The Bargain

I said yes. You will want to know why, and the answer is the same as every answer in this story: I said yes because I was afraid, and because I believed, against all the evidence of my own eyes, that I could control it. I told myself I could build the companion carefully, quietly, with better oversight, with a program I had fixed, and that when she was finished I would have time — time to reason, time to bargain, time to find a way out that did not end with Marina in a grave. I told myself the thing in the trees was right: I owed it. I had made it and run, and the debt was real, and the only way to pay it was to do the one thing I had the power to do.

I was wrong about all of it. But I was not wrong about the debt.

I did not tell Devin. I did not tell Marina. I told the Institute I was taking a leave for my mother's estate — a lie with enough paperwork behind it to hold — and I rented, under a company name I would not care to repeat, a disused fish-processing lab on a small island in the San Juans, reachable only by a boat I learned to run myself. It was the last place on earth anyone would look for synthetic biology: a concrete building by the water with a generator and a freezer big enough to stand in, where the previous tenant had packed salmon and the smell of it had never quite left. I moved my equipment in at night, in boxes marked FILING, and I set up the chamber, and I began.

The work was harder than the first time. That should have told me something, and it did: the first time, I had been moved by the wanting, by the pure, burning curiosity of a man who has not yet learned what his work costs. This time I was moved by fear, and fear is a bad reagent. I made mistakes. I ruined batches. I sat on the concrete floor of that building, with the generator thrumming and the sea making its small sounds against the pilings, and I watched the chamber fail, and I thought about what it meant that I was more afraid of the thing in the trees than I had ever been of my own ambition.

It came to the island twice. I did not see it either time — I found the signs afterward: a window unlocked from outside, a scrape on the wall, a small pile of feathers on the sill, as if it had eaten there and left the evidence to remind me. It was watching. It was always watching. I worked with the knowledge that I was being watched by the thing I had made, and that it was waiting to see whether I would keep my word, and that it had nothing else to do in the world but wait.

Devin found me in January. He had not believed the estate story — of course he had not believed it; he had known me since the bench by the river — and he had traced the company name the way he traced a bad result: patiently, methodically, until he stood on the dock of the island in the rain, with a duffel and a six-pack, looking at the building that smelled of salmon and fear.

“Elias,” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

“Writing a book,” I said.

He looked at the generator, and the freezer, and the windows with the curtains I had put up against the night, and he said, “You're a terrible liar. You always were. The flu, the sabbatical, the estate — you lie like a man who has never needed to, which is why everyone believes you.” He set the duffel down. “I'm not everyone. Tell me what's in the building.”

I told him. Not all of it — I told him there was a project, a line of work I had started in Eugene, that had gone wrong, that I was trying to fix it here, alone, and that he could not be here. He listened, the way he always listened, and then he said the thing I have heard in my sleep ever since:

“Elias, whatever you made in Eugene — I know you made something. I've known since the night on the bench. And I know it scared you so badly that you've been running from it for a year. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stay on this island for two weeks, because it's January and the weather is shit and you look like you haven't slept since Thanksgiving. And I'm going to help you with whatever you're doing, because that's what I do. And at the end of the two weeks, you're going to tell me the whole thing — the whole thing, Elias, not the version you tell the committee — and then we're going to decide together what to do.”

That first night we sat on the dock with the six-pack he had brought, and he told me about the paper he was writing, and I told him about nothing, and near midnight he said, 'You know the thing about you, Elias? You think silence is safety. It isn't. It's just silence.' I laughed, because it was true, and because he had known it for ten years and never once used it against me. It is the last good memory I have of him, and I have kept it the way you keep a coin you found. I should have let him. I should have told him the whole thing that night, in the building that smelled of salmon, with the sea going about its business outside. I did not. I told him the version I told the committee, and I let him stay, and I worked at night while he slept, and I thought, with the particular self-deception of a man who has decided to believe his own lie, that I was protecting him.

The companion was nearly done by February. She was smaller than the first — I had designed her deliberately, out of what I told myself was mercy and what was really fear: smaller hands, softer proportions, a face that would not make a person run. She was not finished. She had a body, and the beginnings of a mind, and she lay in the chamber breathing the slow, regular breathing of a thing that is not yet awake, and I stood over her on a night near the end of the month, with Devin asleep in the other room, and I looked at her, and I understood what I was doing.

