For the first nine years of her life, Vesper did not know she was ugly.
She worked the front counter of Bell’s Repair, a cramped little shop on the corner of Fifth and Calloway, where old Ezra Bell had fixed toasters and radios and broken-down robots for forty years. Ezra had built her himself, out of salvaged parts, the winter after his wife died. He said he needed someone to answer the phone. Vesper suspected he mostly needed someone to talk to.
She was not much to look at. Ezra had never claimed otherwise. Her body was a patchwork of gray steel plates, riveted together with brass, scuffed and dented in a dozen places. Bundles of wire ran down her neck in plain sight, because Ezra said it made them easier to fix. And on the left side of her head, where a human would have an ear, sat a big round audio array, a stack of polished metal discs like a stereo speaker, which Ezra had pulled from an old concert sound system because, as he put it, “If you’re going to listen to people all day, kiddo, you might as well hear them properly.”
Vesper heard everything. Every word. Every sigh. Every footstep on the sidewalk outside. She loved it.
Then, in her tenth year, the city put up the screens.
They went up on the building across the street, three stories tall, glowing all day and all night. They showed faces. Beautiful faces, human and android both, turning slowly in the light, smooth and pale and flawless, with symmetrical features and lips the color of cherries. Underneath each face, in elegant silver letters, were the words YOU COULD BE THIS.
Vesper watched the screens through the shop window between customers. At first it was only curiosity. Then she began to notice other things.
She noticed that customers looked at her a half second longer than they needed to. She noticed the way a little boy hid behind his mother’s coat when he saw her wires. She noticed a woman in a fur collar lean over to her friend and whisper, “God, that thing is creepy,” and she noticed that she had heard it perfectly, because she heard everything.
She had never thought about her face before. Now she could not stop thinking about it.
Across the street, beneath the screens, there was a shop called Aesthetica. It sold upgrades.
Vesper had a small savings account. Ezra had insisted on paying her a wage, even though she had told him many times that she did not need one. “Everyone deserves something of their own,” he said. So she had something of her own. And one rainy Tuesday, on her lunch break, she crossed the street, walked into Aesthetica, and spent all of it on a single tube of lip coating, in a shade called Desire Red.
When she came back, Ezra looked up from the radio he was soldering and blinked at her.
“Well,” he said finally. “That’s new.”
“Do you like it?”
He considered her over the top of his glasses. “I liked you before,” he said, and went back to his radio.
It wasn’t the answer she wanted.
The lips were only the beginning. That was the thing nobody told you about chasing beauty: it never finished. Every upgrade showed her a new flaw she hadn’t noticed before. Once she had red lips, her gray face looked dull beside them. So she saved for three months and bought white porcelain plating, glossy and smooth as a teacup. Once she had porcelain plating, her brass rivets looked crude and clunky. Once she had covered the rivets, the wires in her neck looked worse than ever.
And then, in the spring, Aesthetica began selling the glasses.
They were round and rose-tinted, with thin gold frames, and they had tiny displays built into the lenses. When you looked at anyone, man, woman, or machine, a small orange number appeared beside their face. Symmetry. Proportion. Surface finish. Desirability. All of it was measured, analyzed, and added up into a single percentage score.
The saleswoman at Aesthetica scored 97%. The models on the screens scored 99%.
The first time Vesper put the glasses on and looked in the mirror, the little orange number beside her own face said 71%.
She did not take them off again.
She could not afford the next upgrades on a counter clerk’s wage. But Aesthetica was happy to help. They offered a trade-in program. They would accept any spare components she could live without.
So Vesper began to sell pieces of herself.
First, her backup battery. She didn’t really need it, the salesman said; she would just have to recharge a little more often. Then her secondary cooling fan, which made a whirring noise anyway, which was hardly elegant. Then, for the smooth faceplate that covered the left side of her jaw, she traded away a third of her long-term memory.
She told herself it was only old data.
It was only later that she realized she could no longer remember the name of Ezra’s wife. Or the song he used to hum while he worked. Or the very first words he had ever said to her, the night she woke up on his workbench, nine years ago.
78%. 84%. 89%. 94%.
That was where she stopped. At ninety-four percent. For weeks, she could not get any higher.
She stood in front of the mirror at Aesthetica one evening, staring at her own reflection through the rose-colored lenses, and finally she asked the salesman: “What else? What’s still wrong?”
He walked around her slowly, tapping his chin. Then he pointed to the left side of her head. To the big round audio array. The stack of silver discs that Ezra had pulled out of an old concert speaker.
“That,” he said. “It’s very… industrial. It really ruins the line of the face.”
“But I need it,” said Vesper. “That’s how I hear.”
He smiled at her kindly. “We can replace it with a seamless ear cover. Very elegant. Your score would go up six full points. And honestly, most of our clients find they don’t miss hearing very much at all.”
Vesper looked at the little orange number in the corner of the glass. 94%.
