Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  Sweat soaks his collar. His skin feels hot. He feels like he’s suffocating from fumes. What was I thinking? I listened to a gun instead of my head and now I’m going to pay with my life. And with Iris’s life too because if I’m not here to save her, I can be damn sure no one else will. And what the Hell is taking this elevator so long?

  The doors open, and Eliot runs out quick-breathing for air. He flees through the security doors and vomits in the bushes outside the building. He wipes his mouth with a drip rag and sees the Satine 5000 arriving for work. The security bot stands before the building entrance and stares.

  “I’m fine,” says Eliot. “Just a hangover.”

  The bot doesn’t move.

  “Go to work, Tim. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

  How much time do I have? Eliot wonders on his way to the bus. Enough to put Iris back together again before they arrest me? Enough to gather her parts? And once they catch me, do I have a defense? After all, what did I do that was so terrible other than fight off a sadist who was trying to kill me with a radial saw? Of course, the courts won’t see it that way. Hard to argue self-defense after you sneak through the window of a man’s apartment and point a gun at his head. Better not to think of it, he decides. I haven’t been arrested yet. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. To worry about it before then doesn’t help. Focus on the mission. Get those Goddamn parts, get on a boat, and go.

  Seated on the bus, he opens a style blog on his pocketbrane and browses through the ads. Fashion was never Eliot’s thing, but he needs an outfit that will make him look like Carlyle Sweeney, marketing director for Ocean Cosmetics, not some android salesman from GAC.

  A call comes in. Jaylon Dennis from NatMo. “Tucson Metal is the private contractor we hired to run the company store for the bots working at the Green Valley plant. I sent you an e-mail with a contact who will answer your call.”

  “Got it.”

  “And your end of the bargain?”

  “Pete Maddox from Harris Farms out of Fresno,” says Eliot. “There’s an almond harvest, and they need pickers. It’s good for about two hundred androids for a one-month lease.”

  “Thank you kindly.”

  A salesbot at Barney’s shows Eliot a brown fabric with a wide check pattern in pink and blue. Nice material. Soft to the touch. Costs a bloody fortune, but Eliot isn’t going to skimp.

  His pocketbrane rings with another call.

  “Yes, Sally?”

  “I have Detective Flaubert on the line from…”

  “Tell him I’m unavailable.”

  “It’s the second time he’s…”

  Eliot hangs up.

  In the dressing room, Giorgio the tailorbot speaks with an Italian accent. They do that in retail, try to enhance ethnic characteristics so that heartbeat customers feel they’re dealing with exotic salesmen. Unfortunately, most labor providers do a half-assed job. It’s abundantly clear, at least to Eliot, that Giorgio is Pakistani metal. His skin’s too dark. Accent more French than Italian. Probably made by Ahmad Motors. Just another sign of how the big stores are cutting back during the recession.

  “Ze seamstress can have ze clothes ready right away, Meester Lazar.”

  Eliot stands in his shorts on a podium while a reflective brane scans his body.

  “I want a European cut,” he tells the bot, “and I want to see it with a pink shirt.”

  “What kind of collar for ze shirt?”

  “Spread.”

  Over his reflection, the suits appear on his body with a pink shirt.

  “Zis is Aleece Zambos. Zis is Kareen Johnson, ze Nunez, ze Jordaigne Seay…”

  “That one,” Eliot decides, if for no other reason than he knows it’s nothing like what he’d normally wear. “Now show me some ties.”

  “Zis might work as well with ze scarf.”

  “Ties,” says Eliot. “And I’m going to need new shoes and sunglasses, too.”

  “Do you have ze brand you prefer?”

  The brane flashes different pairs over his eyes. Eliot waits for something oversized and gaudy that will cover the bruises on his face.

  “Those,” he chooses, and within fifteen minutes, the clothes and glasses are ready. He puts them on in the store and folds a pink pocket square into the jacket. He even buys a pair of pink socks to complete the look.

