Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  Eliot’s ribs crack between the squeezing legs. A peaceful dizziness overcomes him as his throat is compressed by the hinge in the Russian’s elbow. The lifeblood slows in his veins. But even as the breath bellows from his lungs, Eliot can sense that Slugger isn’t as strong as he was in the pit. Oil bubbles in the bot’s mouth, and there’s a dampness by his right thigh from where a bullet penetrated his skin.

  The train lowers; it wants to land but has too much speed. Eliot releases one hand from the undercarriage and rests his weight against the Russian’s chest. He finds the wet spot on Slugger’s leg and pokes his finger through the bullet hole in his jeans. The Russian growls beneath him. Sirens blare. The lights of the city blur past as the train gains altitude and loses the river below. Eliot hooks a wire with his finger and rips it out of the android’s leg. As the limb flails uselessly beneath them, the enraged fighter clamps his teeth into Eliot’s ear. Eliot turns his chin into Slugger’s shoulder. He chews into a buckshot wound, and with his teeth, he rips out more wires from the android’s arm.

  The train rises. The bot’s arm releases its grip. Eliot’s ear tears off in Slugger’s mouth as his body dangles over the river, his wires exposed, oil streaming from his wounds. He holds on to Eliot’s coat lest he plunge into the dirty smoke of the city. Slugger needs Eliot now; the hunter clings to his prey. The train rises to clear a bridge. The fighter’s weight stretches the seams of the coat as the train gains more altitude. The fabric rips, and the Russian’s body falls from the sky. He howls and grabs in desperation at the air. With Eliot’s torn coat in his hand and a bloody ear in his mouth, the fighter drops several stories until he lands atop a spire that pierces into his back and out his chest. Pinned and wriggling atop a bridge, the Russian fighter flails and punches as the oil pours from his body and the power drains from his limbs.

  The train lowers. It finds a fast course against the eddies and turns with the contours of the river’s path. Eliot crawls into the space between two cars and pulls himself onto the footplate as the train skims the surface of the water. He grabs for a handle and yanks an end door open and collapses his body inside. The door slams shut as the front car smashes against the shallows of the river. On impact, the train’s safety-spray floods the interior with a deluge of heavy foam that expands into a rubbery shock absorber for Eliot’s tumbling body.

  The train twists and skids and caterpillars in the middle with cars springing into the air, erect, then falling with steel shards slicing through the metal in their path. The train tumbles to its side and floats atop the black-water sludge. The crash ends but the mangled iron rocks back and forth in the river like a fever-sick patient sweating in his bed.

  Within the cars, the foam dissolves, and Eliot sinks in the white bubbles melting beneath him. Water rushes through the broken windows. Sirens sound above the din. Given his injuries, he crawls as best he can toward a crack in the fuselage. He grabs a sharp metal edge and allows the water to push him up through the opening. He emerges from the wreckage like a broken ghost climbing through the splintered planks of his casket.

  Androids leave their homes along the banks and trudge out in the chest-high water to get to the fallen train. Some tear slabs of metal from the cars and rip the limbs off injured bots. Others steal wallets and watches from disabled heartbeats. Others still dive into the muck to pull survivors from the wreck. They form relay chains and move the victims to the riverbank where nurse bots treat wounds and administer CPR.

  Gunfire explodes from a floater in the sky. Bullets sweep the river, cutting down the looters and Samaritans alike. The bots scatter and dive for cover but the gunfire persists.

  Eliot kneels on the sinking metal and watches as a barrage of Molotov cocktails flies from beyond the shanties and smashes into the floater above. The craft bursts into flames and drops from the sky. It lands atop the train where it burns like a funeral pyre on a sacred river. Bots rush the downed craft and pull policemen from the wreck. They rip the dying heartbeats’ limbs from their bodies in an orgy of revenge.

  The flames ignite chemicals floating on the water’s surface. From the west side of the river, a phalanx of officers strafe the tent city with machine guns. The bots retaliate with slabs of concrete launched from makeshift slings and catapults. They attack from the rooftops as the drones attack from the sky.

  Covered in white foam, a Chug-Bot drifts by in the flaming current, and once again, Eliot remembers the girl. He tries to recall which car she was in. He leaps along the protrusions of the sinking train, looking for some sign of her between the cracks of the wreckage.

  “Eliot,” a voice calls from the shanties on the riverbank. “Get out of there!” His brother snaps a loop from his car before calling out again. “We gotta go!”

