helen Mandelson, and this is my research assistant Corwin Reynolds.”
She didn’t respond. I continued with the information I had off my sheet. “Let’s see, you’re nineteen, born in South San Francisco, currently unemployed, didn’t finish high school.” My eyes hurried down the form. “It says that your parents obtained political asylum when they emigrated from Thailand. Do you have any other family in the area?”
“My parents are dead. I went to the orphanage when I was thirteen. Lots of foster homes.”
I heard Corwin behind me, taking notes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “So no siblings, no extended family?”
“No.” She was sitting on her bed, a dirty mattress on top of a low frame. Her skinny arms were wrapped around her knees, her black shirt and jeans too big for her. “I already told the social worker all of this. What more do you want?” She opened her arms and let her feet fall to the ground. In the folds of her shirt you couldn’t even see the bulge.
I made note of her emaciated figure, bloodshot eyes. Possible drug addict, possible malnutrition. Her fact sheet said no arrests, never checked into a clinic. But she was still young. “Sherry, we’re not from the city, we’re from the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley, conducting a study. You can tell us anything and it won’t be used against you, we won’t share it with the police, or anyone else.”
She looked at me with those dark eyes. Her straight black hair covered her shoulders.
“Is there anything else you want to add?” I asked. “What you do with your time, are you seeking employment?”
“Derek, my boyfriend, he comes by sometimes.” Our gazes were padlocked together. “He helps me pay for this place. I go out, sometimes, sometimes I just stay here. I watch TV, eat, sleep. That’s about it.”
I nodded. Corwin cleared his throat behind me. “The technicians will be coming in to install the unit very soon,” I told Sherry. “Have they explained its function to you?”
“They’ve told me that it’ll look like a baby.”
“Have they explained that it will act as a surveillance device? That it will observe everything you say and do around it?”
She nodded. “Will it feel warm? Will it spit up, and do all those baby things?”
“Yes,” I said, “it will feel real. It’s been designed to provide as realistic an experience as possible.”
“Is it like having a real baby?” Her eyes grew wide. “When you hold it, do you feel like you’re holding a baby?”
“I’ve never had a child.”
There was a knock on the door behind us. “That must be the technicians,” I said, “it’ll only take the men a few minutes to set up. Corwin, could you let them in?”
Corwin opened the door, looking over his shoulder at Sherry all the while. The technicians walked in, dressed in dark uniforms, moving with practiced efficiency. One was stouter than the other, but he worked more quickly, as if to compensate for his companion’s more graceful movements. They set up a crib and changing table, both made from the same lightweight plastic.
Sherry watched blankly, until the larger one bent down to reach under her bed, holding a small dark plastic case. “What are you doing down there?” she said, standing up.
The man looked up at Sherry. “Sorry, ma’am, I just,” he mumbled, confused. Talking didn’t seem to be in his job description.
“He just needs somewhere to put the transceiver,” Corwin said. “Somewhere you won’t step on it.”
It goes under the bed so that she’ll forget that it’s there, I thought, so that they can maintain the illusion that it’s a real child she’s caring for.
“Well, don’t put it there,” she said, shaking a little, “don’t go down there. I keep things under there.”
“Here,” Corwin said, taking the box from the confused technician’s hand. Corwin handed it to Sherry. “They’re not trying to look through your stuff, this just needs to go somewhere safe.” Corwin flicked two switches on the case, brushing his hand against Sherry’s wrist and letting it rest there for a moment. “It’s all primed,” Corwin said, “so don’t push any of the buttons.”
I frowned at Corwin. He was always showing too much eagerness with the subjects, always too willing to engage. Providing emotional inputs only muddied the results.
The room felt crowded and stuffy with five people in the small space, and Corwin’s easy intimacy with Sherry made everyone else feel more uncomfortable. The technicians picked up the pace, completing their work in only a few minutes. They headed out the door with the same speed they had entered, only pausing for a moment to let the larger one tip his hat to Sherry.
Corwin and I left soon after, leaving the girl alone in the room with the device. As we walked down the stairwell we could hear its first wails, piercing the urine-stained walls.
Misha, the woman I’d met with at Child Protective Services, had demonstrated the device to me with pride, as if she’d invented it.
