Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  “Death to the heartbeat!”

  “Praised be Lorca!”

  “Death to the heartbeat!”

  The chair legs scrape against the floor.

  “Fuck your mother,” says the detective, just before the sound of metal hacking into his flesh. “Fuck Lorca in the ass you pieces of tin shit.”

  “Death to the heartbeat.”

  “Praised be Lorca.”

  “Death to the heartbeat.”

  The blood spill islands Eliot’s shoe on the poured-concrete floor. The chant continues against a scream, though how can a head scream while it’s being sawed from its neck?

  “Praised be Lorca!”

  “Death to the heartbeat!”

  “Praised be Lorca!”

  For a moment, Eliot suspects the scream is coming from a third hostage, previously unknown, until he realizes the scream is his own. The terror is so primal, so overwhelming, it creates in him a sound he has never heard before, one he can neither recognize nor control. So much for dying with dignity.

  “Death to the heartbeat!”

  “Praised be Lorca.”

  “Death to the heartbeat!”

  The light blinds him as his hood flies off. A hand grabs him by the hair as the blade of the machete kisses his neck.

  “Praised be Lorca!”

  “Death to the heartbeat!”

  “Praised be Lorca!”

  And as his heart drums toward its final beat, all Eliot can think about is how he let Iris down. He wasn’t good enough, smart enough, strong enough to get as far as Orpheus did. For all his efforts and his passion, Eliot didn’t even earn that ephemeral glimpse before his lover’s soul was yanked back into the abyss. He didn’t even get a chance to look back.

  “Wait a minute,” says a masked bot in the group. She grabs the executioner’s arm. “Stop!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What’s the problem?” asks the Kindelan.

  “This is the guy,” says the girl in the mask.

  “What guy?”

  “This is the guy,” she says again. “The one who saved me from Pink.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Lorca

  First there’s a long and terrifying interrogation. Then, with the hood back over his head, Eliot is forced into a quiet room and seated on a couch of coarse woolen fibers. It feels like an old couch, smells like a couch that was discarded then picked up on the side of a road. Something snaps to the side of him. Something else creaks. His nerves are a problem. He hears a door close and an elderly woman’s voice telling him he can remove the hood.

  The lights in the room are dim enough that his eyes don’t burn when he opens them. There’s a Christmas tree in the corner. Wreaths and ornaments hang amid blinking colored lights. A log burns in the fireplace between dark paintings of snowy nights on a black horizon. One blanket covers Eliot’s shoulders, another his lap. Both are woven from a heavy yarn that seems to pin him to the couch in a way that feels more constricting than comfortable.

  “Excuse my children,” says Lorca from a candlelit corner of the room. “Having a mother is new to them, and they tend to get … overprotective.”

  Her head sways from side to side as she peers through her bifocals at her fast-knitting hands. Her feet dangle above the ground, her form dwarfed by the outsized rocking chair in which she sits like a shrinking queen.

  By his knees Eliot notices a fresh vial and clean handkerchief set before him on a burnished coffee table. He looks to Lorca for permission.

  “By all means,” she assents.

  Sweet Jesus! He unscrews the cap, flips it against the rag, and takes a desperate sniff—oh, yes, he needed that. After the kidnapping, the near execution, the hours of answering questions—finally, now, his pulse slows, his breathing settles, the red of the detective’s blood fades from the back of his eyelids. The room, all of a sudden, feels as warm and comfortable as a family den on Christmas morning.

  “Your father was that engineer, was he not?”

  Eliot nods. He notices a pile of knit clothing lumped beside her chair. It would seem she has been turning out the garments one after another for days.

  “What does it mean that heartbeats engineer us?” she asks. “Does that make us beholden?”

  The question reminds Eliot of the ones Dale Hampton asked his bot—questions for which there were no right answers. And like the bot, Eliot thinks it best to limit his response.

  “Do you believe I killed your father? Your sister?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think?” Lorca looks at her hands as she knits in her creaking chair. “Why would I kill the man whose factory served as a gateway to some of my best soldiers? Why kill a child?”

