“Ladies, be patient,” Ms. Khoury says. She asks them to lower their voices, to please raise their hands and not speak unless called upon. “You’re scaring the girls.”
The instructors sort the mothers and toddlers into pairs, seeming to match them by the skin tone and ethnicity of their real children. Meryl’s child must be biracial. The half-Asian girl belongs to Frida.
“You can hug her,” Ms. Khoury says. “Go on. Give her a hug. She’s been looking forward to meeting you.”
“She has?” Frida holds the girl at arm’s length. The girl could be half Chinese or Japanese or Korean. Like Harriet, it’s impossible to tell. The girl steps closer. Her eyes and brows are perfectly symmetrical. There are no scratches on her skin, no birthmarks. She doesn’t have a toddler’s usual encrusted nostrils. Her eyes look more Asian than Harriet’s. The rest of her face, her bone structure, is more Caucasian. Harriet’s features are soft, her overall air is velvety. This girl has a freckled heart-shaped face and golden skin and narrow almond eyes, silky light brown hair, straighter and lighter than Harriet’s, high cheekbones and a pointy chin. She’s skinnier than Harriet, with sleek hands and long fingers.
She reminds Frida of a little wolf, a little fox. It’s easy to imagine what she’ll look like as a teenager, as an adult woman.
Since Harriet was a newborn, people have complimented her chubby cheeks. Her grandparents call Harriet xiao long bao, little soup dumpling. Growing up, Frida hated her own round face, but she takes such pride in her daughter’s plumpness. She needs to remind Gust to feed Harriet enough fats, to have her drink cow’s milk, not almond milk or soy milk or oat milk. If she returns to find Harriet as skinny as this girl, they’ll never hear the end of it.
“What’s your name?”
The girl stares at Frida blankly.
“Okay, you don’t want to tell me. You don’t have to. I’m Frida. Nice to meet you.”
“Hi,” the girl says, drawing out the syllable.
The girl drops to her hands and knees. She begins to inspect Frida’s legs. She unrolls the hem of Frida’s jumpsuit and runs her finger along the yellow stitching. If only Harriet had behaved this calmly at the visits. Frida touches the girl’s cheek. Her skin feels strange. Waxy. Too perfect. Her lips are dry, whereas Harriet’s are always wet. She sniffs the top of the girl’s head, thinking it will smell oily like Harriet’s, but her scent is rubbery, like the inside of a new car.
The instructors call them to attention. Ms. Russo asks for a volunteer. She selects Lucretia’s toddler, who giggles as she’s lifted onto the instructor’s desk. Ms. Russo begins unbuttoning the girl’s uniform.
“What are you doing?” Lucretia shouts. She looks alarmed as Ms. Russo pulls off the girl’s undershirt.
Ms. Russo turns the girl around. The mothers gasp. There’s a blue plastic knob in the small of the girl’s back. As Ms. Russo wriggles the girl’s arms, there’s a glug-glug of thick liquids shifting. She presses a finger into the girl’s cheek, causing the left side of her face to droop. The girl shakes her head and returns to normal.
The mothers begin edging away from their assigned toddlers. Frida is thinking of outer space again, the part where astronauts leave the spaceship, where they die from lack of oxygen. She cycles through a list of improbable scenarios, certain that she’s hallucinating. This might be the latest blip in an extended fever dream fueled by months of surveillance and too little sleep and separation from her daughter.
Once unscrewed, the knob reveals a hole of about four inches in diameter. Digging inside the hole with a spoon, Ms. Russo ladles out an electric-blue liquid that resembles antifreeze.
“Coolant,” she says. “To prevent the girls from overheating.”
Frida pinches her hands. Lucretia looks unwell. Ms. Russo replaces the blue liquid, dresses the girl, and returns her to a stricken Lucretia.
“Aren’t they amazing?” These children—dolls, Ms. Russo calls them—represent the latest advances in robotics and artificial intelligence. They can move and speak and smell and feel like real children. They can hear. They can think. They are sentient beings with age-appropriate brain development, memory, and knowledge. In terms of size and abilities, they resemble a child of about eighteen to twenty months.
Frida feels as if she’s back in the mint-green room. She’s floating outside her body and full of stupid questions.
“When your doll cries,” Ms. Russo says, “those are real tears. She’s expressing real pain, real need. Her emotions are not preprogrammed or random or designed to trick you.”