“Every aspect of this machine is functional,” she said. “When they put it in its crib at night, it’s drawing power from the outlet, recharging its battery packs. And the battery packs help make it heavy enough, see, so it’s within normal weight. It can actually convert the formula you feed it into some of the oils and fluids that it needs to function, and it uses the rest to make its waste product. Isn’t it phenomenal?”
I brushed my hand across the device. It wiggled its pudgy arms back at me. Its skin was off-white, like a Caucasian complexion had been mixed with faint hints of gray and red. “Misha,” I said, “how did you pick the skin tone?”
She smiled again. Her smile unnerved me. “Well,” she said, “it’s the Catch-22, isn’t it? Make it white and people will say you’re ignoring diversity. Make it darker-skinned and suddenly you’re stereotyping.”
The device made a piercing squeal, and I saw a small string of drool forming at the side of its mouth. Misha looked at me apologetically. She flipped a switch on the wall and the device fell dead.
“You couldn’t have made each one different, I suppose,” I said.
“That would have been ideal, but for this prototype run the cost would be prohibitive,” she said, her voice growing defensive. “We measured the involuntary emotional responses in a group of women to a series of simulated models with different skin types and features. You can’t go too gray without looking ashy, which doesn’t evoke the correct responses at all. We tried to find something acceptably dark. We settled on this, which I think is a nice compromise.”
How would people react to a doll of indeterminate race, I wondered? Was it white enough for idealization, dark enough for rejection? “The whole point of these is to test maternal aptitude, am I correct?”
Misha nodded.
“So it seems as though the emotional response would be of particular importance. You don’t think that reaction to the skin color might skew your results somewhat?”
“It seems like that’s for you to tell me, Professor.” She smiled again. Her teeth were pale and reflected the room’s fluorescent lighting.
I smiled back at her, but kept my lips closed.
Misha continued with her sales pitch. “We’ve received local and federal grants for the program. A lot of people around the country are very interested in what we’re doing. We’re reshaping the role of Child Protective Services, moving into proactive measures, instead of just responsive. We’ll know how to allocate resources, where we'll need counselors, where we might recommend adoption, and where, if it comes to that, the child will need to be moved into state custody. The point is, we’ll be able to get children out of abusive situations before they’re even exposed to them.”
As she talked, I looked away from Misha’s face and into the device’s eyes. The lids were peeled back and motionless, staring forward with a cool stillness that made me shiver.
I walked through the dimly lit corridors of Barrows Hall in the evening, past the blank wooden office doors with tiny square windows set at eye level. I reached the office that Corwin shared with three other graduate students. Of the four desks pushed against the walls of the small room only Corwin’s was occupied. He had his back to the door and the lights off, his face illuminated by the blue glow of his computer monitor.
As I entered the room I flipped on the light switch.
Corwin didn’t move, but said, “Hi, Professor Mandelson.”
“Corwin. Have you finished reviewing that latest batch of footage?”
“Not yet.” He made a motion with his mouse hand, and the image on his screen began skipping faster through the frames.
Each “baby” device had two wide-angle cameras, one hidden in an eye, the other in its rear. Our agreement with CPS gave us access to all the footage they collected, as well as audio data from the units’ microphones. All the participants in the study had signed privacy waivers, saying that we could use the data in any research publication as long as we preserved anonymity.
When Corwin turned toward me, I saw that his eyes were red from lack of sleep. “I’ve got notes on last week’s data through Thursday. I’ll have everything through Saturday done tonight.”
He offered me a notebook, which I flipped open to reveal pages of his small script. It looked like the scratchings of a bird. “You should try to get more sleep,” I said. “It’s late.” I came closer to him and peered at his computer. “Which subject is this?”
“Subject number twelve, that’s Chariya,” Corwin replied.
A moment later, the girl moved into the frame. The feeds from the two cameras ran simultaneously, but when the device was laid on its back the rear camera feed showed only black, and Corwin kept that image minimized in the corner. Sherry walked to the edge of the room. The wide-angle lens kept her in the frame but distorted her body oddly, so that she seemed taller and thinner than she already was.
She took a bottle from the table, poured it into a small pan. She heated the pan, using the single burner electric stove that CPS had bought for her. Corwin slowed the frame rate back to normal, and her motions became less frantic. She filled the bottle, fumbling to screw on the cap, and brought it to the cradle, her body shifting in size as she came closer to the crib.
