Asylum on the Moon
From the oval window of her room Claire contemplated the stainless-steel cityscape stretching to the horizon. The asylum was perched on the rim of one of the Moon’s broad craters. Its basin was covered with sleek skyscrapers, residential quarters, museums, and landing ports. Between these ran the lava-like rivers of coruscating light that constituted the traffic of the great metropolis, Luna.—Latin word for moon; root of lunacy, lunatic, etc.—I’m sure there are plenty of jokes about that downstairs on the oh-so-sane planet Earth, she thought. Or should I say ‘upstairs’? Claire turned away from the window. All relative, I suppose.
Sometimes Claire would press her face against the reinforced glass to look at the catwalks skirting the asylum below. Clean, sterile, utterly soulless. This remote institution was how the government of the Terran Confederacy of States (TCoS) treated the criminally insane in 2178. Claire fogged the glass and smudged away a peephole. Through it she contemplated the blue planet whose thin blanket of clouds were currently obfuscating Southeast Asia.
Claire didn’t understand the complicated and (to her mind) poorly-worded laws that had been cited over the years to justify keeping her detained here. She’d been a minor, only 16 years old, at the time of “the incident”, that hilariously quaint euphemism the doctors were fond of using when discussing the murder.
Why the Moon? Why not Earth? Perhaps their reasoning was that, if they kept her here, the TCoS Government would be able to avoid the possibility of one of the more rebellious states claiming custodianship over her. It wouldn’t do for her powers to fall into the wrong hands. More of a curse than a power, she thought massaging her temples. In former times I would have been burned as a witch.
The desk in her cell was littered with papers. The shelves along the walls of the room were stuffed with notebooks, loose leaves. From time to time, the doctors took the papers away. They were very polite about it—asked her permission even. She no longer cared. (“Sure,” she would say with a high-handed flick of the wrist.) Whatever they took they returned a day or two later.
Claire lost interest in the sketches once she’d finished them. But in moments of boredom or during those frequent bouts of depression, she would thumb through the older sketchbooks and binders, scrutinizing the illustrations—rereading the crabbed marginalia, checking the mathematical formulae that filled the margins. She found it bizarre—a bit disheartening, even—that, although she had always had this gift, she had not progressed in the technique of her art since she was a girl. She had simply plateaued after the murder.
As a child Claire had dreamed of becoming a roboticist. It began the day her mother gave her a robotic kitten. But the kitten never had the chance to “grow up,” which in the 22nd century was a very real process for synthetic animals, which were designed to “age” and follow the natural cycles of life (sans reproduction). Unfortunately, a very real pit-bull had mauled Claire’s kitten “to death” (funny way of putting it). Her mother told her that she would buy her another “just like it.” But Claire had responded that the new kitty wouldn’t be just like it since its programming would differ and its synthetic fur would be new. Her mother had simply turned away in exasperation.
Although Claire was obsessed with robotics and artificial intelligence in general, her passion was androids and their uncanny ability by the middle of the 22nd century to mimic human emotions—so convincingly, in fact, that they walked and lived among humans and were often mistaken for them. It was literally the stuff of science fiction. Claire stood at the forefront of the research that had contributed to this revolution in emotional response programming (ERP).
What had alarmed the TCoS Government was that some androids had been discovered modifying their own ERP programming. They were becoming masters of deception. And some of them almost seemed to have souls—to have wills of their own. But Claire could see through their disguises.
Claire was born with a heightened intuition—an internal sense that enabled her to pinpoint the regions of the human brain where the emotions were seated. And it wasn’t just the common emotions—like sadness, happiness, grief, or joy that she knew all about. For example, she could tell precisely where in the right and left hemispheres of the brain the subtle tightening of the muscles around the mouth originated when “incipient unease” was felt. The fluttering of an eyelid, betokening “a sense one is about to be betrayed,” originated (she knew) in five clusters of neurons in the right hemisphere that fired simultaneously to generate this response.
Android skin was synthesized in special laboratories on the Moon. These laboratories had perfected cells by making them imperfect, which is to say that the labs programmed the cells to deteriorate and decay, even as the same laboratories—with a workforce of android laborers (an irony lost on no one)—conducted groundbreaking research in reversing the aging process in humans.
