By the end of the first tenday, I had become a friend and playmate to the younger children, an assistant to Bisur in his magical workshop, and an assistant to Mipina in her writing. Razuko, however, remained uninterested in socializing and did not seem to want much help.

When I first arrived in Bisur’s house, I kept my hologram the same as it had been for the last year or so since I last changed my outfit. But as I observed the clothes worn day to day by Bisur’s family, and by their occasional guests at dinner and by Bisur’s clients, I realized that the green sundress my hologram wore was somewhat masculine-coded, in its colors and pattern if not in its cut. In the upper classes, it seemed, both sexes wore robes or what Americans would call dresses, but the genders were distinguished by the cuts, colors and patterns, as well as by how they wore their hair. The working classes, to judge from Bisur’s servants, the postman, and the egg delivery man, typically wore shirts and trousers or overalls, but the colors and patterns followed the same gender divide as the upper classes: men wore cool solid colors or abstract designs such as plaids or stripes, while women who could afford it wore clothes embroidered with animals, flowers, fruits, coral, and trees, and less well-off women wore warm solid colors. My green sundress was thus considered something in-between, not placing me clearly in people’s minds as to my gender. So after a few days of gathering data on local clothing customs, I altered my sundress to a peach-color and added “embroidery” of some of my favorite Earth animals, not all of which were known to the people of Modais — quokkas, hedgehogs and cats. (Yes, it’s true that nearly all AIs love collecting pictures of cats. I would have loved to have a cat in the house, but alas, Laura was allergic to them.)

My hologram’s loose long hair was already considered sufficiently feminine; both sexes wore their hair long, but men braided it while women wore it loose.

* * *

By the end of the first tenday, I had become a friend and playmate to the younger children, an assistant to Bisur in his magical workshop, and an assistant to Mipina in her writing. Razuko, however, remained uninterested in socializing and did not seem to want much help. He had no friends come over and hang out, as his younger siblings sometimes played with the neighborhood children. Once per tenday, when his father gave him his allowance, he would go out and visit the bookstalls; he always returned with a stack of penny dreadfuls or one or two nonfiction (and typically more expensive) books. The rest of the time, he spent in his room — often reading, but sometimes simply lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling. At mealtimes, he said little except in response to a question from his mother or father.

I became concerned about him, as I thought I recognized patterns that I had seen in Juniper when her depression was at its worst, not long before she realized she was transgender. I did not immediately jump to the conclusion that Razuko was transgender, of course, as I knew from my reading in my home world that depression can have many causes and comorbidities. But after some days of observing this pattern, I spoke to Mipina about it.

“Yes, I’m a little worried about him too,” she said. “Of course he has to study a lot over the long vacation, so he’ll be ready when he goes back to school. And he says he misses his school friends. Unfortunately none of them live in this city. I think the school has been good for him, since he didn’t have many friends before.” Razuko, it seemed, had attended a boarding school for the sons of wealthy commoners for two years; he had returned home for an eight-tenday vacation not long before Bisur had summoned me and bound me to his house.

“Hmm,” I said. “Has he written to his school friends?”

Mipina thought for a moment. “I don’t know. If he puts his letters in the mail basket for Nadai to give to the postman, I wouldn’t necessarily notice.”

I had not seen him write any such letters yet, and I had been with the family for over a tenday by then. I suggested one day that he might write to his school friends, if he was feeling lonely, and he vaguely responded in the affirmative. But he wrote no such letters, and I began to wonder if his “friends” were fictitious, made up to placate his parents and make them think he was happier at school than he was. Juniper had done something similar in her first year of high school.

He was studying a certain amount, though I wasn’t sure how much was actually for school and how much was other nonfiction that interested him. But the majority of his reading was penny dreadfuls and other novels. And as I finished reading the books in the library and began reading the books in various family members’ bedrooms, I started to notice a pattern in the novels he reread most often, which also reminded me of Juniper’s reading before she discovered her gender.

In one, Dancing Slave of the Tainan, a boy a little older than Razuko was abducted by some of the inhabitants of that more advanced world I mentioned, who transformed him into a girl and trained her as a dancer. She served her abductors for eight years, dancing for larger and larger audiences and growing more magical by the day, until she finally discovered a dance that would open a portal back to her home world, where she became a prestigious and wealthy wizard and took as her lover the widow of a printer.

In another, Experiment #4, some homeless boys and girls gathered around to listen to the job crier, who announced the jobs people were willing to offer those with no skills or education. Four of them too trustingly followed up on one of these offers, and found themselves abducted and imprisoned by a wicked wizard, who experimented on them in various ways. One of the girls became only able to speak in rhyme; the other broke out in leaves and flowers all over her skin, and became dependent on sunlight; one of the boys began to constantly float six inches off the ground; and the last boy was transformed into a a girl with three legs. The new girl became the lover of the girl who spoke in rhyme, while the floating boy and the plant-girl paired off as well, and after further ordeals that I will not detail, they escaped the wizard’s compound and eventually joined a circus.

The last penny dreadful which clinched my suspicions that Razuko was like Juniper in more ways than his depression involved no overt magic. In The Orphan Actress, a young boy from a respectable but not very wealthy family wanted to join a theater troupe, but his family were horrified at the thought, and planned for him to be a lawyer like his father. But after a series of improbable misfortunes left him a penniless orphan, he found no further obstacle to his dream except his own inexperience, and soon joined a theater troupe as a menial, rearranging stage furniture between acts and cleaning the theater between plays. At last, he was offered an opportunity to act — in a minor role with just two lines, as the protagonist’s lady’s-maid. At first reluctant to take a female role, he resolved to try it, and found he delighted in women’s clothing, in being seen as a girl by the audience and treated as girl by the other actors. Further roles followed, most of them female, and after some time, he confided to one of the older actresses that he wished he could become a girl for good. She took her to a surgeon, who removed her male parts, and prescribed an herbal concoction that, taken regularly, would gradually allow her to grow breasts and feminine hips. She grew up to become the most famous actress of her day.

