Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

The DJ selects an album from his collection. He places the disk on the phonograph. He cranks the handle while the digger’s image on the monitor shows her desire. Sometimes her eyes are open, watching, waiting, sometimes they close in frustration.

  “Come on!” she says. “Stop teasing.”

  Eliot’s thighs burn, his back stiffens, his cock hardens in his jeans. A jolt of pain travels along the seam of the old wound across his shoulder where the metal welds into his flesh. He feels behind him, his hand searching for a wall to lean on, but he can feel no back to the closet. He turns and sees the room is not a closet after all. It’s too big. Yes, there are clothes hanging above him, but behind him, the space extends toward a high window above a standing cabinet. Beneath the window are rows and rows of lipsticks lined up on the shelves attached to the wall.

  Lipsticks? Well, the fellow does wear makeup.

  Eliot hears the bumps and hisses of a record playing in the bedroom then the first few notes of a piano. Then Enrico Caruso’s ancient voice climbs sullenly above the static. The tenor croons an aria, “Una Furtiva Lagrima,” covering whatever noise Eliot makes as he sneaks farther into the hidden room.

  “Come here,” the digger says to the DJ. Inside the hidden room, Eliot shines his pocketbrane on the lipsticks lining the shelves against the wall. But on closer inspection, they aren’t lipsticks after all. His body senses it, the nausea strikes before his conscious mind can process what he’s looking at. Eliot sees that the colored sticks have nothing to do with cosmetics. They are pinky fingers. They are the pinky fingers cut from the hands of female bots.

  “I want you,” says the digger.

  Eliot studies the fingers. He tries to make sense of how they’re arranged and which, if any, belonged to Iris.

  “I want you inside me.”

  There must be fifty of them. Most are on the shelf but some are tacked to the wall, pinned through the tip and stuck on a bulletin board. Perhaps their colors didn’t fit the DJ’s scheme.

  “Stop teasing,” she says.

  And there along the wall, beneath the tilted window, one pinky has a shorter nail than the others. It’s darkened by grit and dulled about the edges. It’s the fingernail of a creative who did metal work with her hands.

  “Pink,” says the digger.

  Eliot unpins the pinky and sticks it in his mouth. He tastes the astringent residue of Mun’s factory on his tongue. The taste seems to correspond with the bacon-sulfur smell of that red liquid he stepped in when he visited Heron. It gives him a rush better than any drip he ever inhaled.

  “Pink, stop.”

  It’s her finger. Eliot can taste it. Eliot closes his eyes and bites down softly to secure it in his mouth.

  “What are you doing?”

  He sees an early century laptop open on a workbench, and judging by the blinking light, it was recently used. He touches the track pad and the screen turns on.

  “Pink, you’re scaring me.”

  It’s a laptop with a flash drive, the kind crooks use to keep their records off the cloud—the kind that Pound sold in his store.

  “Pink, that hurts.”

  The folders are marked: loops, inventory, buyers, taxes, receipts.

  “Pink stop.”

  It’s all there. Everything he needs to find Iris is there. Right on this …

  “Nooooo!”

  A loud snap breaks across the room followed by a scream. Eliot shuts the laptop. His head jerks back toward the bedroom.

  Whoa.

  No ecstasy in that cry.

  Footsteps crack on the plastic-coated floor. Someone approaching. Eliot grabs a shelf and climbs toward the high window. He perches on the cabinet as the DJ pushes his hanging clothes to the side.

  “Help!” comes a scream from inside the bedroom. “Help me!”

  Eliot remains still. With a damp hood over his head and Iris’s finger in his mouth, he holds his breath and stares at a spot on the wall.

  “Somebody! Help me!”

  Pink turns on a work lamp on the bench. He moves the laptop aside. Oil drips to the floor from the severed pinky in his hand.

  Eliot can hear the headboard in the bedroom smack against the wall as the digger struggles to break from her restraints. Pink tacks her finger to a board upside down so the oil won’t drip to the ground. He opens a large, wooden trunk and sorts through the various sharp-edged instruments in his collection. Squatting a few feet above him, Eliot watches him push aside an ax and a machete before settling on a radial saw. Like a reaper who found his most trusted scythe, Pink gathers the cord and kicks the trunk closed. He shuts the light and exits the wood slatted doors.