One time in the asylum’s common room, Claire surprised a nurse who had been making fun of her behind her back. He had been talking to two colleagues: “I think it’s funny,” he said, “that someone so utterly devoid of emotion claims to understand how emotions are formed.”
“You don’t find it funny,” Claire said. “You find it ironic.”
The nurse went silent. He and his colleagues stared sheepishly at her.
“Irony is complicated, dependent on context—on relationships. It’s localized primarily in the right hemisphere. . . Oh, wait, now you’re embarrassed—and a bit surprised that I overheard you. You’re feeling a rush of adrenaline, and your left temporal lobe is positively glowing.”
The pages of Claire’s sketchbooks were covered on one side with drawings of faces or the components of faces—eyes, mouths, chins. Sometimes the faces were in profile. On the other side of each page, Claire took pains to illustrate the sectors of the brain and/or clusters of neurons affected by the specific emotion she was attempting to isolate and describe.
“I don’t know how I’m able to do this,” Claire told the doctors. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m not a robot myself. I’ve been here on the Moon long enough. Perhaps you all have replaced me with an upgrade.”
Claire heard the footsteps on the hollow plates outside her door. An access code was entered and the door swished open.
“Claire?”
“Who else would it be, Dr Randall?”
He laughed nervously. Claire cackled by way of response.
“Your tittering is amusing,” she remarked. “And, to be honest, quite welcoming to me. It’s familiar. You’re the only doctor here I like.”—But even as she said this, she studied his eyebrows, pupils, and jaws to see if they moved as a human’s should. They did.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” Dr Randall said.
He was trying—rather ineptly Claire thought—to tell her something. But he wasn’t sure how she’d react. She could read his emotions as if she’d programmed them herself.
“You’re dithering, Dr Randall. Out with it. What is it you want to tell me?”
“There’s someone here to see you.”
“Someone here to see. . . me? Who on Earth—notice I say ‘Earth’—would fly all the way here to see me?” Claire knew exactly who it was. Dr Randall sensed she knew.
“She’ll only meet with you if you’re willing to.”
Dr Randall regarded the drawing Claire had been working on: a face in profile with clenched jaws. He looked up at his patient. “You don’t have to see her—”
“It’s been 19 years and my mother has never once expressed any interest in hearing my side of the story. Now you’re telling me she’s had a change of heart? Why wasn’t I told she was coming?” Claire looked at him suspiciously. “How is it that she suddenly is here on the Moon?”
“She just wants to talk to you. We’ve prepared a place where the two of you can meet in private. You can explain to her what happened that night. The night you killed your stepfather.”
Claire’s jaws clenched as tightly as the face in the illustration. “I’ve told you what happened that night. I’ve given my testimony to the courts, to the lawyers—at least six? Seven times? And I’ve told you, Dr Randall. I’ve told you and your supposedly clever colleagues what happened that night.”
Claire knew she was being a bitch. Dr Randall was a good man. He didn’t deserve to be talked to in this fashion. She looked at him imploringly. “Over the course of 3 years, when I was a child, my stepfather groomed me. . . ” Claire shivered as she thought of the thing that had been her stepfather. “He would touch my hair—tell me he would make me the most powerful woman on Earth. He was overly fond. I think you know what I mean by that. He told me that if my mother ever found out about the conversations the two of us had, we would both be in trouble. . . I was so young!” Her eyes brimmed with tears. “I defended myself as best I could!”
“You stabbed him thirty-seven times.”
“I wasn’t counting!” she yelled. Then she smirked and turned to the window. She studied Dr Randall’s reflection in the glass. “I murdered him. I’ve admitted it—I’ve never denied it.” What she wasn’t telling Dr Randall was that her stepfather had been an android himself. Her mother knew this and had been in solidarity with that renegade band that sought to break away from human society and live on their own. There had been four androids that night. They had replaced her stepfather’s corpse with a synthetic one composed of his supposed DNA. It was only after everything was in place that her mother had contacted the authorities to report what she had done.
