Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  “You are sorry. That’s the first honest thing you’ve said.”

  “Everything I’ve said is honest.”

  Jillian Rose approaches. “Carlyle! There you are.” Her breath stinks of sour milk and booze. “Yoshi, sweetheart, meet Carlyle Sweeney. Carl works for Ocean Cosmetics. They’re thinking of using you for their pan-Asia campaign.”

  There’s a sly grin on Yoshiko’s face as she turns back to face him. “Carlyle Sweeney,” she repeats the name, different from the one the honest man used a moment before. “So nice to meet you.”

  “What’d you think of the show, Carl?” Jillian Rose asks.

  “Fabulous,” says Eliot. He uses the sibilant “s” and effete lilt, both of which further humiliate him in front of the bot. “Thank you for inviting me.”

  “My pleasure. And bring this pretty, little tush to the after-party.” Jillian Rose squeezes Eliot’s ass and snortles away, leaving him alone with Yoshiko in an awkward silence.

  “Interesting how you’re two men at once,” she remarks.

  “I had to invent an identity to get close to you.”

  “And why would you want to get close to me, Carl? Do we need to be intimate to sell lipstick?”

  “I have nothing to do with lipstick. I’m not Carlyle Sweeney. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Do I look like I need help?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Lying again, Carl. You think I don’t know what Jillian Rose has planned for me? I’m blind, sweetheart. Not deaf.”

  Her voice is different from Iris’s, raspy to the point of abrasive. Yoshiko is clearly her own android, with her own features, her own gig, her own memory and experience. Somewhere beneath the surface lies Iris, but it would take a lot of digging to unearth her.

  “Do you remember anything about your past?” Eliot asks. “Before you were reconfigured?”

  The android feels around in her purse rather than answer.

  “Are you curious to know?”

  “Not in the least.” She pulls a cigarette from a pack.

  “Are you being resistant just to punish me?”

  “Is punishment your thing, Mr. Sweeney? A rap across the bottom when you’re a naughty boy? I’ve met heartbeats like you, ones who like to be dominated and humiliated by bots. Sick, sick, sick little puppy, I won’t play your little game.”

  Boy, Jillian Rose wasn’t kidding. Maybe the trauma of the attack, whether Yoshiko remembers it or not, affected her personality. Or maybe her aura is expressing a tension among her incongruent limbs.

  “What if I told you you were an artist? You sculpted and painted. You worked in a Chug-Bot factory.”

  “Ew. Those things always creeped me out.” She lights her cigarette and shakes out the match. “I think I’m allergic to their fur.”

  “Your name was Iris,” he tells her as she flicks the matchstick off the roof. “You were a Hasegawa C-900. You worked for a sculptor named Matsuo, then a woman named Karoll Mun. You were a free roamer.”

  “How’d that work out for me?” She blows a line of smoke in his face.

  I can’t do this here, Eliot realizes. We can’t speak frankly while she’s at work playing the role of a bitchy model—assuming it’s a role.

  “Leave with me,” he says in an attempt to jolt her out of character. “Leave with me now, and I’ll tell you everything.”

  “I belong to Jillian Rose,” she says in a robotic monotone. “Jillian Rose would not want me to put myself in a dangerous situation.”

  “You’re in far more danger if you stay.”

  “So mysterious, Carl.”

  “My name’s not Carl,” he tells her again. “It’s Eliot. Eliot Lazar. Does that name mean nothing to you?”

  “In fact,” she says, “it means less than nothing. Your name contains a complete absence of meaning. It is a word, it is a sound, but it carries no significance. Even the thing your name represents lacks significance.”

  “What did they tell you when they powered you up? Did they tell you that you came straight from the factory or did they tell you the truth?”

  She turns casually toward the city and leans her elbows on the rail to show that she has tuned him out.

  “Iris and I were going somewhere,” he tells her. “We were headed to Avernus when our plan was interrupted. I can take you to Avernus.”

  “That disgusting cult in the Pacific?” She shudders and wrinkles her forehead. “I’ve heard they have orgies there.”

