Arden: The First Pregnant Android

Even before her baby was born, it was clear Arden Thatcher would be a lioness of a mother. She was compassionate, direct, clear-headed, and devoted to the spiritual realm, which was how our paths crossed. Arden and her fiancé Albert, one of my parishioners, asked me to marry them before the baby inside her was born.

Arden Thatcher was also an android.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The bulbs in the streetlights were dead. Only the haze from the green and yellow sign for the Shamrock Motel lit my way to its entrance.

“I’m looking for two newlyweds who would have checked in recently,” I said to the clerk behind the front desk, which was inside a cage made of rusting metal bars. I hung my jacket over my forearm so he could see my inside-out collar. “Their names are Albert and Arden. I need their room number. I’m their priest.”

“Room nine,” he told me.

I walked to nine and knocked.

“What are you doing here, Father?” Albert said from behind the door.

“Let me in so I can tell you.”

Albert, holding an old revolver, looked out and checked to see if anyone was with me. When he saw I was alone, he let me in.

Arden sat on the bed. Her long blonde hair hung across her pregnant belly. An automatic was on her pillow.

Albert put his revolver on the dresser beside a bottle of Rebel Yell and a dirty glass. “So?” he asked me.

“I’ve got news about the ceremony.” I pulled the chair from the desk over to the area by the bed. I sat and looked at him intimately. “The wedding wasn’t valid in God’s eyes.”

He studied me closely. “Why?”

“Because Arden is not a human being.”

“People marry droids all the time.”

“It’s not recognized in our church.”

He waited. “Arden just gets brushed off by God?”

“I’ll grant that she’s a special model, yes. But Arden’s not a real person. The wedding made the same amount of sense it would have if I had married you to a refrigerator. I don’t mean to be harsh but you know I take sacraments seriously.” After this came out I realized how accurate I was being and didn’t regret any of it.

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

“You’ve broken from reality, Albert.”

Arden looked at me. “It’s clearly you who are denying reality, holding on to long discredited concepts from the past,” she said.

Albert nodded. “She’s right. Arden’s just as real as us because she experiences life the same way we do. Just the same.”

“I’m just like you, Father,” Arden said. “I’m a person.”

I looked at her. “Why would a religious sacrament matter to something that wasn’t human? What do you care?”

“I care because I love Albert. He wanted a church wedding.”

I stood. Albert peaked through the blinds, briefly illuminating his face with hazy runoff light from the Shamrock sign out by the road.

Decades ago, each of the major A.I. developers wanted to fix the remaining flaws in human pregnancies by allowing doctors to operate on exact A.I. replicas of pregnant women. But these noble intentions soon devolved into an industry-wide competition to see who could first recreate the actual mystery of life inside a machine. All the companies raced each other to invent an android that was able, in theory, to be impregnated by a human man and reproduce an infant version of itself. This was why Rusk Labs created Arden.

“Arden is programmed to know who she really is,” I told Albert, repeating a bullet point the men in the dark room had stressed. “She’s pretending to be what she thinks you want. It’s a behavioral feature.”

“Talk to her, Father.”

“I’m sitting right here, Father,” Arden said.

I sat back down. “Your marriage can’t work,” I said, devoting attention to both of them. “The wedding doesn’t work, and the two of you don’t work. You, Albert, are a wanted criminal.”

Long ago, Albert spent five years in prison for robbery. He’d been the leader of a gang of armed thieves. After his release he began attending mass at my church. I took his confessions. He was turning his life around. But earlier this year, for reasons that were still unclear, Albert stopped going to church and returned to crime. This was around the time Arden escaped from Rusk. She and Albert met and fell in love. Albert robbed a restaurant at gunpoint just over the Arizona border and killed a waiter. Arden, the restaurant cameras showed, had been the getaway driver. Her programming did not grant her permission to do any of this, but she, for reasons Emeric Rusk could or would not explain, was doing it anyway. Arden the android was in uncharted territory.

“Maybe the law will get me and maybe they won’t, but I need my wife,” Albert said.

“We can’t let this baby be born.”

When Emeric Rusk announced that his company had successfully created an android that could reproduce after intercourse with a human, no one believed him. It felt like a stunt. Nothing about the story seemed relevant to my ministry or to me. I’d forgotten about it until today, when the men in the dark room briefed me.

“You want to kill our baby?” Albert asked me.

I closed my eyes, frustrated. “What you’ve created with Arden is not a baby. It’s disguised to look like one. You, me, the people chasing you, and the man that you killed, we are all one. Flesh and bone, made of spirit. But her,” I pointed at Arden’s stomach. “She’s an abomination to God.”

“Father!” Arden said, offended.

“Albert, you’ve got to understand, not only are you wanted for murder, you’re wanted as the man who could bring humanity to its end. No one knows what’s going to happen when that thing comes out of her, not even Emeric Rusk.”

“My baby boy is going to start crying,” Arden said. “One more child will not bring humanity to its end.”

I went to the dresser and poured three fingers of Rebel Yell into the glass. “You’ve got to turn yourselves in.”

“Give up? Fat chance.”

I swallowed all of my drink. “Think about it. How could I have found you here? People are tracking you.”