  “No, no, no. Please, don’t do this! Please!” the digger screams.

  Eliot exhales the breath he was saving in his lungs and lowers himself to the floor. He uses his pocketbrane to find a small backpack and zips the laptop inside. With the backpack strapped to his shoulders, he steps on the trunk and pulls the high window from its frame. He casts it aside and climbs the full height of the cabinet.

  “No, no, no!” come the digger’s screams.

  Eliot sticks his head outside into the night. Looking down, he spots the ledge a full body’s length below. Nine stories beneath that lies the sidewalk. The radial saw buzzes from the next room. Eliot can hear the digger scream. Her screams and the saw’s buzzing should cover the sound of his escape.

  Eliot rests his stomach on the cabinet and maneuvers his feet out the window. He lowers himself, holding on to the windowsill, and drops his body along the building’s facade. His feet dangle but don’t reach the ledge. He misjudged the height, and now the rain-slick stone lies a good eighteen inches beneath him.

  The wind blows, the rain falls, a flying train approaches. Its headlight scatters a glare through the evening mist. Eliot hangs by his fingers from the window, his mechanical right hand supporting the bulk of his weight. His feet search for a toehold on the brick facade. The sill cracks and splinters in his hands. His body falls the full foot-and-a-half, and his shoes slip from the ledge. He grabs for the crease between the ledge and the wall. His chin bangs the stone. His nails dig deep into a crevice. He panics, bites hard on Iris’s finger, and holds for dear life to the ledge.

  Fast steel zephyrs through the damp air as the flying train passes. Eliot can see his shadow pronounced by the light. By his fingers and his chin, he pulls his chest onto the ledge as the train rushes by less than a yard away. Facedown on the rough, gray stone, panting, he hears the air whip past until its presence lessens, diminishes, then fades into the low rumble of the city.

  Eliot stops to find his breath through his nose as his mouth is closed with the finger inside. He touches his face to the stone sagging beneath his weight. He gets up and presses his back to the wall. Now he can’t help but look down, can’t deny the height as he could when he was facing the other way. The vertigo quakes his limbs. Iris’s finger in his mouth, backpack strapped to his shoulders, he shuffles toward the bedroom window. Get out of here, he thinks. Before the ledge collapses, before the fear cripples you to where you can’t move. Get out.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” says the digger inside the apartment. “I won’t tell anybody who you are, I promise. Please.”

  Her agony follows him. He hopes to make it past her screaming, past the apartment, and back to the hallway where he can take the elevator down. The bedroom window, the living room window, the hallway window, then he’s free. He has the laptop. If it doesn’t contain the information he needs, he can negotiate for the computer’s return. An antique piece like this is worth a bunch to a collector. Eliot can trade it back. But first, get off the fucking ledge.

  The saw buzzes. The bot screams. Caruso sings on the phonograph. Eliot steps to the edge of the bedroom window. He hopes with the lights on bright the DJ won’t see him passing outside. If he can make it past the window, Eliot will be in the clear. He shuffles his feet to get closer.

  “Help me!”

  Her scream sends a shock of pain f
rom his shoulder to his feet. Don’t look inside, he tells himself. You’ve got what you’ve come for, more than you expected. You’ve worked too long, looked too far and wide to get sidetracked now. No need to look through the window at what you’re leaving behind.

  The saw buzzes. The digger screams. Eliot peeks through the window to see.

  Inside the room, Pink stands at the side of the bed checking to make sure his performance is being captured by the lens. He wears yellow goggles; his shirtless back reveals a giant, crosshairs tattoo. Logo of the Militiamen. The artist revealing the flip side of his identity.

  “Please don’t do this,” the digger begs. “I’ll do anything you want. Just please let me go. I haven’t done anything to you. Please, God…”

  But it’s as if the bot’s pleas exist at a decibel the DJ cannot hear. Once again, the saw roars. The digger screams. Pink lowers the spinning blade against her leg.

  Eliot turns away. His breath fails him. A tremor shakes his knees. He reaches into his pocket for a vial of drip. His hand falters and the vial slips from his fingers. It dings against the ledge then sails with the rain nine stories down before bouncing with a plastic click against the pavement.