  Tucson Metal Solutions. Hurrying to his appointment at the modeling agency, Eliot reads Jaylon’s e-mail off his brane. He calls the number and gets a surly desert rat with a cowboy accent. He asks, “You run the company store?”

  “Who’s askin’?”

  “Jaylon Dennis from NatMo told me to give you a call.”

  “That don’t answer the question.”

  “I’m looking for a pair of C-900 legs,” says Eliot. He reads off Iris’s serial number. “You have ’em?”

  “You still ain’t tole me who ya are.”

  “I’m someone willing to pay a lot of money for a pair of legs.”

  There’s a pause on the other end. “Well, lotta bots lose their legs at Green Valley. If I’m short on replacements, I’ll lose the contract.”

  “What’s your price?”

  The rat quotes a price.

  “Done,” says Eliot. “Hold on to them. I’ll pick ’em up this week.”

  3-D holograms of eyeless modelbots traipse back and forth in the waiting room of the Jillian Rose Modeling Agency. Eliot sits on a stark, white couch reading Revealed! He hears a female smoker’s voice chanting a mantra from another room:

  “Yes, I am young. Yes, I am beautiful. Yes, I am thin and popular and kind.…”

  In the newsbrane, there’s a special report on the dangers of the “underground orgies” that led to Edmund “Pink” Spenser’s death. Sex and drip-fueled bacchanalias, claims Revealed!, run as propaganda ploys by Lorca.

  “Yes, I am authentic. Yes, I am talented. Yes, I am deserving of my money, success, and fame.…”

  A gaunt bot with a pixie haircut enters from the office kitchen. She wears a short skirt and carries a latte with foam turtling above the brim.

  “Mr. Sweeney?”

  “Yes?” Eliot answers to the made-up name.

  “Jillian Rose will see you now.”

  He follows the bot down the hall closer to the source of the chanting. “Yes, I have friends. Yes, I am worthy. Yes, I am important and hold power over my life.…”

  Eliot enters to find a grossly overweight woman with multiple chins seated behind her desk with eyes closed, legs crossed, and fingertips touching as she chants. He watches the bot take a half-full latte from the desk and replace it with the one she was holding.

  “Yes, I am lovable. Yes, I am needed. Yes and yes, my life is filled with yes!”

  The bot’s gone before Jillian Rose opens her eyes to find her fresh drink. From her expression, Eliot suspects she thinks it was the chanting that filled the cup and not her bot.

  “Okay,” says the woman who never has to drink from the bottom half of a latte, “love the shirt.”

  “Don’t you, though?” Eliot brings the lilt back to his voice, doing his best impression of Pound.

  “I do.”

  “And the socks?” He lifts his foot to show the matching pink.

  “Cut it out.”

  “Too much?”

  “You’re too much.” She tests the temperature of her latte but feels it’s still too hot to drink. “So you’re that Sweeney guy, right? The one from Ocean Cosmetics?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you want Asian female?”

  “I want Latin male, but this is for work, not for me.”

  Jillian Rose snorts as she laughs at what Eliot thought was a mediocre joke at best. She waves a hand over her desk calling forth the hologram faces of Asian models to rise from the surface. All of them are eyeless and severe. Beautiful but empty. At Jillian Rose’s touch, their floating heads spin 360 degrees.

  “Cute,” Eliot says of the first. “Gorgeous” about the second. �
��Stunning” about a third. He conceals his disappointment that none of them is Iris.

  “The factories can’t churn out beauty,” says Jillian Rose. “That’s why we search it out on the street. We look for that rare accident, the flaw, the beautiful mistake. Our scouts and buyers scour the world for quality parts. Everything but nipples and pussies of course. We buy a part here, trade a part there, and put ’em together into something we can show.”

  Eliot has to ask, “Your models have no vaginas?” At work, he had heard about manufacturers who turned out torsos with missing genitalia, but he always assumed it was an old wives’ tale.

  “Saves time on the digital editing,” says Jillian Rose.

  “Seems a bit extreme.”