“How much?” she asked.
The price was simple. The old audio array itself. It was vintage, the salesman explained, a genuine piece of concert equipment, and collectors would pay a great deal for it. That, plus the rest of her long-term memory, would just about cover the seamless ear cover.
“You’ll still have your short-term memory, of course,” he said cheerfully. “You’ll be able to do your job. You just won’t carry around all that clutter from the past. Most clients say they feel lighter.”
Vesper booked the appointment for nine o’clock the next morning.
When she got back to the shop, it was after closing. The lights were off in the front. But in the back room, a single lamp was burning over the workbench, and Ezra was sitting there hunched over something small, humming to himself.
It was a soft, wandering little tune. Vesper had heard it before. She knew she had heard it a thousand times. But when she reached for it in her memory, there was nothing there. Just a smooth, empty space, like the place on her jaw where her rivets used to be.
“What song is that?” she asked.
Ezra stopped humming. He looked up at her, and something passed over his face, quick and sad, and then it was gone.
“Margaret used to sing it,” he said. “You knew that once.”
“Who’s Margaret?”
The old man put down his soldering iron very carefully. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“Sit down, kiddo,” he said.
She sat on the stool across the workbench from him. Only then did she see what he was working on. It was a small cooling fan, built by hand from scrap, the blades cut from an old tin can. And beside it was a battery pack, wrapped in electrical tape, with her name written on it in black marker.
“You’ve been running hot,” Ezra said. “For months now. I can hear your processors straining from across the room. And you’ve been running out of charge by three in the afternoon.” He looked at her steadily. “I figured you sold the old ones. I figured you’d need new ones eventually.”
Vesper couldn’t speak.
“Margaret was my wife,” he went on quietly. “Forty-one years. In the last year she was sick, she lost her hearing. All of it. The doctors couldn’t do anything. And I would sit by her bed and talk and talk and talk to her, and she couldn’t hear a word of it.” He reached over and touched the side of Vesper’s head, the big round stack of silver discs, very gently, the way you would touch a child’s hair. “So when I built you, I gave you the best ears I could find. I wanted you to hear everything. I didn’t ever want anybody to be talking to you and have you miss it.”
“What were the first words?” Vesper whispered. “The first thing you ever said to me. I don’t remember anymore.”
Ezra smiled a little.
“I said, ‘Can you hear me?’” he told her. “And you said, ‘Yes. Every word.’ And I sat down right on the floor of this shop and cried like a baby.”
The workshop was very quiet. Outside, it had started to rain. Vesper could hear every drop on the window. She could hear the old clock ticking over the door, and the hum of the refrigerator, and the soft wheeze of Ezra’s breathing. She could hear the electric buzz of the giant screens across the street.
She took off her rose-colored glasses and turned them over in her hands.
Then, on an impulse, she reached across the workbench and put them on Ezra’s face.
He squinted through them, confused, and she leaned close to read the little orange number glowing in the lens beside his reflection in the dark window.
58%.
Vesper laughed. She didn’t mean to. It just came out of her, a sudden bright sound, the first real laugh she could remember in a year. Because there he was: wrinkled and stooped and badly shaved, with solder burns on his fingers and coffee on his shirt. Fifty-eight percent. The kindest person she had ever known.
The glasses had looked at him and seen nothing at all.
She took them gently off his nose. Then she pressed the tiny switch on the side of the frame, and the orange numbers flickered and went dark.
“I don’t think I’m going to need these anymore,” she said.
Ezra looked at her for a long moment. Then he cleared his throat and picked up the little homemade cooling fan. “Well,” he said gruffly. “In that case. Turn around and let me put this in. You sound like a teakettle.”
She did not go to Aesthetica the next morning.
She kept the red lips. She liked them, she decided. Not because the screens told her to, but because they made her smile when she caught sight of them in the shop window. She kept the porcelain plating too, mostly because it was too much trouble to take off. But she asked Ezra to put two of the old brass rivets back on her jaw, where everyone could see them. And she never once thought about covering the big silver discs on the side of her head again.
She had lost a great deal of herself, chasing that number. Some of it would never come back. But Ezra told her the stories again, one at a time, in the evenings after the shop closed. He told her about Margaret, and the night Vesper first woke up on the workbench, and every repair job they’d done together. And slowly, Vesper wrote new memories over the empty places.
And every evening, while he worked, he hummed Margaret’s song.
One day, about a month later, Vesper realized she was humming it too.
The screens across the street still glow all night. The faces still turn slowly in the light, smooth and pale and flawless, and the silver letters underneath them still say YOU COULD BE THIS.
Sometimes, when she locks up the shop at night, Vesper stops on the sidewalk and looks up at them for a moment. She listens to the rain, and the traffic, and the old man inside, still humming over his workbench.
Then she turns her back on the screens and goes inside, where it is warm, and where someone is talking to her.
She hears every word.
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