  “Help me!” screams the digger. “Please, God, help me!”

  Stop it, Eliot rebukes her in his mind. You shouldn’t have put yourself in this position in the first place. What kind of tramp goes home with a stranger? Didn’t your mother teach you better?

  “HELP!”

  Well, no, he answers his own question. Bots don’t have mothers. They have factories that churn them out by the thousand. They’re never taught these lessons about the dangers of human perversity.

  “Help me. Please, somebody!”

  But it’s your own damn fault you’re here, he tells her in his mind. Your own poor judgment. And even if I did try to help you, even if I did risk my life against that maniac, who’s to say a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, you wouldn’t put yourself in an equally inane position? Why should I risk my life saving yours when you act in such a reckless, careless manner?

  The saw blade stops. Caruso sings. The rain sprays Eliot’s cheeks. One foot sideways then drag the other behind it. Pass the bedroom window. Crawl inside the living room and exit out the front door. I’ll be halfway down the stairs before the DJ knows he’s been robbed.

  “Help me!”

  Good Lord, she’s loud, thinks Eliot, but he decides her cries aren’t real. She’s just an actress in a loop yelling her lines. After all, bots aren’t like us. They don’t feel pain the way we do. Their hearts don’t beat, they spin. They don’t have souls, just parts and experiences that balance together to create an aura. This isn’t really happening, Eliot insists. It’s just the soundtrack from a slasher movie Pink’s watching on his brane.

  “Please, God. Please, somebody, help!”

  The denial strengthens him; once again, Eliot can move his legs. He waits for the sound of the saw blade then slides his right foot to the center of the window. He shifts his weight and brings the left foot over. One more right-left slide and he clears the window. He stands on the other side with a clear path to the living room window, to the hallway and then he’s free. The ledge holds, he has the laptop, and, Goddamnit, he’s almost free.

  “Please, God. Somebody help me!”

  Is this how Iris screamed? Eliot wonders as he stands on the ledge a few feet from escape. Did she too call for help with no one there to save her? The cool metal of the pistol tugs from the holster in the small of his back. It reminds him of its presence. It reminds him with its hard, iron touch of the power held in its works.

  “Help me!”

  Eliot shakes his head. That’s not what it’s for. A gun can’t save that android, a gun can’t save any of them, and nor can I. I’m just one man—a lowly drip addict cowering on a ledge—I cannot save the oppressed robots of the world. I’m a lousy salesman, a working stiff, not some hero in a Hollywood movie. Even my father couldn’t save them; the politicians wouldn’t let him, the system’s rigged, the market dictates, the mode of production determines …

  “Help me!”

  And he’s filming it, whispers the gun.

  What’s that? Eliot asks.

  He could have shut her down first. He could have turned off her power, made an incision with a scalpel, and removed her limbs while she slept. He could have made this painless for the bot, but he wanted to make a performance of her humiliation instead.

  The metal teeth of the saw chew through the digger’s limbs. The gun beckons. It urges an action Eliot continues to refuse.

  “Please. God. Somebody. Please.”

  Eliot shimmies away from the window. He moves farther toward the living room. The farther he moves, the more faint her cries. A few more feet and they’ll blend into the static of the city. A few more feet and the entire scene can be forgotten.

  “Hold still,” says the DJ, annoyed with the digger’s cries.

  Hold still? asks the gun.

  The words singe into Eliot’s shoulder like a branding iron meted to his skin.

  Hold still, the gun repeats, mocking the audacity of the command. It’s as if this maniac is a doctor or a barber cutting her hair—hold still, he tells her. Participate in your own torture. Make it easy for me, and hold still.

  The saw buzzes. The digger screams. The gun speaks to Eliot’s anger. It pulls on his tailbone and hisses to his soul like a serpent.

  Isn’t this why you took me here? asks the gun. For just such an event as this?

  No, says Eliot. I brought you here to protect me, not to save some digger who got in over her head. The principal is Iris, not some random tramp from a party.

