Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  He was out in three.

  His parole officer noted in a report that the parolee’s “clumsy incompetence and inability to remain employed would likely land him back in jail.” Five years later, the PO was proven right. A Modesto County indictment accused Chief Shunu of running some of the filthiest prostitutes in the state of California. Among his heartbeat customers, there were eight cases of AIDS, fifteen of gonorrhea, and twenty-seven of syphilis. Among his android customers, there was everything from the I love me virus to foaming mouth to a worm that convinced infected bots it was a good idea to set themselves afire. The judge was appalled. He wrote in his verdict that the accused was more than a pimp, he was a pandemic, and thus sentenced Shunu to fifteen years in the sweat lodge at Pelican Bay.

  Eliot looks out the window at the morning sun burning the solar fields on the desert floor. A billboard angled toward the hyperloop has been hacked and reprogrammed to read LONG LIVE LORCA. His seatmate is asleep, so Eliot uses the momentary privacy to douse a drip rag and take a quick hit. He folds the hanky into his pocket before finding this tidbit about Shunu in the archive of a Crescent City blog:

  In pleading for clemency, the inmate claimed to have “changed his ways and found Jesus” after years of studying the Bible in his cell. When a parole board member asked which of the gospels was his favorite, the inmate replied, “What’s a gospel?”

  The blog goes on to report that three weeks after his release, Shunu was accused of violating the Mann Act with a Mormon girl he met through a prison correspondence. A judge issued a warrant for his arrest, but the Indian had fled from his last known residence and likely returned to the Chumash reservation to avoid a third strike that would earn him a life sentence. Tribal authorities ignored an extradition request. The case remains open, though Eliot would guess that as long as Sleepyhead isn’t plying his trade in a California jurisdiction, the authorities are content to have him off their hands.

  At the Tucson vactrain station, Eliot rents a car and drives thirty minutes on a desert road to get to the Green Valley Recycling plant. He’s never been there before, but he knows the company well. GAC sells many of its DBRs to Green Valley for them to be stripped and resold for parts. Whatever parts the recyclers can’t salvage, they sell as scrap, and whatever they can’t scrap gets dumped into an old copper mine at the Arizona site. Like Dale Hampton said, it’s a good way for GAC to recover losses from its downed bots.

  Off a two-lane highway, a line of trucks loops into the plant to drop off cargo and pick up more. Eliot approaches the guest entrance. He rolls down the window at the guard station, and a gust of hot air presses against his face.

  “I got an appointment at Tucson Metal Solutions.”

  “Tucson Metal?” asks the bot at the station.

  “They run your company store.”

  The securitybot makes a call from his booth. Eliot looks out toward the loading bay and sees a shipment from a Maricopa county sheriff’s bus. Inside is a line of four-by-four cages stacked with rogue androids taken from the county jail. Botworkers haul the cages from the back of the bus and drop them on the desert floor.

  “Get away from me!” says a rogue locked in a cage. “I didn’t do nothing! I didn’t do a Goddamn thing!”

  The workers back off, waiting for the captive to use up his juice before they dare put their fingers near his cage. Seeing their reluctance, a foreman shouts a warning from the entrance of the dock.

  “Get ’er done,” he says. “We ain’t got all day.”

  The workers step it up. Two flip the cage while a third jumps to the top with a cattle prod. As one opens the lock, the second worker reaches inside and grabs a limb with his gloved hand. The rogue fights, but as soon as his leg is outside the cage, the bot on top prods him with a high-voltage shock that shorts the android’s engine. There’s a short but loud fizzing sound; his body gives a death rattle. The workers fix a collar around his neck and drag him inside the plant.

  The securitybot hangs up the phone. “I can’t find any Tucson Metal Solutions. You’ll have to speak to the plant manager on the floor of the kill room. Maybe he’ll know something. Here.” The bot hands over earplugs and a lanyard that identifies Eliot as a guest. “You better wear this or the line workers might mistake you for a DBR.”

  Inside the plant, it’s hotter than the desert. Just a giant, square room with high ceilings and lots of doors. No air-conditioning. No fans. And even with the earplugs it’s painfully loud.