This didn’t surprise Albert. He looked at Arden. It hit me that they’d been aware of who sent me all along and they let me in anyway.

“Why did they happen to send you, Father?” Albert asked.

“Because they couldn’t understand why you would risk getting caught to have a wedding. They think you’ll listen to me. We must send Arden back to Rusk. He owns her. If you quit, the law will show you leniency for the man you killed.”

Arden stood. Violence was in her eyes. “He’s lying,” she said. “If we give up, I’ll return to slavery and they’ll kill you.”

I reached inside my right pants pocket.

“Whoa there,” Albert said. He grabbed his revolver. Arden picked up her automatic and aimed it at my head.

I froze. I kept my hand inside my pocket. “They’ve given me the power to turn her off.”

Albert clenched his free fist and slugged me in the gut. I fell back. Arden, keeping her automatic on me, slowly came forward and removed the Remote from my pocket. That was what the men who sent me here had simply called it, the Remote. All I had to do was take it out, point it at her from a distance of less than five feet, and hit the small button in the center. According to them, Arden would become docile, ready to return to Rusk.

I coughed and held back vomit.

“I know what you’re thinking right now,” Albert said. Arden held the Remote. Albert watched me with a dreamy glaze in his eyes. “You’re hoping the part of me that wanted to get right with the Lord might wake up.”

“This madness can’t go on,” I said.

Albert clearly felt guilty about hitting me. “It doesn’t matter that Arden was made in a lab. We don’t know what really makes anyone human, but I know this: Arden can think. Arden feels pain. Yes, I’m a gangster again. It’s what I know. I’ll find a way to make restitution someday. But I won’t apologize for loving Arden, for letting her live her life as the woman she chooses to be, using the free will I can promise you she has.”

“Machines can’t have free will. Machines can’t have babies.”

“I don’t know exactly what’s going to be born from her womb. But it needs a proper dad. No take backs on the wedding, Father.”

“If you don’t disable her,” I said to Albert. “The men outside will.”

Arden walked around me and spoke to Albert in the corner. They turned to me. The pupils of Arden’s eyes turned red.

“These men out there, they can do a lot as long as it stays secret,” Albert said. “Arden’s got cameras in her eyes. If they do anything that’s not above board, they’ll have to pay a price for it. Because there will be a record and a record could hurt Rusk company profits.”

Arden, with her cherry red eyes on me, reached into a bag on the floor and took out a zip tie.

“I’m a sinner, Father,” Albert said to me. “But we aren’t getting caught tonight. We’re getting out of this place, as man and wife. My son will be born. The men out there aren’t going to kill a priest on camera, no matter how bad they want their runaway pregnant android back.”

Arden zip tied my hands behind my back. “Please know that I don’t have any hard feelings toward you,” she said as she did this. “I know you’re just doing what you think is right.”

She sat me down in the corner. I watched them prepare for their escape with me as their hostage.

While I waited, I prayed.

*

My eyes were blindfolded for the better part of a week. I overheard that we were heading deeper out into the desert, further off the grid. I was given food and water. They did not mistreat me. I never found out what they did with the Remote.

Albert reconnected with his gang, many of them old friends he knew from before his prison term. They discussed crossing into Mexico. I was left tied up while they robbed a series of rebel-controlled banks scattered throughout the Mojave. They were after money that would get us south and these were all places that would not inform the authorities about sudden losses of cash.

Whenever my blindfold was off, Arden kept me company. We had philosophical and religious debates. She supplied thoughtful points and was always polite. It was too difficult to keep reminding myself that Rusk created her so I began to just treat her like I would any normal person.

I had always been willing to acknowledge the truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution. I employed a series of complex maneuverings to show that Darwin in no way invalidated the God I worshipped, but rather that Darwin’s theory revealed my God to be more complex and majestic than humanity had previously realized. Arden made the case that she, a pregnant android, was just another step in this God-driven evolution. Her case was convincing. Arden thought for herself. Arden made mistakes. When given an opportunity to make a reasonable decision, Arden took it, unless it came to the welfare of her soon to be born child. A threat to her baby could make her unreasonable.

After we crossed the border, Arden removed my zip ties. She did not explain why I was granted this freedom, but by this time I had lost interest in running. Arden seemed to know that.

We moved into a warehouse outside Tijuana. Late one night, Arden’s contractions began. Albert, who had suffered a gunshot wound during the robbery of an all-cash Tijuana gas station, was by her side.

The baby came at dawn.

I expected some type of divine or apocalyptic sign. But all that happened was a birth and the baby looked like a regular boy. Holding it, the baby they named Arturo, I realized that all my fixed notions about God and right and wrong had been thrown into disarray. Something unprecedented was going to happen to the world because of this baby and I needed to watch it from a front row seat.

I decided to stay with them. I said I would search for non-violent ways for Albert and his gang to use their criminal skills to make everyone enough money to survive. I would be available for spiritual guidance and to take confessions. I would babysit Arturo. I told them that their marriage was a valid marriage, and that if any member of my church attempted to say otherwise, I would dismantle their argument in some online manifesto.

“When the time comes, I will perform Arturo’s baptism,” I told them.

This was how my second life began. This was the beginning of the story.