Claire was trying to keep it together. She turned back and faced Dr Randall, raising her hands. “I can tell by the way your eyes are moving,” she said, “that you still think I overreacted that day. . . The truth is, once I started stabbing him, I couldn’t stop. I was a juvenile. It’s not fair what happened to me. I was sick, but I’m better now. I should be released. My mother was the one who put me here. She said I’ve always been hysterical, delusional.”
“There’s nothing to corroborate your claim that your stepfather attacked you.”
“Was I supposed to wait until he assaulted me?!”
“So you’re admitting he never assaulted you?”
Claire laughed and tore up the drawing she had been working on. “I can’t tell you what really happened that night, because you wouldn’t believe me. It sounds so insane. . . . But what he did to me was abuse—psychological abuse.”
Dr Randall went to the door. “This was a bad idea.”
“Wait,” Claire said, touching his shoulder. She was worried. If she were to admit that what she had done was morally wrong, it would be construed as a confession—she would be adjudged to be of sound mind. Far from being released, she would be transferred from the asylum on the Moon to one of the prisons on Earth. And that would be it. She would simply be disappeared.
“I’ll meet with my mother,” she said. “Forget what I just told you. He did abuse me—physically. I’ve been in this asylum so long that I’ve started believing the counter-narratives you and your staff have been brainwashing me with since I was brought here.”
Claire looked up at the speakers in the ceiling. “Can I ask you a question, Dr Randall?” (She had to know if he was on her side.)
“What’s your question, Claire?”
“Why does the asylum play those subliminal recordings at night when I’m trying to sleep?”
“There are no subliminal recordings being played at night, Claire. You’re imagining them.”
He couldn’t look her in the eye. Not even Dr Randall could be trusted. “I want to see my mother,” she said.
Dr Randall pointed to the door. Claire exited and walked with him down the white corridor. The well-behaved patients like Claire were segregated from the violent psychotics, and from the general population.
Claire had been born in North America, in an area formerly known as the state of Illinois. Her father, an engineer, had died in an automobile accident. He had been a collector of antique 20th century cars and had lost control of one of these while joyriding along a country road. Claire’s mother remarried a year later. Her new husband was a quiet man, a computer scientist—or so everyone had been led to believe. Claire had loved her father but distrusted the newcomer from the moment she first set eyes on him. She knew he was an android because of that subliminal hum—the same sound the asylum played at night in her quarters when she was trying to sleep. Claire would not have been able to hear the hum had it not been for her gift. The hum was how the androids communicated with one another.
The halls of the asylum were ample, clean. Claire presumed this was due to the institution’s being under the perpetual scrutiny of the Consortium, who funded and staffed it. The Consortium (a TCoS-aligned body) was itself answerable to Earth’s Global Human Rights Council.
The long narrow windows in the corridor looked out onto the city: Luna. Music was banned from the asylum because no one knew which tunes a patient might find triggering. However, acoustic therapy was used, but only under the strictest conditions. The woman at the reception desk was obviously an android. Claire wondered if the rest of the staff knew this. If they did, they didn’t seem to care.
The automatic doors slid open and the two of them entered the holographic community yard. Claire wondered why the asylum’s board of trustees had felt the need to simulate a perimeter fence with hurricane wire at the top. There was even a guard tower built in the corner of the fence. Maybe the staff feared that if patients thought they were in an actual open-air glade (with no fence), they’d be inclined to run off into the woods. There were probably a few nut jobs here who, if they were able to get to the tree line, would grope around looking for a concealed door behind the holographic trees, thinking they could somehow find a shuttle bay and make their escape. Anyone that deluded probably deserved to be here.
Holographic technology had not quite advanced to the point where it could reproduce comprehensive environments that “held together”—environments with tangible surfaces formed of light. The only way to simulate that sort of thing was to project holographic environments—“virtual realities”—directly into the human mind with the assistance of gloves, goggles and special suits. So the lawn of the community yard was only partially holographic. The grass was artificial and synthetic. But the forest beyond the fence, and the birds darting about in the sky overhead were illusory, although they seemed very real and very beautiful.