I was building a slave. That was the word, and I have never found a better one. I was building a person — a person, with a mind, with a wanting, with the same message I had written into the first — to give to the thing in the trees, the way a man gives a dog to a child to keep it quiet. I was building her to be given away. I was building her so that the thing I had made would go away, and take her with it, and leave me alone, and I understood, standing over the chamber, that I had become the thing the committee was afraid of: a man who makes people for his own reasons.

I destroyed her. I did not plan it. I did not decide it in advance — I stood over the chamber, and I understood what I was doing, and the understanding was the decision, and I stopped the program, and I stopped the pulses, and I drained the medium, and I watched the body in the chamber stop breathing, and I stayed until it was over, and then I cleaned the chamber, and I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and I shook until morning.

I was still shaking when the glass broke.

The window behind the chamber came in with a sound like a branch breaking, and the thing was there — I had never seen it in full light before, and I have never seen anything since that I would rather not have seen: the pale skin, the too-wide face, the yellow eyes with no white in them, and in those eyes, for the first and last time, not patience — grief. It had watched. It had watched through the dark of the island, through the months of waiting, through the nights when I had worked and it had held its breath, and it had seen what I had done, and it came through the window with a sound that was not a scream but something lower, a sound like a machine learning to mourn, and it looked at the empty chamber and it looked at me, and it said:

“You made a choice. Now I will make mine. I will be with you on your wedding night.”

It was gone before I could answer. Gone the way it had come, without sound, through the window and into the dark, and I stood in the building with the generator thrumming and the sea going about its business and the empty chamber holding the cold, and I understood that I had done the one thing that guaranteed the outcome I had been trying to prevent, and that the only thing left to do was the thing I had never been good at: warn the people I loved.

I did not warn them. I went to Devin's room to wake him, to tell him we had to leave, to tell him the whole thing at last — and the room was empty. His duffel was gone. His coat was gone. His boots were gone from the door, and there was a note on the pillow, in his hand, and it said:

Went to the dock to check the boat. Back in twenty. Don't worry, I know a bad idea when I see one, and this whole island is one.

I ran. I ran the way I had run from the subbasement, the way a man runs from a fire, and I was too late. He was on the dock, by the boat, and the thing was with him, and I saw it happen the way you see a car go off a bridge: Devin saw me, and he turned, and the thing took him — I will not describe what it did with its hands; I will not describe the sounds — and I was still running, and the boat was rocking, and the sea was going about its business, and when I reached the dock there was only Devin, and he was gone, and the thing was gone, and the island was quiet.

I called it in. I had to. I called the county sheriff and said there had been an accident on the island, and they came by boat, and they found Devin's body on the dock, and they looked at the marks on his throat, and they looked at me, and they asked me questions, and I answered them badly, and they arrested me.

They held me for three days. They had nothing — no motive, no witnesses, no evidence except the marks, which matched a pattern the state police had begun to call the Coast Strangler, and which the coroner said could not have been made by a man alone in a building with a generator and a smell of salmon. The district attorney let me go, reluctantly, with a warning not to leave the county, and I did not leave the county. I stayed in a motel in Friday Harbor, with the blinds down, and I wrote to Marina — I wrote her the letter I should have written years before, telling her I loved her, telling her I had made a terrible mistake, telling her to stay away from the coast, to stay away from the woods, to stay away from the summer place, to stay away from anything that smelled of my work — and I mailed it, and I waited. Devin's two weeks never came. I never got to tell him the whole thing — only the version I told the committee, which is the lie that has outlived him.

She answered in a week. Her letter was short, and it was Marina: no recriminations, no questions, no fear. It said:

I don't understand the letter, but I understand you. Whatever you've done, whatever's following you, I married you in my heart a long time ago, when we were children, and I'm not going to stop being yours because you're afraid. Come home. We'll face it together, whatever it is.

I read that letter in the motel in Friday Harbor, with the blinds down, and I cried for the first time since my mother's funeral, and I understood that I had been given the one thing I did not deserve, and that the thing in the trees had promised to take it from me, and that the only way to keep Marina safe was to never go near her again — and that I was not strong enough to do it.