Sherry’s voice came from the speakers, breaking the leaden silence of the office. “Food for you, little one.” She looked directly at us now, with that strange quality with which one person looks straight into another’s eyes. The bottle came toward us and narrowly missed the camera lens. There were sucking noises as the device closed its mouth on the rubber nipple. We could hear a faint mechanical whir, far too soft for Sherry to notice, but audible on our filtered and amplified feed.
“I’d sing you something in Thai,” Sherry said, “but I don’t remember what my mother sang to me.”
“She’s doing well,” Corwin said in a hushed voice, “she’ll pass for sure. Hell, they should give some of the other children to her.”
“Isn’t there a boyfriend?” I asked. “Has he shown up on tape?”
“He stops by once in a while, never stays for long.”
“Does he have any interaction with the device?”
Sherry was humming something. The sound resonated oddly, the low frequencies clipped by the microphone and the computer speakers.
“He asked what it was the first time. Usually he tries to ignore it. One time he said it creeped him out, during their, um, coitus.” Corwin pitched his voice to give the word an ironic flair.
“I know what I can sing to you,” Sherry said to the device, her voice coming out from the speakers, “it’s a song Greg used to listen to. That’s Greg, my last boyfriend, not the Greg I knew at Edgewood, when I was littler.” Her voice quavered a little, getting lower and rougher. “Oh, sweet child,” she sang, “sweet child of mine.”
I watched Corwin as he stared at the screen. His eyes had a glazed look to them, from exhaustion or something more.
“Don’t stay up much later, Corwin,” I told him over Sherry’s gentle singing. I turned and left the office.
Over the next few months the work wrapped me up, the way a new project always does. I was on sabbatical from teaching for the semester, so I was free to lose myself, working late nights and sleeping in the office. At times, it seemed as though there was nothing in the world outside of poring over Corwin’s notes, watching excerpts from the recordings, and logging information for eventual publication. I knew even then that the work would make my career, make papers and books and, God willing, daytime talk show appearances and features in national newspapers. Visions of prestigious awards and a cushy tenured position at Harvard danced before my eyes with a certitude that should have been troubling.
On occasion, I would watch Sherry’s video. She had bonded with the device more thoroughly than any of the other subjects had. She attended to its every need with care and warmth: diapering it, feeding it, burping it. She would spend nights awake with it, rocking it gently as I watched through its eyes. She would sing to it the secret name that she had given it, until its lids shut in an approximation of sleep.
I sat in Sherry’s apartment for our biweekly interview, the November light outside peeking in through the window. She was six months along now and showing, the curve of her distended uterus marking a strange departure from her still thin frame. Her face had more color than when I’d first met her, a rosy blush like fermenting grapes.
“He’s sleeping through the night now, sometimes,” Sherry said, “and he doesn’t cry as much. He’s really getting much better behaved in general. He’s less fussy about eating, too.” She was holding the device in her lap, supporting its head with one arm. It had the same fuzz of dark brown hair as when the technicians had first brought it in. Sherry looked down at it lovingly.
I jotted down a note on my yellow legal pad. “How are you feeling? Has anything changed in the last couple weeks?” I asked her.
“Well,” she said, then paused, “It’s a little strange.” She held a lock of her hair between two fingers and twirled it. “My breasts have been leaking some. I tried to,” she stopped, still playing with her hair. “I tried to let the little one suck some, just to see, and you know, I think he liked it.”
“Hm.” She had become more open over time, more willing to share these little details.
“But it was just a little bit,” she said hurriedly, “there wasn’t much there. And he can’t really suck that much, his mouth doesn’t hold on too well.”
She seemed to be normalizing the device’s presence, I wrote in my notes. I continued: It fit with the general trends we’d observed in her psychology, that she demurely accepted whatever demands were forced upon her by authority figures. She didn’t just submit, though. She went so far as to develop affection for whatever was forced upon her, hence her strengthening bond with the device. Stockholm syndrome type, clearly.
I took a moment to stretch my hand, which was cramped from gripping the pencil.
“Have you ever thought, Professor, milk is the breast weeping, crying tears of love. That’s what it felt like, like crying for love.”
I looked at my watch. “Sherry, I need to head off. Thanks again for your help. I’ll send Corwin in to do next week’s interview, and then I’ll be back in two weeks.” I nodded at her, and Sherry beamed.
“What the hell,” said Corwin, “when did this place get fancy enough to fire all their real waiters?”
