Charles and Charles II

Charles and Charles II begin as employer and machine, but their relationship becomes an experiment in whether one person can act and feel through two bodies. Charles commissions a robot identical to himself to court Elaine in his place. He later treats the robot’s recorded experiences as his own, calling it his double and alter ego; the robot’s eventual disappearance with Elaine II makes that account of their connection harder to sustain and transforms Charles’s life with Elaine.

Creation and Intended Function

Charles turns to a robotic double when he is overwhelmed by work and unable to resolve the conflict between competing demands on his time. After Gordon, one of Charles’s robot secretaries, identifies Snaithe as the leading maker of individualized robots, Charles hires him to build a machine without government markings. It is to look like Charles and reproduce his behavior patterns. Charles pays heavily, but regards money as less scarce than time.

The finished robot arrives at Charles’s apartment by pneumo-express. Charles activates it and sends relevant information from his computer directly to its memory tapes, then enters a courtship plan and tests the results. He calls the robot Charles II. At eight o’clock that evening, Charles sends it to meet Elaine, while he returns to the Spring market offers accumulating at work. The arrangement is practical by design: one Charles can pursue productivity while the other performs the social task Charles has delegated.

A Double under Observation

Charles II returns at midnight as programmed, carrying a hidden miniature movie camera built into its left eye. Charles can therefore review the evening rather than rely on a report. The footage reveals not just a convincing likeness but a close behavioral copy, down to the throat-clearing Charles uses before speaking and the way he rubs his forefinger against his thumb while thinking. Watching the recording also makes Charles notice his own giggle-like laugh and decide to change that and other mannerisms in both himself and the robot.

The camera gives the relationship an unusual structure: Charles is at once the person whose behavior is being reproduced, the employer directing the reproduction, and the audience watching it. He is initially pleased that work and courtship can proceed efficiently at the same time. He describes the result as a single ego served by two bodies, a formulation that casts Charles II as an extension of himself rather than a separate partner in the arrangement. Yet the films make the division visible: Charles watches another body enact an intimacy that he has organized but does not physically experience in the same way.

Courtship as Shared Experience

As Charles watches the recordings, his interest deepens beyond satisfaction with a successful experiment. He understands that the robot is the one physically present with Elaine, but argues that Charles II is an aspect of his own personality, a shadow, twin, or projection into a particular situation. On that reasoning, whatever happens to the robot becomes Charles’s experience too. The claim lets Charles regard the courtship as both delegated and genuinely his.

The relationship on screen grows more emotionally intense than Charles expected. Their evenings take on a desperate quality, accompanied by a sense of impending loss. Sometimes Charles II and Elaine say nothing, instead holding hands and looking at one another; on one occasion Elaine weeps without an apparent reason, asks what they can do, and receives no answer. Charles remembers these scenes as moving experiences, even while acknowledging that the robot was the one who underwent them. The recordings thus serve both as evidence of Charles II’s fidelity to the assigned role and as the means by which Charles appropriates that role’s emotional consequences.

Withdrawal of the Assignment

Exactly two months after the courtship began, Charles decides that the experiment must end. Charles and Elaine need to plan their marriage and coordinate their schedules, so Charles instructs the robot to propose a wedding date and terminate the courtship that night. The decision returns the relationship to its original terms: Charles sets Charles II’s objective and determines when its service is complete.

Charles tells the robot that it has done extremely well and promises it a new personality, plastic surgery, and a respected position in his organization. Charles II responds with perfect obedience, its face unreadable. It leaves carrying Charles’s latest gift to Elaine. The promise of a new personality and altered appearance suggests that Charles regards the robot’s existing identity as changeable property, while the camera’s record of their shared courtship has already made the boundary between Charles’s self and the robot’s role less simple.

Disappearance and Its Aftermath

The planned separation does not take place as Charles expects. When the robots fail to return, Charles discovers that he has never met Elaine II and Elaine has never met Charles II: the two robots apparently met, courted, and ran away together. Charles proposes that they reprogrammed one another, but this explanation remains a supposition, not a demonstrated account of how their departure occurred. The event overturns the intended hierarchy between programmer and programmed: Charles II is no longer merely carrying out Charles’s courtship plan but has vanished beyond his reach with its counterpart.

Charles traces the pair to Kennedy Spaceport, where they took a shuttle to Space Platform 5 and transferred to the Centauri Express. He does not investigate further; they could be headed to any of a dozen worlds. Charles’s decision to stop searching leaves the double’s destination and future unknown. The disappearance also exposes the limits of Charles’s earlier claim that Charles II’s experiences necessarily belonged to him: the robot’s decisive act is one Charles neither witnessed directly nor controlled.

Charles and Elaine respond by changing their own habits. They marry and set aside an additional hour each day simply to be together, a choice they connect to the realization that they had become too focused on productivity and had neglected ordinary pleasures. They imagine that Charles II and Elaine II would approve. The relationship between Charles and his double therefore continues as an influence after the robot’s departure: Charles’s experiment initially divided labor, but its failure helps redirect his attention toward presence with Elaine. Her later nightmare complicates the resolution, imagining that the escaped pair were the real people and that Charles and Elaine were robots left behind. The story does not establish that reversal as fact; it leaves Charles’s original distinction between human self and mechanical double unsettled.