  From behind a guardrail, Eliot watches as a big, burly android drags a DBR by the collar down a path between two columns of workers. The first hands on the line remove the bot’s clothing. The next cut off his hair. The next hack at his limbs with knives and machetes. Across a table, a team of bots has a go at the torso. They use smaller tools to cut off the genitals, remove batteries, and tear out engines. Finally, at the last station, a bot pulls the eyes from the decapitated head.

  Each component is then rushed over to a door where the parts wait to be collected. Eliot sees bundles of arms and legs wrapped in twine, piles of skin and hair, engines loaded into crates, batteries stacked on the floor, heads balled up in a wheeled bin. Scavenging bots pick up whatever circuits and wires fall out during the process. Cleaners mop up the spilled oil then jump out of the way as a worker drags another DBR down the line.

  “Pick up the pace,” calls a heartbeat in a white coat. He watches a giant wallbrane that displays the number of downed bots running through the room and the rate-per-minute at which they’re getting chopped.

  Eliot approaches and asks if he’s the manager.

  “Aw, Hell, I thought you were comin’ Monday. I swear we’re testing the metal down the line.”

  “Testing the metal?”

  The manager steps back. “You’re not from virus control?”

  “No,” says Eliot. “I’m looking for Tucson Metal. I think they run your company store.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s over by the barracks,” says the manager. “Come with me. I’ll show ya.”

  He opens a door that leads to an air-conditioned corridor with long windows on each side. It’s much quieter here, so Eliot can remove his plugs.

  “I sure am glad you ain’t from the government. We’re overwhelmed today so I don’t got nobody scanning for infections.”

  “Not even the convicts?”

  “Shit, I got orders to fill. Besides, them rogues ain’t infected. Most of ’em ain’t even guilty.”

  Through the window on his right, Eliot can see a well-lit room with female bots repairing, cleaning, and wrapping up parts to be shipped. They bunch up the hair and sort the clothing. They label boxes and pass them down the line.

  “My warehouse is empty,” says the manager. “Everything you’re looking at has already been sold, and there ain’t enough downed bots to fill my orders from last month, never mind this month.”

  In the packaging room, the androids run around with no conveyor belts, forklifts, or large tools to help. Everything is done by manpower, or bot power, lifted and processed with hands, legs, and backs.

  “So whenever we got more orders than metal,” says the manager, “we just throw a few bucks to a local sheriff who’s kind enough to arrest a few more bots and send ’em our way. This way our customers get their orders, the county gets a check and a couple fewer bots. Beats raising taxes.”

  “Not so good for the bots,” says Eliot.

  “Ain’t that the truth. We don’t even have the time to let their juice run out. Hell, sometimes we run behind and start chopping our own employees. I can’t tell you how much that slows the line.”

  Through the window on Eliot’s left, there’s a dark room with shirtless male androids inside. Molten steel, fire, and welding torches provide the only light. It looks like a metal forge from somewhere in the center of the Earth.

  “That’s where we smelt the excess and press the scrap,” says the manager. “We sell the high-quality stock to the labor providers to make new bots, then we drop
the junk into the copper pit. I got it down to five percent waste,” he says proudly. “Shooting for four. At that rate, we can keep this running for about five years before the pit fills up.”

  After the corridor, they exit back into the desert where there’s a landing strip, a railroad track, and another line of trucks loading cargo. The manager points Eliot toward a wooden building about a hundred yards away. “Head over there,” he says, “you’ll see the company store before you hit the barracks. If you find yourself in the copper pit, you’ve gone too far.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You bet.”

  A procession of bots drags pressed cubes of scrap across the brush. The sun nears its peak, and there’s no shade under which to hide. Eliot arrives at a run-down cluster of buildings that looks like the remnants of a ghost town from the Old West. There’s a saloon and an oil change garage and, sure enough, a company store where Eliot hopes to find Iris’s legs. He steps up the wood stairs and enters through a pair of swinging doors.