There was a drab brick shack in the middle of the yard that Claire and Dr Randall were approaching. It looked uninviting. When they reached it, Dr Randall opened the front door and stepped in. It was small, sparsely furnished. There was a kitchenette, a small den, and a tiny bathroom. It almost looked like an ancient break room.
“Claire,” Dr Randall said. She looked at him without really seeing him. “I’m going to leave. And your mother will come in. You have two hours. . . And in the spirit of full disclosure, we’re not recording you. Your mother was insistent on that. She’s been looking forward to this meeting and hopes it will be a success. She wants to get to know her daughter again.”
Claire nodded and tried not to laugh at the corny “She wants to get to know her daughter again” comment. So hackneyed; right out of a potboiler.
Dr Randall left.
Claire went to the couch and sat down. The springs creaked and this made her cover her face and snort.
“It’s good to hear you laugh again,” a woman said. “To hear you. . . happy.”
Claire turned to the door Dr Randall had exited. Her throat went dry and her skin crawled.
The woman at the door looked the way Claire remembered her mother looking. But that was the problem. She looked exactly the way her mother had looked 19 years ago when Claire saw her last. It was an android. Claire could even hear that faint subliminal hum, the androids’ secret language. It approached her, its face melting into an expression of maternal love. But then it drew back. It sensed Claire’s unease.
Claire analyzed the confusion and doubt that played on creature’s countenance. Claire had described, delineated, formulated these expressions in her work. She had developed the sub-processes that enabled androids to simulate these simulated emotions. The android shed a tear but wiped it away hastily. Claire grinned in awe and horror. The asylum had stolen Claire’s work. They had been using her to create this monster.
“Remember when you were a little girl?” the android asked. “We would make cookies together. You made the cookies look like the faces of clowns. And then you would explain to me what each face was feeling.”
The android gestured to the kitchenette, and went to the counter. Claire moved to the other side of the counter. There was a cutting board. The dough was spread. The cookie cutters had already been used to shape the outlines of twelve faces; round ears, pointy hats. The android began handing the cookies one at a time to Claire who put them on the greased sheet.
“Why did you come here?” Claire asked. She was determined to get to the bottom of this.
The android shrugged. “I. . . ”
“It’s brilliant,” Claire observed. “You’re faltering, inarticulate. You react with hesitancy, uncertainty. You have doubts. But do you feel these emotions, like I do? Like a human does?”
“Interesting you say that, Claire. I’ve spent the last 19 years asking myself whether you feel emotions the same way a human does. I’ve been trying to figure out how you could regard what you did so cooly—so emotionlessly. The person you killed felt these same feeling that you claim to understand so deeply. But have you ever regretted what you did? Are you capable of feeling shame or guilt?”
Neither spoke for a full 10 minutes. The alarm dinged. The android removed the cookie sheet from the oven and put it on the cooling rack.
“There’s still plenty of dough,” Claire observed. “We could make more.”
The android smiled and seemed relieved.
“Your programming’s incredible,” Claire said incredulously. “I didn’t expect you to respond with relief after a full 10 minute hiatus and a refusal on my part to answer your rather insulting questions. . . The appropriate emotion to evince would have been frustration. But when I said ‘we could make more cookies,’ you smiled. Your shoulders relaxed, as if you were real. It’s remarkable.”
The android seemed hurt. Its eyes fluttered. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You always said such confusing things like that when you were a girl. It’s why I called you my little prattle-box—”
“Don’t you dare do that!” Claire said. “Don’t say things like that! It’s not your place to use such familiarities with me! Either you or your designer consulted my mother. Then you recorded that little bit of private banter—that expression of endearment that only the two of us would’ve known. What’s this about? Why are you here? Are you trying to get me to admit that what I did was wrong?!” Then she whispered, “Did they send you?”
The android frowned. The meeting wasn’t going according to plan. Claire watched as the machine went to the couch and primly sat down on it. “Let’s wait for the cookies to cool,” the android said. “Then you can put your buttercream faces on them and give them whatever emotions you see fit.” The intonation of the voice and the leaden expression of the android seemed to say, “there you go, missy.”