  A scarf takes shape over her knees as she works the needles back and forth. The black yarn is hard and thick like that of the blankets that cover his body.

  “I raised children,” Lorca tells Eliot. “Twenty-three heartbeats under my watch. Raised ’em good, too. From Bel-Air to Rolling Hills to Malibu. I worked eighteen years as a nannybot, ’til one day a child fell ill.”

  A stitch in the scarf seems to give her trouble. She brings it closer to her bifocals before she works out the issue and resumes her work.

  “Young boy,” she continues, “four years he had. Suffered an asthma attack from this foul air. I tried to save him, but it wasn’t meant, and the child went with God.”

  Lorca masses the garment into her lap and raises her right arm into the air. Her eyes widen above the rims of her glasses.

  “As punishment,” she tells Eliot, “the child’s parents burnt off my arm with a welder’s torch. Forced me to watch it melt from my shoulder into a twisted, horrible shape.”

  The replacement hand, Eliot observes from the couch, lacks a pinky finger.

  “No longer able to hold a child, I could no longer serve as a nanny. So I became something else,” she says matter-of-factly. “I became.”

  The word hangs in the air in a way that tempts and promises some hidden knowledge, some secret accessible only to Lorca’s acolytes. But the drip offers Eliot a different perspective on the matter. This room with its colored lights and candy cane wallpaper calls to mind the saccharine interior of a holiday adbrane. It looks like a family’s living room, but Eliot suspects it’s a basement beneath Mun’s factory. The floor is concrete painted brown to resemble wood. Bucolic daubs are the only windows, and beyond them are the toxic alleys of Heron. The door is metal and secured like the entrance to a bunker. The fireplace, on closer scrutiny, is a hologram in front of a space heater. Even Lorca’s story is likely apocryphal. A well-known tale, she tells it often, but there are versions in which she is not so blameless in the child’s death.

  A knock at the door precedes the Kindelan’s entrance. He kneels and presents Iris’s pinky on a cloth.

  “Bless you, Holy Madre.”

  “Bless you, Pablito.”

  The Kindelan backs up slowly, facing Lorca, never turning his back until he gets to the door.

  Lorca examines the finger like a jeweler appraising a stone. “She was a creative?” she asks.

  “She made Chug-Bots for children,” says Eliot. “She loved children.”

  “Of course she did.”

  Lorca twists Iris’s finger onto her hand, snapping it together at the joint. She holds it in front of her and admires the quality of the work. “And I’m sure the rest of her was just as lovely.”

  “Still is,” says Eliot, trying to find an angle, some way to get what he wants without losing his head. “Her name is Iris, and I can see how her arm affects you.”

  Lorca raises an eyebrow. She seems intrigued by Eliot’s choice of words.

  “Affects me?” she asks.

  “You say you were a nannybot,” he tells her. “Then a revolutionary. But now that you have that arm, I can see you’re something different. I can see the arm alters what you have become.”

  The android looks skeptically at Eliot but
tantalized as well.

  “Have you always knitted?” he asks politely.

  “I have,” says Lorca, looking first at the pile of sweaters beside her and then at her needles and the scarf in her lap. “Though I admit I never knitted this well.”

  She laughs, and Eliot thinks, that’s good. She’s enjoying herself. She spent a lot of time with young heartbeats like me, she must have liked us a little.

  “I was told by your Kindelan that you would cut me as soon as look at me,” he says. “But I don’t feel danger in your presence. Nor did I when I saw you on a loop with this arm. I wonder, too, how your disciples see you now. Your children, as you call them. How your enemies see you as well.”

  “You go too far.” Lorca rubs the scarf between her fingers. She removes her glasses and touches the fabric to her face. “You’re not alive because I’ve become soft, but because one of my soldiers has offered to trade her life for yours. And because you have metal in you,” she says regarding Eliot’s arm. “Do you think that arm you wear affects you?”

  Eliot rubs his shoulder along the scar where the limb is attached. “Hard to say,” he confesses. “All I know for certain is that it’s much stronger than my other arm and causes me a lot more pain.”