  Black smoke rises from the river. Gunfire and screams penetrate the flames. Eliot hops along the sharp edges of a middle car crumpled like a sheet of paper. Deep within the crash, he sees a patch of pale white skin reaching upward from the darkness. He lowers his body into the twisted metal until he can discern the girl’s form.

  “Take my hand,” he says, but the girl doesn’t respond. He lies down against the hot metal and thrusts his arm into the void. “I won’t hurt you,” he tells her. “Take my hand.”

  Still, the girl doesn’t respond.

  Eliot extends his arm, his shoulder burning, until he has a grasp of the girl’s wrist. He pushes himself up and plants his knees on the metal. Her body is weightless in his grasp. He lifts her easily, too easily; her uncanny lightness unsettles him. Standing on the fuselage, holding the girl in the air, Eliot can see that her torso is severed on an angle beneath her chest. Her parts spark and her wires sag beneath the clean shear that sliced her in half. Her open eyes are lifeless and blank, one with a little red fleck.

  “Eliot,” Shelley screams from a side of the battlefield. “Get out of there!”

  Projectiles arc above them. The smoke billows. The train sinks into the muck. Eliot hears his brother screaming from the shore. He feels the river burning around him. He looks at the little red fleck in the dead bot’s eye: so useless and intact.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Apocalypse

  Left Arm—Uchenna

  Right Pinky—Edmund “Pink” Spenser

  Head—Jillian Rose Models

  Legs—Tucson Metal Solutions

  Torso—Chief Shunu/Joshua Dominguez

  Right arm—Lorca

  Eyes—Blumenthal Promotions

  The police have a checkpoint on Crenshaw. Assault rifles across their chests. The car approaches. Inside, Eliot holds a rag to the side of his head. Behind the wheel, Shelley does the talking.

  “I got to get him to a hospital.”

  Eliot shows the injury, and the cops wave them past. Blood drips down his neck. His clothes are soaked. The pain runs from the side of his head down his shoulder and into his busted ribs. He takes a vial from the glove box and pours a few drops in a rag. He takes a sniff then presses the cloth to where he used to have an ear.

  “There’s a first-aid kit in the galley,” says Shelley

  “I know.”

  “You got to take care of that.”

  Sirens flare around them. Armored trucks with SWAT teams race east through the city. Explosions blast through the night.

  “I gotta get loops of this,” says Shelley. “This could be my chance.”

  As they escaped the river, floaters and drones scorched the bots’ tents and shanties with flamethrowers. Fleeing androids carried the fire to the warehouses and factories nearby. They smashed windows and flipped cars. They stole weapons from downed officers and shot back at the sky. Shelley drove with the current of the riot until he made it out of harm’s way, but even now, in the car, they feel as if they’re only inches ahead of the swell.

  “Can you get to Avernus like that?” Shelley asks.

  “I can get there.”

  “You’ll need help.”

  “I’ll have it.”

  Because he’ll h
ave Iris.

  It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t how he drew it up, but Eliot has her parts now, every damn one of them. Against all laws of probability, against all warnings and his own fears, he has everything he needs to put her back together again.

  “You all right?” asks Shelley.

  “I’m all right.”

  He’s not all right.

  The price was too high. It split him in two. Half of Eliot is in the car but the other half is kneeling atop the train with his fingers in a young girl’s face.

  “She was dead already,” he says in the car.

  “Who was?”

  “The girl.”

  Shelley hasn’t looked at him since the river. He aimed his loop-cam to take a picture when Eliot raised the bot out of the wreckage, but then he lowered the cam and looked away. Shelley, his flesh and blood, who has no quarrel with the ugliness of the world—shit, he revels in it—couldn’t look at his own brother as Eliot removed the girl’s eyes.

  “There was no point in leaving them there,” says Eliot. “Should I have just left them to sink in the river?” They drive past the pump jacks on the oil fields in Baldwin Hills. “She was a bot, for Chrissake. For all we know she was older than me.”

  “Who you trying to convince?” Shelley asks.

  Throngs of androids drift onto the street to watch the fire from the hilltop. Shelley honks, but they’re slow to get out of the way. Challenging and unafraid, they stare into the car as it passes.

  “You can’t tell Iris,” says Eliot.

  “Tell her what?”

  “She’ll never forgive me.”

  “All right.”

  “She’ll never forgive herself.”