Corwin and I were out for a quick dinner in the middle of a long evening. It was the best Chinese restaurant near campus despite its dingy decor. The Buddha statue in the shrine by the cash register stared at me over his bowl of oranges. Our table was so caked with spilled droplets of grease and sauce that it looked varnished.
I watched the clumsy robot waiter shuffling between the tables. “I don’t mind them,” I said, reaching for the beef with broccoli. “As long as they don’t try to bring in robot chefs.”
“I don’t know, they creep me out. It’s those expressionless faces, like they’re secretly plotting the downfall of the human race.”
I chewed and thought for a moment. “It's a common feeling. We can accept things that are very inhuman and things that are precisely human, but close approximations frighten us.”
Corwin watched the waiter’s back, glowering at it. “Whenever I look at them, it’s like something inside me just gets twisted around the wrong way. Everything in me that’s human rebels.”
I snapped my chopsticks on to a piece of carrot. “They’re not that different from the baby devices, though. And some of the women have certainly formed some kind of bond with them. Just look at number nineteen, or number twelve, Sherry. Is there a difference in perception between individuals, or between genders, I wonder?”
At the mention of Sherry’s name Corwin clamped his mouth shut, chewing rhythmically. We ate in awkward silence for a moment.
“Do you ever get the feeling that the women only think they love the devices because they don’t know any better?”
I frowned at Corwin. “Corwin, please try to limit your use of value judgments in work matters. I’ve warned you about this before.”
After that, we didn’t speak until the check came. I watched Corwin tap his chopsticks against the table in a strict rhythm, keeping time for some music that I couldn’t hear.
Several weeks later, I was making my nighttime pilgrimage from the coffee lounge back to my office when I saw Corwin in the hallway. His face was bruised on the left side, just in front of his ear, and a fresh cut ran from one side of his chin to the other. I stopped to stare at him. In the fluorescent interior lighting, the blood on his cheek was dark brown. It had been wiped at haphazardly, so that it looked like a broad smudge of chocolate. It was then that I noticed the blood on his shirt, the droplets scattered around his broad chest, garish on the light fabric.
“Corwin, what happened to you?” I asked him.
“I fell down some stairs,” he muttered. He tucked his neck down to his chest and tried to step around me.
I turned and sidestepped, not letting him pass. “Did this just happen? Are you badly hurt?” I looked around, but there was no one else in the hallway. “Should I take you to a doctor?”
“Professor, I’m fine.” He tried to shoulder past me again, and I reached for his arm. As his hand swung past me, I saw skinned knuckles with large scabs forming on them.
“Corwin, you’re in shock. What happened to you?”
He turned his head toward me. His face was red. “I don’t want to talk about it, Professor.” His pace quickened, and he turned down a corridor, leaving me in the center of the hallway, alone.
I didn’t see Corwin the next day, or the day after. I called his cell phone and got no response. I buried myself in work, trying not to wonder or worry about him. Hours and hours of footage sped by me in a daze of data collection and rapid analysis.
Three days later, Corwin reappeared. He didn’t come in to see me, but passing his office I glanced in and found him back in his chair, staring at his computer screen as always.
He offered no explanation. We continued with the work.
Sherry was well into her third trimester. The glow around her was now in full force. It pervaded the room. I marveled at the difference between this larger, smiling creature and the waifish girl I had interviewed four months before.
“You seem happy today, as always,” I said.
She shook her head demurely. The device was asleep in its crib, but her arms were crossed as if still cradling it. “I feel well,” she said. “I’ve been in very good health ever since he came into my life.
“You know, Professor,” she said, “can I tell you something? I haven’t told this to anyone.”
I nodded to her.
“Right after I found out I was pregnant,” she said, “even before I saw a doctor, before I got visited by the social worker. When I found out, I was so angry, I just sat in my room and cried. I mean, it was sort of my own fault, I thought, since I had just let him do it, whenever he wanted. And then, when my boyfriend came by later, I asked him for some crystal, more than I’d ever taken before, than I’d ever seen, more than a gram. He wanted to stay, to, you know, but I made him leave.
“I took it, wrapped it in a square of toilet paper, and I swallowed it all.” Sherry was shaking a little as she spoke, “I think that I wanted to die. I didn’t want the baby to die, I just wanted to die, I think.