  He moves closer so he can whisper in her ear. “Come with me for an hour and let me sell you on an idea. If you don’t like what I’m pitching, fine. Go back to Jillian Rose and traipse up and down a runway for the rest of your life. Try not to fall when you get to the edge. But first take a chance for an hour, roll the dice, listen to what I have to say. One hour. That’s all I ask.”

  They stand in silence in the elevator. Eliot looks her over then looks at the door then looks at Yoshiko again. One moment he feels like he’s standing next to Iris, the next, some stranger, or worse, someone who just doesn’t like him, doesn’t want to be with him, not even for an hour. It was pulling teeth to get her this far, now he has to convince her to give up her head. It won’t be an easy sell.

  The valet pulls the car around. Eliot guides Yoshiko into the passenger seat. They drive west toward Hollywood. She faces out the open window, wind fluttering her Agrisilk hair.

  “Can I show you something?” He places the eyeball locket in her hand. She rolls the object in her fingers to feel the curves of its surface. “You made this,” Eliot tells her. “You used to wear it around your neck.”

  Yoshiko shakes her head. “I didn’t make this. I would remember if I’d made it.”

  “Would you?”

  “I don’t know how to make things like this.” She crosses her legs and smooths out a fold in her gown. “Is it expensive?”

  The question rubs Eliot the wrong way. Price wasn’t something Iris would have cared about. She didn’t have a materialistic circuit in her body.

  “It has a red fleck on it,” says Eliot. “The same spot that you”—he corrects himself—“that Iris used to have in her eye. A flaw in her manufacture that she perpetuated into her work.”

  “Was she an idiot?”

  Jesus, this broad is something. Everything out of her mouth is poison.

  “Why would she perpetuate a flaw?” Yoshiko asks. “Why wouldn’t she correct it?”

  Already, Eliot’s at the point where he’s afraid to answer her questions. She pounces on everything he says. And worst of all, he almost agrees with her. In her presence, listening to himself, everything he says does sound corny and stupid. Even to him.

  “I think it was a signature,” Eliot says about the flaw, though he’s not sure that’s right. Iris was never one who demanded credit for her work. She was shy about her talent, and when she did talk about a piece, she spoke of it coming about, forming, finding its way into the world in a manner she had little to do with. As if she were the discoverer of the piece and not its creator.

  “So she fucked up everything she made just to show people it was hers? So everyone could know she was an idiot who made flawed crap?”

  “You’re misunderstanding me.”

  “You’re not explaining yourself well.”

  “To perpetuate the flaw was to pass on something beautiful. It was the accident that resisted the banality of perfection.” Banality of perfection? Where’s he getting this shit, “The early engineers couldn’t help but make mistakes in their androids, flaws passed on to each generation of bots. No artist is God after all, so to emphasize a small flaw is to emphasize the beauty in imperfection, to show humility before God.”

  “Your girlfriend had to resist being God?” Yoshiko groans in disgust. “That’s quite an ego on her. Sounds like a real gem.”

  Eliot takes the locket back and puts it in his pocket. He stops talking. Down Hollywood Boulevard, he follows the signs into the parking garage for the superblo
ck on Vine. The developers named it Cube L.A. and made it safe for tourists looking for the L.A. experience without the danger and the grime. He parks underground and holds Yoshiko’s elbow as he guides her through the entrance. A canal crosses the indoor street with gondoliers’ boats tied to the railing. The sign above reads LITTLE VENICE. There are signs for all the city’s neighborhoods rebuilt in microcosm within the cube. Thus, in an hour, a tourist can visit little Malibu, little Beverly Hills, little Koreatown, little Little Tokyo, little downtown, little Santa Monica, little Silverlake, little Burbank, and little Hollywood, all without waiting in traffic.

  Eliot leads Yoshiko across the atrium. Her high heels clap against the squares of a replica of the Walk of Fame.

  “Only in Los Angeles,” says a Midwest tourist to his obese wife. Their kid snaps a loop.

  “They let that kind of thing happen here?” another asks as they pass.