  But is it possible, asks the gun, that there is some larger purpose that brought you here of which you were unaware? Those calls and cries for help, heard by no one except you, me, and the son of a bitch hurting her—is it possible some fate put you here with me in your holster for a reason?

  “Help me! God, somebody!”

  From the day you were conceived and I was manufactured, says the gun, all the way to this moment—is it possible we were joined for the purpose of doing something more than bearing witness to a cry for help? Is it possible the God for whom she calls has put us here by means of His machinations that we might act in this moment and answer that cry?

  Caruso sings. The saw buzzes. The digger screams.

  Or are we here to hold still?

  “Help me. Somebody, please help me!”

  Frozen on the ledge. His sweatshirt heavy and wet. His breathing labored. The gun burns like dry ice into the base of Eliot’s spine. It pulls with a weight that anchors his feet to the ledge. With a careful hand, he eases the weapon from the holster and raises it before his cheek.

  Thatta boy, says the gun.

  I’m not ready.

  You’ve practiced.

  I’m a lousy shot.

  Nothin’ to it. Point and squeeze like Shelley taught you. The rest I do myself.

  Iris’s finger in his mouth, weapon tight in the palm of his mechanical hand, Eliot squeezes the grip and clicks off the safety.

  You won’t falter?

  Been at it for years.

  I never tested you. I don’t even know that you work.

  Smith & Wesson, baby. American classic.

  But you’re old, says Eliot. You’ve been sitting in a display case collecting dust.

  That old queen in the antique shop seemed to think I’d work.

  He steps carefully back to the bedroom window. His legs obey him now—or rather, they obey the gun. The singular purpose of the machine’s design compels his body to carry out its will. The gun wants to shoot, ergo so does the man holding it. It weakens his argument against action.

  Eliot slides along the ledge and ducks down to the opening of the window. He sees the walls splattered with oil, the bedsheet turned black, the DJ repositioning the spinning blade. The digger cries. Gun in hand, Eliot ducks low so the backpack won�
��t brush against the window sash. He lifts one foot off the ledge and steps across the threshold.

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” the digger yells. “You’re a twisted piece of shit!”

  Her amputated legs are wrapped and stacked neatly on the floor. Her arms remain attached, but the restraints are tight, cutting into her wrists.

  “Piece of shit!” She spits in the DJ’s goggles. He straddles her waist and slants the blade to the base of her exposed breast. He doesn’t see Eliot approaching from the window.

  “I hope you die,” says the digger. “I hope you rot from cancer and die!”

  Caruso sings. Eliot aims from his position. He lines up the sight. His arm outstretched. His hand shakes. He moves in closer for a better shot.

  The DJ looks at the monitor to make sure his masterpiece is in frame. Caruso sings. The girl curses and pulls against the cuffs.

  Plant your feet, says the gun. Point and squeeze.

  The saw buzzes. “Help me!”

  Now, says the gun.

  The DJ touches the spinning blade to her breast. The teeth of the saw splatter oil across the room. The girl screams.

  What are you waiting for? asks the gun.

  Oil flies from her chest.

  Shoot, says the gun. Goddamnit, shoot!

  With the blade in the fold of the digger’s chest, Pink notices a peculiar shadow stretching up the wall before him. He turns to the monitor and notes a third actor in his film, a specter in a black hoodie, extending a shaking gun toward his head.

  Damnit, I told you to shoot!

  Pink hurls the saw at Eliot, who ducks and fires at the same time. The saw misses and flies out the window. The digger twists and flops. Eliot fires again, but he’s late. The DJ leaps from the bed and wrestles him for the gun. Their feet slip on the oil-wet plastic; the two men slam to the carpeted floor.

  Outside, the spinning blade cuts into the brick exterior of the building. Inside, it pulls the cord taut beside the wrestlers’ heads. Pink bangs Eliot’s hand against the floor, and the gun falls from his grip. Eliot crawls for it, but the DJ pulls him back. The digger struggles against her restraints, stretching out her wrist as Eliot feels the blunt force of knuckles smashing the back of his head. His face collides with the floor. Blood clouds his vision. His weak hand grabs for the gun, but the DJ finds it first. He turns Eliot over and shoves the nozzle into his mouth, pushing Iris’s finger to the back of Eliot’s throat.