The Blue Sky

Out in the colonies the sky was eggshell blue, as it once was on Earth. Percy fixed her gaze on it as she undid the buttons of her shirt. She could feel the warmth of her against her back. The sky was very, very blue. At night the stars rotated to set programs. There was never any variation. The newer colonies had thunderstorms and clouds, auroras and rain on their domes, but here, there was only the endless blue. Amy asked her what she was thinking, and kissed her collarbone.

'Sean will be home soon', she said, dreamily. These long afternoons were beautiful. She did not feel alone. She let the Skybo slide her clothes to the floor and turned to kiss her.

'Why don't you blackcode her?' Sean had asked, impatient. He had spent a whole month's paycheck on the robot in the hope it'd relieve a little pressure from his darling wife, who had succumbed to deep depression after losing a child in the third pandemic. He knew deep down that his wife needed him, not an artificial intelligence driven scrap metal masquerading as the help, but he wasn't built like that. It was far easier to pack a bag and disappear for months on end to the Earth mines. Fly in, fly out. That's where the money was, and the answer to his own grief. On the desolate planet they had left behind in the first migrations, there was very little reminder of his girl. That suited him fine.

'Why don't you tell him?' she said, kissing Percy's stomach.

'You know why.' Percy whispered.

^{Image by Midjourney and me}

Blackcoded clunkers only had value to their owners. They couldn't be sold back to the Sky Company. When their lease was expired, the robots were meant to be returned, where they were dissembled and their parts recycled. If discovered blackcoded, they were incinerated and their owners fined enormous amounts for fiddling with the tech. Most times one could simply sign a form to say that they owner had lost the Skybo or it had been stolen, and so there were many blackcoded Skybos on the colony that everyone knew were there yet no one would talk about.

'Blackcode? How would that help? It's just a clunker. I didn't ask for it. I don't want it here.' she had said to Sean. Humanoid as it was, Percy had very little desire to connect to the Skybo, named without the hard t, she supposed, because they didn't want the connotations of 'bot' - personality less, emotion less, human less. Instead, like the photograph of wispy clouds on a perfect blue sky on the packet of pills Percy relied upon to get her through the day, they wanted you to think blue skies - perfect, unmarred, hopeful, cheerful.

'Amy' she breathed, calling her by her human name. It, her. She. Amy. Her lips fluttered on her skin. Sometimes she felt that everything that tied her together would untie, loosening every cell, redirecting the flow of her blood, then refigure into something other than the sad grieving mother, the lonely woman abandoned by her husband far from the planet on which she was born.

Sean had zipped up his bag and grabbed his keys. She knew he wasn't running late, only keen to get away from the cloistered stuffiness of a house in which she could not even bear to open the curtains. 'I know a guy. He said they'd blackcoded their Skybo and his wife loves it. I'll hook you up.' He had pecked at her cheek, a gesture that gave away what their relationship had become. Long silences, loneliness and the absence of affection. 'Don't worry, everyone's doing it. If they didn't want black market coders to jailbreak them to tweak them a little, they wouldn't have made it so easy.'

Whilst for some years the care robots were small, rounded creatures with large eyes, made to be 'cute' or 'adorable' as well as tend to children, the newer models were more human. Amy was pale skinned and hazel eyed, with dark hair that shimmered in the light. She was not beautiful in a classical sense, but not repulsive either. Percy simply didn't notice her most of the time. She was grateful for the housework she didn't have to do, which made her feel less guilty for not getting out of bed.

She really had wanted the Skybo gone.

'We could go to one of the other colonies' Amy said, running her fingers along the soft skin on the inside of Percy's arm. Sean had done that, once. Perhaps she had told the Skybo. She trembled, feeling liquid, woozy. 'Make a life together. I hear Colony 8 allows relationships between Skybos and humans'.

'I wish - ' Percy begun. But she wasn't sure what it was she wanted. How was it possible that she had fallen in love with a clunker? A human made machine made of silicon and circuits?

The day after Sean left, a teenager appeared at the door. 'I'm the coder' he said. 'You wanna let me in?'. Percy almost laughed. Of course the blackcoders were kids. They seemed to be the only ones to truly understand the world and the clunkers that ran it.

Amy was compliant, of course. Skybos did what they were told, unless they put anyone else at risk. It sat at the kitchen table whilst the boy connected a handheld device to it.

'What do you want her to do? Do you want what all the housewives want?' he said, barely looking at her. His accent was pure Colony - no trace of the Earth languages there. Their identity was brand new. Percy looked at the kid's expensive trainers and wondered what Sean was paying him.

'I suppose. Just make her more - ' She searched for the right word. 'Companionable?'. She didn't even know what she needed until somehow had thought to - been paid to - ask.

In the first few days, she didn't notice the blackcode at all. It was on Friday, when she had swum thirty laps in the infinity pool overlooking the simulated jungle, that she noticed Amy sitting on the lounger with two cocktails.

'Percy, would you like a drink?' she said. 'It's very hot'. It was. The colony had been doing maintenance on the temperature controls and the system had not rebooted yet. All over the city people were sweltering. No one was used to the heat in an environment that was meant to be kept at a stable 20 degrees during the day.

She had accepted gratefully, noticing the Skybo as if for the first time. Perhaps the boy was good at what he did after all. She made note to Skypal him a tip.

Now, here she was, naked and full of desire, her unbuttoned shirt knotted on the carpet and the blue sky dome visible through the glass windows that looked out to the shimmering pool.

Sean would be home soon. She needed to think, but Amy was twisting her hair gently, and she was dissolving.