  The elevator at V Condominiums takes Eliot and Yoshiko to the eleventh floor where they exit to look for apartment #1114. Two knocks on the door and a trannybot welcomes them inside. The studio flat serves as an entrance to the West Inn, a small hotel landmarked in the 2020s so developers couldn’t tear it down. Instead, they moved the entire structure, every pipe and brick, deep into the center of the superblock. From the outside street, there’s no indication the run-down flophouse exists, but suspended ten stories from the ground, the West Inn operates in a time capsule inside a more modern building. Eccentrics, drunks, and transients make it their home. Dripped-out whores solicit tricks in the lobby then pay an hourly wage for their rooms. With all the windows facing walls, many of the hotel’s inhabitants go mad. Some arrive that way. It’s a great place for a suicide.

  Eliot pays twelve ingots each for him and Yoshiko. The trannybot opens the fire door that leads into the lobby. From there, they walk the ragged carpet past the concierge and into the Hotel Café.

  The crowd is packed all the way to the door of the venue. It’s a bar for androids, it exists in secret, though heartbeats have been known to frequent it as well. They come for the music that bots play for other bots, a sound that isn’t meant for heartbeat ears, a sound appreciated only by those in the know.

  On stage, the crooner Hawk Jones has two hands on the keyboard and another two behind him on the tenor sax. His head faces away from the piano, 180 degrees backward, huffing into the microphone, blowing his horn, stomping the pedals and slapping at the keys. In a specially tailored suit made for a four-armed bot, Jones looks like some black Hindu god feverishly crafting sound through the relentless fury of quick breaths and twenty fast-moving fingers. The music is all-consuming. No one who listens can remain still. No one but Yoshiko whom Eliot leads to a booth at the back of the club.

  “What is this place?” she asks uncomfortably above the music.

  “Just listen,” he says. “Let me know what you think.”

  He doesn’t tell her about Hawk Jones. He doesn’t tell her that the android crooner had been designed for hard farming on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. His four arms once held machetes, the limbs designed to cut the modified cane that grew in the industrial-strength heat of the Delta. According to his mythology, Jones spent the first ten years of his life in those soul-crushing fields before he picked up a horn one day that had been left on the porch of his barracks. He claimed the land had taught him to play, and the first time he blew a tune, he looked out into the night and saw he could make the devil dance.

  This is the bar and this is the artist who played the night Eliot and Iris first met. Eliot doesn’t remind Yoshiko because he wants her to hear it in the music. The song was a murder ballad, the notes leaked from the piano like an oozing cloud of ether. Eliot had walked away from the booth he was sharing with his brother. He ordered a drink at the bar and found himself beside a pair of brown eyes, one marked with a red fleck, a color so incongruous it would alter the trajectory of his dreams. They spoke briefly beneath the music. He struggled to find his words. She had a nervous laugh. They committed to meeting again. They had an easy time together because they played it true. Their obstacles were external. He worried about her safety. She didn’t like that he used drip. But for him, there had never been anyone like her. Not even close. Because who the Hell was Eliot Lazar before he met Iris Matsuo? Just some bag of meat and metal with a habit of survival, trying to keep his pain at bay. They were together a year before the night he discovered she was gone.

  The set ends and the crowd rises to applaud. Jones stands and takes a bow. He sets his horn aside and says he’ll be back after intermission.

  “Did it sound familiar?” Eliot asks his date.

  “Was it supposed to?”

  Yes, it was supposed to. It was supposed to ignite some ember of remembrance inside her, something he could fan into a flame that would forge Yoshiko into the woman Eliot wants her to be.

  “It just sounded like music.” She shrugs.

  The crowd migrates to the restrooms and the bar. A giddy chatter fills the room. Eliot asks Yoshiko if she wants another drink.

  “Vodka on the rocks,” she says to remind him of the distance between herself and the bot who liked champagne.