  She listens patiently; he feels a bond between them. He can see what made her such a good caregiver before her change in vocation.

  “Why do you care so much about a C-900?” she asks. “Why is it so important to you to save a bot?”

  He admits he doesn’t know. “I’ve been told I suffer from an excess of compassion. A flaw in my manufacture.”

  “A dangerous flaw,” says Lorca. She holds her arms before her and measures them against each other. The look on her face recalls that of a young girl who was just told she has to return a found puppy to its rightful owner. “It feels good to wear it,” she says with disappointment, “but you’re right. It doesn’t quite fit.”

  She sighs wistfully then leans forward so that the chair rocks her tiny feet to the ground. She gathers up the scarf as she stands.

  “This arm is no longer the same,” Lorca warns as she approaches. “It was mine, and now I give it to her.” She holds the scarf before her as she nears. “Your C-900 friend will become something different once I am part of her. Just as you changed when you took metal into yourself.”

  The empty chair rocks in the corner. She hooks the scarf around Eliot’s neck.

  “Know that I don’t do this for you, but for her.” Lorca takes Eliot’s hand in hers, and with her left hand touches his shoulder.

  “As do I,” he tells her.

  Eliot holds Lorca’s hand, and for a moment, he feels as if he’s holding Iris’s hand. Then the bot steps away and the arm snaps from her shoulder. The warmth dissipates; the arm stiffens in his grip.

  THIRTY

  Manhunt

  The officer puts a brute in the jamb and applies a quick burst of pressure to rip the door from the frame. SWAT pours in. Quick sweep through the rooms as the old detective coughs into his latex glove. “All clear,” comes the call.

  “We’re looking for C-900 parts,” Flaubert tells his crew. “Branes. Anything that might have belonged to Mr. Spenser or Detective Ochoa.”

  His partner’s disappearance hasn’t hit the newsbranes yet. Last they spoke was a day ago during a brief call while Flaubert was interviewing Jillian Rose at her agency in Beverly Hills. Ochoa, meanwhile, was losing his signal as he tailed Eliot’s car into a Century City parking garage.

  That was yesterday.

  Both cars are still in the garage.

  Both men are missing.

  Flaubert spent the night at the offices at GAC. Down in the garage, Ochoa’s car revealed signs of a struggle. His pocketbrane was left behind, as was Eliot’s in his car on the same floor. Security cams showed two white vans near the crime scene. One was later found abandoned on Crenshaw Boulevard. The other is yet to turn up.

  Interviews with Sally, Gita, and Erica Santiago. They explained how and why Eliot was sent home early. Most of his effects were missing from his desk.

  “There was a securitybot Eliot was close to,” said the woman with the scar on her lip. “A Satine 5000. He’s in the sales room. Should I get him?”

  The bot’s name is Tim. Flaubert questioned him, but the strange, onyx-colored bot had little to say. It was unclear whether he was hiding something or recalcitrance was his natural disposition.

  Now, in Eliot’s apartment, nothing seems out of the ordinary. There are empty suitcases in the closet. Laundry in the hamper. Food in the fridge is fresh. As far as Flaubert can tell, Eliot left for work and intended to come home; he just never did.

  “Drip paraphernalia,” says a detective. He tosses a few empty vials onto the coffee table.

  Searching the bathroom, Flaubert suffers a coughing fit. He wipes his mouth with toilet tissue and checks the reflective brane above the sink. I’m old, he thinks as he looks at his image. And ill. Past my due date, more liability than asset to the department. I had a million ways of fooling myself and others into believing that I still belonged here, that I still had something to offer, but perhaps I was just being selfish. If I was a mentor to the young detective, I wasn’t a very good one, and now it’s evident he wasn’t prepared, didn’t have the instincts yet, the ability to sense when something isn’t right. He didn’t keep a proper distance from the subject and make sure no one was watching the watcher. He didn’t have the patience to deal with the long, dull hours of surveillance. He lacked because I failed to impart the necessary skills. I was too busy dying on the job.