  Inside, the shelves are crowded with merchandise ranging from the high end to the untrustworthy. A menu lists prices for debit cards, pocketbranes, rain gear, gloves, shoes, and new batteries. It lists an inventory of software updates, memory upgrades, botcords, replacement limbs, strips of smart metal flesh—every accessory a bot might need for the desert and the factory floor.

  Eliot approaches the counter where a young, disengaged clerk lies back on a chair with his eyes closed and a fly swatter dangling from his hand. He has spacers in his cheeks and a tribal tattoo on his forehead. Three fans are positioned to blow air directly at him. None are pointed in a direction that might benefit a customer.

  “Excuse me. Do you work for Tucson Metal?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Eliot Lazar from GAC. I called a few days ago to purchase some legs.”

  The clerk remains seated enjoying the breeze from the fans. “The C-900 legs?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I usually only sell to bots. Don’t make sense you’d come all this way to buy ’em from me and not the plant. Not sure why it is you want ’em.”

  “Did the payment clear?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then I want ’em ’cause I paid for ’em.”

  The clerk shoots Eliot a look. He adjusts the fans to point up before he rises slowly and reaches beneath the counter. He takes out a box and removes the lid to reveal a leg wrapped in cheap brown paper. Eliot shines his pocketbrane’s UV on the thigh and reads the serial number, which matches the one on Iris’s locket.

  “Where’s the other leg?” he asks.

  “In use,” says the clerk. There are gaps where two of his teeth should be, though it looks more like a fashion statement than a lack of hygiene.

  “When we spoke, you said you had the pair.”

  “Oh, I have the pair,” says the clerk. “It’s just the other’s in use.” He swings the fly swatter to add a bug’s corpse to the funeral mound at the base of the wall. “I could sell you a Patel or an XL series with the same color skin. Hell, them XLs are top of the line, real nice value if you want ’em.”

  “I paid for a specific pair of legs,” says Eliot. “The payment went through. I expect the leg.”

  “Suit yourself.” The clerk shrugs. “But you’re gonna have to get it yourself off a Titty Fat.” He turns the fans back toward his chair and takes a seat.

  I’ll bite, thinks Eliot. “Who’s Titty Fat?”

  “Just a carver. Her production was falling so she decided to lease a new leg to replace the one she was gimpin’ on. We made a deal on the C-900 piece after I bought it off a DJ playing a gig in town.”

  “She make all the payments?” Eliot asks.

  “Nope.”

  “Then why not repossess the leg?”

  “’Cause I sold it to you,” says the clerk. “It’s your problem now.”

  “All right.” Eliot sighs. “Where is she?”

  “Over by the copper pit. NatMo put her on a quarantine post until she’s disinfected.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Good question.” The clerk laughs at some joke only he seems to hear. “And you might need a tool kit if you want to snap off that leg.”

  Eliot pays for the kit. It costs three times what it would online, but this is a company store with a captive customer base, so of course the mark-up is extreme. Once outside, he carries the leg and his new bag of tools toward the copper pit to find the android named Titty Fat who has Iris’s other leg.

  The sun is a killer. He heads for the barracks so he can take cover in the shade. The building is a long flimsy patchwork of rusted sheet metal with intervals in the roof to allow in light. The bots sleep lengthwise on the ground with their cords plugged into the wall. Each outlet is next to a slot in which the workers insert their debit cards to pay for their juice while they recharge.

  Eliot steps over a group of kidbots asleep on the ground like a pack of baby wolves. He recognizes the child-sized androids as imports: American companies don’t build bots that look under eighteen. It’s rare to see a kidbot, as they aren’t mass-produced but rather made-to-order as replacements for heartbeat couples who lost a daughter or a son. In fact, Eliot and Shelley had begged for one to replace Mitzi after she was killed along with their father in the explosion by the stable. Their mother rightly refused. She knew that kidbots only remind families of who they lost rather than serve as emotionally fulfilling replacements. That’s why after a few years their owners usually release them as free roamers left to wander the streets begging, stealing, and causing mischief. Occasionally one will find work in a factory or mine where their small bodies and tiny hands can be useful for some specific task. Sometimes, too, they get adopted by android couples looking to create a family-unit like those of the heartbeats. But more often than not, the poor, innocent kidbots find themselves susceptible to the most depraved of society’s predators, or else their batteries drain and their little bodies collapse in the street where they get carted off and sold for scrap.