  “Ah, but it gives the girls an aura that shows up in the work. They’re sexy but sexless. Beautiful but unattainable.” Jillian Rose burns her tongue on the latte she can’t wait to drink. “As for the eyes, we can always throw a pair in. Choose a color to go with your bot, though it’s de rigueur to leave them blind.”

  Eliot looks back at the faces hovering above the desk.

  “No vaginas,” he mutters to himself.

  “Those things only get ’em in trouble anyway. Now if only I could sew up their mouths so they wouldn’t suck cock.”

  “Honey, if only you could sew up mine.”

  Again, she snorts her laugh, covering her mouth with a chubby hand.

  “Where are the older ones?” Eliot asks, brushing away a hologram image with a flick of his wrist.

  “Looking for something more sophisticated?”

  Jillian Rose touches a folder marked “Over 21.” The first model to appear looks like a fifty-year-old Japanese businesswoman. She has gray hair and the look of an eyeless executive running a Fortune 500 company. The next one is a typical girl next door, the kind of woman you’d marry, if you wanted to marry a sexless, eyeless android.

  “There are a few boutiques who still use heartbeats,” says Jillian Rose, “but what you get with the bots are girls who know how to behave. First sign of trouble, we reconfigure ’em with new parts to change their auras. They usually come out nicer, though sometimes you get another rusted cunt.”

  A model’s image appears above the desk, and Eliot’s hand clutches the armrest on his chair. His heels dig into the carpet as if his body recognizes her before his mind can confirm it. The face floating a foot away has no eyes and the expression isn’t one Eliot has ever seen from Iris before, and yet something in him insists it’s she.

  “Her,” says Eliot, forgetting his lilt and every affectation he had put on to sell himself as Carlyle Sweeney.

  Jillian Rose puts down her cup and gulps the hot liquid in her mouth.

  “Really?” Jillian Rose asks. “Are you certain?”

  No, he isn’t certain. His gut tells him one thing but his mind feels as if it’s not quite her. It could be a face made by the same manufacturer but with a slight variation.

  “Why?” he asks. “What’s your hesitation?”

  Jillian Rose touches a floating icon and the image of the model appears full size as she catwalks in a circle around the room. She’s taller than Iris, with longer limbs and a longer torso that makes her head seem small. Her outfit changes as she walks. Winter coat. Spring dress. Bikini. Autumn sweater.

  “We call her Yoshi,” says Jillian Rose. “Short for Yoshiko. Assembled a little old and sad if you ask me. Clients have been disappointed with her aura. She’s at a fitting now for a show she’s working tonight. You’re more than welcome to come, though I have to tell you, I have her scheduled for reconfiguration in a week.”

  He’s just in time then. A week later and she would have been rechopped or shipped off overseas.

  “Look, I’m all for girls being a little bitchy,” says Jillian Rose, “but this one is just plain out of hand. If you like her, I’ll keep her together for another job, but then I’ve got to swap some parts.”

  Eliot watches the hologram circle around the room. He reaches out with his hand, but the image evades his touch.

  “What’s her make?” Eliot asks.

  “XR-20 torso with TK-3 and C-900 parts. Of course, all our components come from licensed brokers and trappers. No viruses or worms. No counterfeits or illegal chops.”

  “Which licensed brokers and trappers?”

  Jillian Rose reads off a list. “W and A Collections, Frey Metal, Grab and Snatch, and the rest comes from … Oh. Hm.” She scrunches her eyes at the brane. “Baby, are you sure this is the android you want?”

  “Why?” Eliot asks. “What are you hiding from me?”

  “Nothin’.” She wipes the foam from her lips.

  “Jillian Rose.” He says her name with a flirty smile as if he’s chastising her. “No secrets.”

  Her chins jiggle as she cackles like a teenager with a crush. She looks around the room then leans across the table, smiling salaciously to beckon Eliot near. “I hate to talk out of school,” Jillian Rose whispers, “but have you read in the newsbranes about the killing last night? The DJ who was murdered at the El Royale?”

  “What about him?”

  “Truth is he was a trapper. Called himself Pink ’cause he kept the pinky fingers of every bot he took.”

  “So?”