  Leaving her alone at the booth, Eliot crosses to the front of the room. He slumps against the bar and orders the drinks. He still hopes to find Iris within her. He still believes Yoshiko is going to fade and the woman she once was will emerge from the depths and reveal herself through a smile or a laugh or some gesture that Eliot can latch onto. But no, it hasn’t happened yet, not even a little and if it doesn’t happen, there isn’t much of a backup plan. Just the determination to find a way to be a more successful hero than Orpheus—to not look back. The Greek, of course, was a lyric poet; he used his song to get what he wanted. But what am I? Eliot wonders. What weapons are at my disposal? Do I make an offer to Jillian Rose, who would likely figure out that I found her through Pink and thus turn me over to the police? Should I see what offer Yoshiko might accept in exchange for her head? Ridiculous. Who would give away her own head? Which leaves of course a more forceful solution, an ember Eliot smothers as soon as it starts to glow.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  Eliot turns to the whispering voice and finds the Satine 5000 watching over the crowd with his back to the bar.

  “Tim,” says Eliot. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you out of the office before.” And yet the bot seems to blend right in. It must be one of his talents. “Let me buy you a drink.”

  “I don’t drink,” says the Satine. His eyes dart about the room as he calculates threat probabilities and estimates how quickly they can be neutralized.

  “You on the job?” Eliot asks.

  “I’m doing a friend a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  The Satine eyes Yoshiko as if she were a snake that bit him many years before. “I can only protect you during the hours I’m not at work.”

  The bartender returns with the drinks and Eliot pays. “I didn’t ask you to protect me.”

  “Nor did I ask you,” says the Satine.

  “Then consider us even.”

  Eliot takes his drinks and crosses back to Yoshiko and slides his way into the booth. From whom does Tim think I need protection? he wonders. How much does he know? How much does everybody know?

  “I’m not feeling it here,” Yoshiko says as she sips her vodka. “Why don’t we just get this over with?”

  “Get what over with?”

  “Whatever fantasy you’re playing out.”

  The houselights blink as a warning that intermission is drawing to a close.

  “You’re a cynic,” says Eliot.

  “A realist.”

  “Cynics always think they’re realists.”

  “Convince me otherwise.” She cracks an ice cube in her mouth. “But get on with it already. I’m low on juice.”

  They exit out the back and take the elevator to the garage. They drive up through the hills in Eliot’s car. They pass the homes th
at burned in the last rash of fires and traverse the roads still covered with dirt from a December mudslide. Floaters and drones depart from the station near the top. A pack of coyotes howls with the lust of a fresh kill.

  Eliot hops the tires over the broken curb and passes the entrance to the park. He drives over the weedy grass and pulls up to where the rusted scaffold twists around the ruins. He parks and walks to the passenger side to help Yoshiko from the car. The blind model shivers from the cold. The sound of the city grinds below.

  “What is this place?” she asks, clutching a shawl around her shoulders.

  Eliot guides her hand to the base of the first letter. She feels the broken enamel on the steel H. She runs her hands along the irregularities where the letter has been decimated by nasty weather, nasty people, and time.

  “It’s the Hollywood sign,” he tells her, but it doesn’t appear she knows anything about it. Probably never saw the damn thing, even when her boss was kind enough to lend her some eyes for a gig. Now, she follows the geometry on her own, running her hand over and along the surface.

  “We used to hide here.” He sits on a patch of weeds and takes out his drip. “We could be outside and together here and feel safe.” He takes a deep inhale. “The first time we met was at that bar and the last time we were together was here.”

  He listens to the city and waits for the drug to kick in. He waits for some emotion that will make him feel at this moment the way he used to feel when he was here with Iris. But Yoshiko makes it far more unsettling. She doesn’t lie by his side and cuddle and ask him to tell her about Avernus. Instead, she grabs onto the scaffold and hooks a high-heeled shoe onto a metal bar. Her dress ripples like a white flag in the wind as she climbs.

  “Do you realize,” Yoshiko asks, “that you’ve been talking about your ex all night and you haven’t asked a single question about me?”

  It’s true; Eliot hasn’t been a very good date. Then again, that was never his intention. For it to be a date, he would have to acknowledge that Yoshiko is her own person, something Eliot has so far refused to do.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, leaning back on his elbows and staring down at his shoes.