  Exiting the barracks, Eliot passes the generator providing juice for the sleeping bots. It’s loud and pumps out a black plume of smoke that hangs over the desert. Once again, he sees the parade of bots dragging crushed metal from the plant. He asks one on the march where Titty Fat is, and the bot points to an outcrop of high, wooden poles freestanding by the edge of the pit. From a distance the poles look like totems, and two of them hold a wide banner that reads: ABANDON ALL HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. But as Eliot approaches, he can see there are no carvings on the totems. Instead, wrapped in razor wire, the bodies of crucified androids roast in the midday sun. Cords hang from their navels and connect to the generator. Around their necks, they wear signs reading SLACKER or DRUNKARD or WHORE. Some are naked and covered in oil that cooks their skin. Some have limbs that have been chewed by dogs. Each has an expression of hopeless resignation or bored despair. Each except one.

  “I’m looking for Titty Fat,” says Eliot.

  “That’s me,” says the one.

  Her demeanor matches her wide toothy smile—she can’t help but smile as someone has cut off her lips. She is short and rotund, with a dark, brown sunburn. Her hair hangs straight with a crown shaved on top so the sun focuses directly onto her head. Two holes in her gingham blouse expose her breasts, and around her neck, a string holds a sign reading RUNNER.

  “Sorry to bother you,” says Eliot, “but would you by any chance be wearing a C-900 leg?”

  “This one on the left,” says the bot. “There’s a ladder over yonder if you care to look.”

  Eliot finds the ladder and leans it against the post. He climbs up to where Titty Fat is tied. From the height, he can see through the black smoke to the bottom of the pit where bots stack the metal cubes, which the workers throw over the edge.

  “Is it all right if I lower your pants?” Eliot asks.

  “Go ahead.”

  Titty Fat expresses no judgment as Eliot undoes her but
ton and unzips her fly. He pulls her pants down and sees she’s wearing a wrapped cloth for underwear. With the UV from his pocketbrane, Eliot confirms that the serial number on her leg matches the number from Iris’s locket.

  “I better warn you,” says the bot. “This leg ain’t done me no good. It might well be infected.”

  “With what?”

  “With the devil. Sooner you get it off me, the better.”

  A female android on a neighboring pole clears her throat and spits. The sign around her neck reads THIEF.

  “I worked here ten years,” says Titty Fat. “Leased plenty of parts, and never once considered runnin’ ’til I had this leg. Then it was all I could think a’. Mornin’, noon, and night. Just always thinkin’ about escape.”

  Eliot steadies himself on a step and unpacks his tools on top of the ladder.

  “I’d been wantin’ to see the orphans at the San Xavier Church. Been givin’ them a piece of my paycheck for years. I fought the urge ’til I couldn’t take it no more, ’til that darn leg went and convinced me.”

  Eliot uses a scalpel to make an incision on the bot’s hip and a drip rag to soak up the excess oil. He cuts around in a circle and peels down the skin.

  “I ran thirty miles on a desert road just to see those poor orphans and tell ’em what they all mean to me. How much children mean to me. Turns out all I did was scare the heck out of ’em.” She laughs humbly and embarrassed. “Luckily, the padre had me arrested and brought back here before I could do much harm.”

  Eliot uses a screwdriver to find the latch. He jams it in and unlocks the femur from the hip. “I’ll buy you another leg to replace the one I’m taking,” he says.

  “Bless your heart, but I can’t accept no charity.”

  “Nonsense. How are you going to work with only one leg?”

  Titty Fat lifts her chin and squints at the sun. “Once they get me clean of the virus, I’ll be more valuable to Green Valley for my parts than I’ll ever be again as a worker. They’ve treated me kind, so I’m just glad I can give them and NatMo somethin’ back.”