  “So”—Jillian Rose lowers her chins and raises an eyebrow—“let’s just say we’ve been contacted by police.”

  She leans back into her chair, pleased with herself that she was involved, however tangentially, in a scandal.

  “Not that I know anything,” she admits with disappointment. “Probably one of Lorca’s crew. You know how they feel about trappers. Shame, too. Pink had great product. And he threw these fabulous parties in…”

  “I like her,” says Eliot, cutting the story short, “but I’m concerned about the aura. When can Yoshiko and I meet?”

  Jillian Rose leans forward and checks the schedule. “She’ll be walking at the Standard tonight. I’ll get you on the list. And remember, if she turns you off, I got plenty of other bots.”

  Her assistant enters the room. “Ms. Rose? I have that new looper on line two.”

  “Hold on, Carl.” She turns from Eliot and takes the call. “Bruno, the new loops are outrageous! How’d you get such a good snarl out of Molly?”

  Eliot’s own pocketbrane vibrates with a call from the office. He puts in his earpiece and exits to the hallway to talk.

  “What’s up, Gita?”

  “Hold for Detective Flaubert.”

  “Gita, no!”

  Too late.

  “Mr. Lazar,” says the polite voice on the other end, just before it breaks into a hacking cough. “This is Detective Jean-Michel Flaubert from the Rampart Division. We spoke last week if you recall.”

  “I recall,” says Eliot. “How are you?”

  “Quite well and thank you for asking.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind coming down to the precinct today. As soon as possible if you don’t mind.”

  “It’s not a good time,” says Eliot. He loosens his tie and undoes the top button on his shirt. “May I ask what this is about?”

  The old detective clears his throat before imparting the news.

  “We found your car.”

  SIXTEEN

  Rampart Division

  With his back to the blinds, the old detective blows softly into a hot cup of tea only to fall abruptly into another coughing fit. Each rib-shaking hack feels like a failed attempt to dislodge the tiny pieces of glass from where they’ve cut themselves into the tissue of his lungs. He waits for the fit to subside then uses a handkerchief to wipe away the black ash collected on his desk. That’s what’s coming out of me, he observes. It’s what’s coming out of my pores when I sweat. The by-product of the androids’ energy needs. I am choking to death on robot excrement.

  He wipes his face then checks his watch. Half past six in the evening. The precinct has been abuzz since morning when a Militia
man acquaintance discovered the body of Edmund “Pink” Spenser butchered in his apartment a block from Hancock Park. The newsbranes liked the story right away. After all, there are heartbeats in Hancock Park, most of them wealthy, many of them politically connected. The LA Times published two loops of the victim on its cover: the first showed him skateboarding with his shirt off, rippling muscles and shaggy blond hair—a sun-drenched idyll of the sunshine state; the second showed Mr. Spenser with his face bashed in and his arm severed at the biceps.

  The day pressed on, the story got the mayor’s attention, which got the chief’s attention, which got the attention of every Tom, Dick, and Mary with a badge, a gun, and a pulse. Lest the city convulse into a spasm of revenge killings, the brass needed a perp posthaste, i.e. they needed a bot.

  Luckily, those same newsbranes that broke the story were quick to provide a suspect. It was Revealed! that came up with Plath before the department even knew who she was. According to the tabloid, the female digger was an assassin, an Android Disciple trained in the art of seduction, sent to murder innocent young heartbeat boys at the behest of Lorca. Detectives assigned to follow up discovered Plath was absent from her job at a Melrose clothing store where she was employed via a labor provider. Witnesses from the underground saw her leave the firehouse with Mr. Spenser. A botress at an all-night diner remembered serving both Plath and Mr. Spenser at the same booth. As if that wasn’t enough, the crime scene was littered with screws, hinges, and other parts easily traced back to the serial number listed in Plath’s employment file.

  Once the police brass confirmed the findings of the least credible newsbrane in Los Angeles and declared Plath the main suspect in the case, all that remained was to find her. The order was given at the briefing: Find Plath. Dead or alive. Dismissed.