Claire sniffed. “Sarcasm,” she said.
What were they up to? This whole thing was some kind of set up. Dr Randall must’ve lied when he said they weren’t recording her. He must be collaborating with the androids. They were trying to get Claire to slip up, to confess her alleged guilt. She could no longer bear it. This was a blatant violation of her civil and human rights. She would initiate a legal process, ask to speak with the Consortium's inspectors. But the inspectors weren’t scheduled to visit for at least 2 months. She had to act now—to force them to come to the asylum so she could talk to them.
In addition to the other baking utensils, there was a small knife for cutting the edges of pastries. Claire seized it from the table and closed the distance between herself and the android in less than 3 seconds. She stabbed its throat repeatedly. It screamed and a jet of oil shot into Claire’s face. She kept stabbing and slashing it until she could see the wires and valves under the skin. Black oil spurted onto the cushions and onto Claire’s uniform. The android’s cries alerted the staff who burst through the door and entered the shack.
Two orderlies seized Claire and pulled her off the android. The machine writhed on the ground in its death throes. It emitted a horrible, almost human, gurgle as it arched its back and turned its face toward Claire. Dr Randall cried out and started to groan. Sparks shot from the android’s eyes as a clot of oil oozed from its parted lips. The legs of the android quivered spasmodically, then it was still.
Claire howled in grief. It was only now that she felt grief. The android had been the pinnacle and sublimation of all of her years of research. It had been perfect. It had even had a soul—she just knew it. She regretted what she had done and fainted away in anguish.
The orderlies dragged her from the shack to the maximum security ward. She was stripped, showered, and given a new uniform. She lay sedated on a bunk in a padded cell.
On the other side of the tinted glass, the director of the asylum outside of Chicago studied the manila folder. The patient had suffered paranoid delusions since she was a child. She thought she lived in the late 22nd century and was a patient in an asylum on the Moon. Indisputably a savant, Claire had withdrawn further into her strange world after her father’s death in an automobile accident in 1975.
Claire’s stepfather, an accomplished computer scientist, had attempted to draw her out of her shell. He had encouraged her to become an engineer. No one knew what had driven her to kill him. Claire’s mother had been devastated, and acceded to the court’s ruling that her daughter should be confined to an asylum for the criminally insane for the duration of her natural life. But on account of Claire’s good behavior, there had been talk of releasing her.
The director closed the file and sighed. Poor Dr Randall. He would lose his license for this. All he had wanted to do was help. But this idea, this scheme of bringing Claire’s mother to the asylum and leaving her with her daughter unattended—this would never have been authorized by the court—or the board of trustees for that matter. Now Claire’s mother was dead. And one of the orderlies had tendered his resignation. The experience had been too traumatic for him. With a heavy heart, the director signed the last of the forms and dated it: 22 May 1996. When he looked up, he saw that Claire was awake. She was standing directly in front of him, staring fixedly into the tinted glass.
She couldn’t see through it. She touched the glass. It was then that Claire noticed that there was still oil from the slain android under her fingernails. She pretended not to notice it in case they were filming. She knocked on the glass. Then she pounded on it with both fists. She saw her reflection and gasped. There was no end to the asylum’s ingenuity. That wasn’t her reflection looking back at her. It was another android, one made to look exactly like her. It even moved the way she moved.
Claire lowered her eyes and whispered very quietly. She quickly looked up to see if the android had heard what she had said. It winked slyly to indicate that it had. The craftsmanship of this one was beyond anything Claire could ever have dreamed of. She began communicating with it by moving her lips without talking, speaking in that language—that subliminal hum that was the androids’ language. The android understood her and responded in kind. At long last, after 19 years of utter loneliness, Claire had found a friend.
I wanted to thank Winston Malone of The Storyletter XPress for publishing this story on his Substack almost a year ago. He convinced me to set up a Substack of my own at the time, and I finally did it! It’s been fun.
I absolutely loved this story the first time around and it's still wonderfully paranoid and chilling on subsequent reads. Unreliable narrators are some of my favs, but they're rarely done well. You nailed it!
Amazing!