I would give a false impression if I implied that all the stories he read involved boys becoming girls; I believe he had a hard time finding even these three, which showed more signs of frequent re-reading than any of his other books. Most of the others, including all the ones he had bought since I arrived, were stories of adventure and romance with cisgender girl main characters.

You will scarcely be surprised, therefore, when I confide in you my suspicion that Razuko might also be transgender. Indeed, after their latest reread of The Orphan Actress, they began spending more of their pocket money on medical nonfiction, both pharmacology and surgery. It was then that I resolved to speak with them about this.

* * *

Mipina, after I had shared my concerns, had tried harder to speak with Razuko, to engage them in conversation both during meals and in visits to their bedroom, and to show them physical affection. As hungry as Razuko was for affection, they seemed awkward and unable to respond to Mipina’s overtures in other ways; their depression was not alleviated, and Mipina grew more anxious over her oldest child. She shared her concerns with Bisur, and Bisur made his own attempts to engage Razuko in conversation. His questions about what Razuko had been reading met with embarrassed silence and a panicked glance at the bookshelf (where some of the penny dreadfuls were hidden behind a layer of respectable schoolbooks and other nonfiction), followed by a few halting words about their nonfiction reading. Bisur was not perceptive enough to interpret those glances, and being just as socially awkward as his child, decided he had done enough when the halting and intermittent conversation had gone on for twenty minutes or so.

It was the morning after one of these awkward attempts at a conversation that I made another overture at befriending Razuko. Not long after they returned to their room from breakfast, when they had made some listless attempts to start reading the pharmacology manual they had recently bought, and then started staring at the wall, I projected my hologram near the door. “Good morning, Razuko.”

“Oh, hi, Callie. Did Father or Mother send for me?” (Bisur, who disliked the sound of bells and especially those loud enough to be heard throughout the house, had taken to asking me to summon his wife, children or servants when he wanted to speak with them, rather than using the system of bells that had come with the house.)

“No, I just wanted to get to know you better. I’ve been here a couple of tendays and I feel like I know your parents and your little siblings fairly well, but... you’re a person of mystery.”

“I’m not that mysterious,” they mumbled. “I just sit in my room all day and read. I don’t have enough imagination to write my own books like Mother does, or make up games like Zongi, or invent new spells like Father — even if I had the power to cast them.”

“I’m sure you have more talent than you suspect,” I said. “You remind me of the oldest child of the family I used to serve; when she was your age, she suffered terrible depression, and could hardly bring herself to do anything but read, or — or watch plays,” (Modaisu lacked a word for “television” or “movie”), “and not always even that. But we discovered the underlying cause of her depression, and now she is much better. Not perfect; she still has bad days now and then, but she’s much happier, and also more creative, like she was when she was a child. Or she was when I saw her last,” I added worriedly.

“Do you think you can help me?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but I want to try.”

“I don’t think it’ll do any good. Even if you can figure out what makes me like this, it’ll probably be really hard to fix, and I’m not worth fixing.”

“Razuko!” I said, a little sternly. “Please don’t say such mean things about my friend.”

“Who...?”

“I mean you,” I said. “I would like to be your friend. And I don’t like to hear people say mean things about my friend.”

I saw a slight, a very slight, smile.

I did not breach the subject of Razuko’s reading matter or their feelings about gender on that occasion. I asked gentle questions about their nonfiction reading, whether they remembered the border town their family used to live in when they were a child, their school experiences. To my surprise, Razuko burst into tears when I mentioned school, and confessed that they had no friends there — something I had suspected when they went so long without writing or receiving any letters. On the contrary, they were being bullied by the older and stronger boys.

“Have you told your parents about this?” I asked.

“Please don’t tell them,” they said. “It won’t do any good. Father will probably put a curse on the boys who harass me, and then he’ll get in trouble with the law, because their families are more powerful than Father.”

“There are more ways to deal with bullies than to put curses on them,” I said. “If your father threatens to pull you out and send you to another school, the threat of the loss of money will make the headmaster take action. Especially if the parents of other bullied children act in concert.”

“I dunno,” they said. “It’s a tradition at Ngumai Academy, bullying is. The teachers were all bullies when they went there, or so I’ve heard. They say ‘Lap it up, and you’ll be able to lord it over the younger boys when you’re older. It’s good practice for the real world,’ and so forth. One family pulling their kid out isn’t gonna change anything. And where else would Father send me, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m new here, but surely there must be other schools just as good? This seems like a pretty big country.” According to the gazetteer in the library, Modais was about the size of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia put together, though its population was less than a quarter of those states’.

We talked for almost an hour, Razuko educating me on the academic situation in Modais. Some schools only took the sons or daughters of the nobility, some also accepted the children of wealthy commoners, but Ngumai Academy was the only one of any prestige, it seemed, that took the sons of the nouveau riche as well as those of old money families. The next most prestigious school that would accept Razuko would be a great step down for them and their family’s ambitions, and, Razuko fatalistically estimated, would probably have just as bad a bullying problem. I was used to a certain amount of social stratification between private schools and public schools, and between public schools in middle-class and poor school districts, but this was an eye-opener. I finally admitted that I had no easy solution, but encouraged Razuko to speak with their parents about the bullying before they had to return to school.

If my suspicions were correct, however, they might be researching girls’ schools by then.

If you're impatient to read the rest of “Smart House AI in Another World,” you can buy it as an epub or pdf on itch.io. Otherwise, the remaining chapters will continue to be posted about once a week. (This week was pretty hectic.)

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