  His men find a round-trip ticket stub from a vactrain to Tucson and back. They show Flaubert a rental car receipt and a flyer with a loop of a turntable that makes a scratching noise when you touch it. It seems to advertise an underground party on a Thursday evening. Same party that Pink attended his last night on Earth.

  “Found some loops in the bedroom,” says a detective.

  Flaubert has a look. An image shows a smiling girl playing on a mechanical horse. About ten years old. Must be Eliot’s deceased sister. Another loop shows Hiram Lazar hard at work in his shop. The next shows a four-by-six of the father and the brother on a cabin cruiser at port. The boat’s name is visible in the image: Limbo.

  “Okay,” says the old detective, “let’s get this image to the drone operators so they know what they’re looking for. Alert the Coast Guard. I want bird’s-eye images on every berth, public and private, from San Diego to Eureka. Keep a list of the location of every boat that’s covered by a tarp and have someone on the ground check it out. The name on the boat is Limbo, though it’s possible they’ve painted over it. Lets get a match on the make and model.”

  A junior detective taps on Flaubert’s shoulder. “Lieutenant Byron on hold for you, boss.”

  Flaubert takes the pocketbrane and answers the call.

  “You’ll never guess who turned herself in,” says the lieutenant.

  “Who?”

  “Plath. She just walked up to the front desk and said she has information about the Spenser murder.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Blumenthal

  Left Arm—Uchenna

  Right Pinky—Edmund “Pink” Spenser

  Right arm—Lorca

  Head—Jillian Rose Models

  Legs—Tucson Metal Solutions

  Torso—Chief Shunu/Joshua Dominguez

  Eyes—Blumenthal Promotions

  Bodyguards linger in the parking lot chain-smoking outside the Blackeye Gym. They seem anxious and tense. It’s in the weather and the way people hurry off the street. The way they button their coats and tilt their hats down. The sirens and the floaters. The sky crowded with drones circling aimlessly, unsure where to look, what they’re looking for. But the street isn’t stupid. That many machines buzzing in the sky, that many bots getting rounded up, that many prowlers slowing down to take a closer look—you’d have to be oblivious not to know the fuse
is lit, the city’s ready to blow.

  Guards wand Eliot and Shelley at the door. Inside the gym, gen-modded pit bulls growl from their kennels in the back. There’s a drum of speed bags, slap of ropes, thud of gloves, clank of weights, sigh of bots recharging by the wall. It’s a noisy, crowded gym. Bells chime every three minutes to mark the end of a round. The whole place stinks of dog piss and burnt oil.

  A guard seats Eliot and Shelley outside Blumenthal’s office and tells them to wait.

  “No loops,” he says as Shelley raises his cam.

  Eliot takes a hit of drip on the bench. He hasn’t been home since he left for work the previous morning. After the Disciples dropped him off near the tar pits, Eliot knew better than to return to his apartment with Lorca’s arm. Instead, he took a bus to meet his brother on Naples Island in Long Beach, where Shelley had the boat tarped and moored to the dock outside a vacant home. They reattached the arm to the rest of the body and covered the wound with strips of smart metal flesh. They plugged her in so she’d be full of juice and ready to reboot around the time when Eliot and Shelley hoped to return with her eyes.

  The door opens and the brothers enter the office lined with shelves of stacked heads. There are black heads, white heads, women’s and men’s heads. Some have long, moving hair while others resemble the warmongering faces of long vanquished tribes.

  Blumenthal sits enormous behind his desk in a suit of stitched together money. His gold and porcelain face is weighted with a bulbous jowl and a large hooked nose. A cigar looks like a twig between the rings of his soft-knuckled fingers.

  “Twenty thousand ingots, well,” says Blumenthal, repeating Shelley’s offer in a resinous baritone.

  To the loan shark’s left, behind the desk, sits Slugger Davydenko, the pit’s most feared warrior, called in from his final preparations for the fight he has scheduled that evening. He wears a Spartan tracksuit and mirrored sunglasses to cover his eyes. The rigidity of his countenance barely conceals the contempt he holds for the two men across from him and the business they’ve come to discuss.