She looked up again at me then, and smiled. “But this little one, he makes me happy, and I haven’t done anything bad since then, and I’ve felt good all the time.”
I smiled back at her, looking up from taking notes detailing her narrative. It would make a perfect anecdote for an article in one of the popular journals. For Nature, or Science, if we really made it.
“Sherry,” I said, “you know that the program is almost through. The social workers are going to want to help you transition out of this. You’ll have your own baby soon.”
Sherry looked down again at her arms. “Professor,” she said. “I don’t want them to take him away from me.”
I looked down at my notepad again. “Being frightened of change is natural. Social services will help you adjust to the challenges a real child will present. But you’re doing great.”
Sherry looked away from me, shaking her head.
It was around then that Corwin began to appear on Sherry’s tapes outside the interviews he conducted for me. I first noticed while reviewing footage that Corwin had already gone over. I was scanning for good sample moments of Sherry with the device to play for a departmental presentation. We had just completed the first paper to come out of this work, and were preparing to send it off for publication.
I scanned through a week-long block of recordings, glancing at Corwin’s notes for the relevant days as I went. His handwriting was difficult to read, and at times downright cryptic. For Tuesday the 15th he had scribbled into the margin, “Aftnn: subj. sees byf. 2145. key?”
Sherry was slow on her feet. At times she struggled to stand up with the weight of her body. I increased the video speed, making her motion appear even more awkward. She looked like the tin man of Oz, like her joints would make metallic clanks with each step. She set the device down in its crib, and I moved the playback down to normal speed.
The audio track kicked in, and I heard a knocking sound from the speakers. Sherry lifted herself and headed toward the door. As she moved her belly stretched out, distended by the lens, expanding grotesquely. The door swung wide to reveal Corwin’s face.
I put down Corwin’s notebook and peered at the corner of the screen, where Sherry and Corwin stood. Neither said anything for a moment, then Corwin entered the room. With a flurry of motion, he pounced on Sherry, attaching his face to hers. His hand groped at her shoulder, his leg kicked the door shut, the slam so loud that I jumped in my seat. I watched them intently.
Corwin tore her shirt from her body, peeled off her jeans. Sherry didn’t resist, allowing him to have his way. He buried his lips in her black hair, rubbing her stomach until his hand disappeared below its curve. She planted small kisses on his bare chest and let him roll behind her. Their moaning filled the room, and I hurriedly turned off the sound. I had lost track of where I was, in my office at one in the afternoon, undergraduates in the hallway peering at me with quizzical looks. I took up a new notepad and a pen, and began taking notes.
Sherry and Corwin were on the bed, in the corner of the image, their writhing bodies distorted and disproportionate. He thrust into her with a simple, regular rhythm, his head bobbing along in time. Corwin’s eyes were closed, but Sherry’s were wide open, and I saw that she was still staring at me. Staring with the same intensity that she’d stared at other times, when she was peering down into the crib, the same loving expression on her face, the same words on her lips.
Five minutes, and it was over. Corwin lay on the bed, spent and drenched in sweat. Occasionally his chest would twitch and shiver, as if he had just been shocked. Sherry got up quietly and bent herself over the crib. She was naked, her skin olive-colored in the light filtered through the camera lens. She lifted the device to her chest, until all I could see from the front camera was her skin, pores and the fine hairs growing from her flesh.
A week later, Corwin came into my office. He looked ragged, his hair in a tangle. The third button from the top of his shirt was undone. “Professor, I need to talk to you about Sherry.”
I spun my chair around to face him. I had not talked to him about what I’d seen on the tapes, not given a hint of it. What would I have said? Should I have lectured him on professional ethics, on dispassionate research? Or should I have disciplined him, dismissed him from the project, or from the school? Did he know that I had seen?
He stood in the doorway, his frame backlit. In that moment, he looked stronger than he ever had to me before, his chest seemed broader and his spiky blond hair stood on end.
“What about her, Corwin?” I asked.
“She doesn’t want to give up the,” he stopped himself, “the device. Child Protective Services wants to collect them when the program ends, but she doesn’t want to give it up yet.”
“Yes,” I said, “she told me that.”
“She needs your help. We need your help,” he said.
“We?” I asked.
“Yes, we're going to be together. I, we, decided that we care about each other, that it's more important than any of this.”
I said nothing. I held my arms tight together.
“I need you to help me convince them that she can’t give it up yet, that she’s not ready to, mentally. We’ve had more experience with the emotional impact of the project than they have. They’ll listen.”
“My opinion is that she can adjust, especially once she has her real child.”
He looked away from me. “It’s not about that. I’m not sure. It’s not something she can replace, it’s different for her.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Why are you doing this, Corwin?”
Corwin tapped his foot on the floor quickly and steadily. “It’s just, I care about her very much. She’s special, there’s something in her that makes me feel more, more alive somehow. I don’t understand it fully. When I started seeing her, you have no idea, it was so hard watching her with her boyfriend on the tapes. And then the time he found me at her apartment, even though they had broken up already. He was drunk, I thought he might kill me. I think I hurt him pretty badly, Sherry told me to leave. I came here afterward, when I saw you in the hallway. I just wanted to sit in my office and watch her all night long, so that I could feel like she belonged to me,” he trailed off. His breathing was heavy.
“Do you really think that this will be good for her? Keeping that thing around?”
“I think that this is what she wants. I’m trying to help her.” He looked at me, his eyebrows tightened. “I need you to feel something for her, just for a moment. I need you to help her, too.”
“You know I can’t do that, Corwin,” I told him. “Besides, you’re not in love with her. You’re in love with the research, in love with the project. I know the feeling can be overwhelming when you immerse yourself in something like this.”
He stared at me, breathing so loud I was afraid he might hit me.
“And she doesn’t need you, Corwin,” I said. “She has a child already, she doesn’t need another one.”
His voice was quieter than ever, but full of menace. “I need you to do this for me. That’s all I’m going to ask you for. But if you won’t do it, then I’ll go public. I’ll tell the journals and the papers that you knew your graduate student was sleeping with your star subject, and you didn’t do a thing about it. It’ll hurt me worse than you, but no one will dare publish you after that.”
I thought I should feel insulted, or frightened somehow. He had threatened me, threatened to destroy everything I’d worked for. But instead I hardly felt at all, just a small something inside of me that knew that he was right, that I had no choice but to do what he asked. I shook my head and looked down.
“I’ll do it,” I said, “if that’s how it is.”
Corwin turned and left my office. That was the last time I saw him outside of a video screen.
They took the device away from Sherry two weeks later. The men had to pry it from her fingers, and on the tapes I watched her weep as they removed it from her apartment. I had begun dropping hints to Misha at CPS that Sherry was a special subject, that she warranted further attention and study. They didn’t cave until Sherry showed up at their offices the day after they took it away, weeping and tearing at her hair. They rushed me over to calm her down, and I convinced them that the only way to stabilize Sherry was to give her back the device.
The tapes still came to me, piling in my mailbox every day. I made sure of that. On the tape, I watched as the technicians brought it back to her apartment, and I watched as Sherry wept with joy. The device was on standby, so only the rear camera was active, but I could see Corwin reassemble the crib and Sherry lovingly place the device back into it. As she put it down, the eyes opened and the front camera feed turned on. I head a burble of pleasure, and for a moment I couldn't tell if it came from Sherry or the device. Corwin peered into the crib, staring straight into the camera eye, and I stared back unflinching. I’m not sure if he knew I was watching, but he probably guessed. He would have disabled the recording, I’m sure, but Sherry wouldn’t let him hurt it.
Corwin didn’t go to see her as often, once every day or two. He would pop in from time to time, talk to Sherry for a while, always bringing her gifts of pickles, or ice cream, or tiny clothes in pink or blue. She would put them away, leaving them hidden in cupboards, untouched. She would smile at him wordlessly. She saved her talking for the device.
I took detailed notes, recording it all in my notebooks as a follow-up, an in-depth case study to supplement the previous work.
I watched as Sherry went into labor at 11:34 PM, sitting up in bed without a sound. She reached for the corded phone that Corwin had made her install and calmly called a taxi, then called Corwin to help her out the door.
The room was empty for nearly two days, the only noise the occasional prerecorded cries that the device made when it was hungry or cold. I watched it all, sitting for hours, the footage of the empty room that was now so eerily familiar.
Sherry returned on the third day, without Corwin, holding a bundle in her arms. “Corey,” she said to the bundle in her arms, “welcome to your new home.” She walked stiffly into the room. “And say hello to your brother,” she said, as she laid the infant down into the crib next to the device.