  A burning Dumpster blocks the entrance to the freeway. Shelley drives around it and merges onto the ramp. They head west toward the harbors, away from the riot, joining a stream of cars pouring onto the freeway. People headed for where they hope it’s safe. Maybe Mexico, maybe the water, maybe south toward the desert. Somewhere they hope the bots won’t follow.

  “I fucked up,” says Eliot.

  “Only by your own terms.”

  “What other terms are there?”

  The bridge to Naples Island in Long Beach is blocked off by armed heartbeats. They check pulses before allowing the car to pass. The island is arranged in concentric circles with canals that circumscribe the footpaths in front of the houses. Shelley’s boat is tarped and moored in front of a vacant property that sits in the center of nine canals.

  “I got it from here,” says Eliot. “Go get your loops.”

  “I’m helping,” Shelley insists.

  They pull off the tarp and untie all but one of the ropes. They remove the bumpers. Eliot hands his brother the key to his apartment in exchange for the key to the boat.

  “Call me when you get to Avernus.”

  “Of course.”

  “And do something about you ear,” says Shelley. “It’s really ugly.”

  The waterway is clogged with boats already leaving, headed to Catalina or a few days at sea until things settle down. If they settle down. There’s no way to know.

  “Come with us,” says Eliot.

  “You kidding? This is my chance!”

  “But what if this is it?” Eliot asks. “What if the whole city goes up tonight?”

  Shelley laughs. “And to think a schmuck like you was the spark.”

  The younger brother looks wistfully at the boat held to its mooring by one ragged piece of rope. This was his home, and now it’s floating away. He puts a hand on Eliot’s bad shoulder, above the wound that marks the day their family was separated into the living and the dead.

  “You would have regretted it if you’d let her go,” he tells Eliot. “For the rest of your life you would have wondered what it would be like if you’d taken those eyes.”

  “But do I regret taking the eyes?” Eliot asks.

  “Not so much that you’ll throw them in the sea.”

  A horn blasts as a tanker makes its way into the harbor. Smoke rises above the mountains and blacks out the moon east of the fires. A wave of hot air swirls all the way to the shore.

  “Give my best to Mom.”

  The car door slams. The wheels screech as Shelley drives back toward the freeway. Eliot wonders if he’ll ever see him again, wonders if he’ll even survive the night. He probably will. His brother’s the kind who always finds someone to take care of him. It just won’t be me anymore, thinks Eliot.

  He holds his side as he climbs aboard the boat drifting gently from the dock. He unties the last rope binding him to the land and tosses it onto the deck. Up on the bridge, he puts the key in the ignition and sets the throttle to neutral to keep the boat from drifting into the canal. He heads belowdeck for the first-aid kit so he can put something on his wound right away.

  A man coughs as the lights come on. Eliot sees him on the port-side couch in the galley. His clothes and skin are burnt. His eyes squint in the light.

  “Good evening, Orpheus,” says the old man, pointing his gun to urge Eliot’s hands into the air.

  “Good evening, Detective.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The Canal

  “We’re adrift in the innermost circle,” Flaubert says through his earpiece. “I need harbor police. I need a forensics team and a paramedic. Suspect sustained an injury.”

  What the old detective won’t say in front of Eliot, cuffed and seated on the starboard-side couch, is that he has his own injuries to deal with as well. Second-degree burns and a broken leg from the blast didn’t deter him from investigating the lead that came through on the drone feed. He was able to autodrive out to Naples Island; he was able to get himself into the boat and suck up the alcohol onboard to keep the pain at bay; but getting back onto the dock with a suspect in tow will be impossible without the aid of other officers.

  “How long will it be?” he asks the dispatcher. Then after receiving his reply, “Very well.”

  Flaubert hangs up and activates his pocketbrane to record any ensuing conversation. He places it on a table next to Pink’s laptop. The device glows green but will turn red if it detects anyone is lying. He finds the first-aid kit under the sink and opens it on the galley counter. Supporting himself on his less-injured foot, he dons a pair of latex gloves and goes to work on Eliot’s wound.

  “And that’s the C-900 in the cabin?” he asks.

  Eliot nods.

  “And those are her eyes?” He gestures to the plastic bag on the couch. Eliot nods again, and the old detective tells him to hold still. He pushes aside the young man’s hair and cleans the wound with a disinfecting pad. “She’s beautiful.” Eliot winces as Flaubert applies a layer of antibacterial gel. “Seeing her put together, I can understand your passion to save her.”

  With the old detective this close, Eliot can hear what a struggle it is for the man to breathe. Knocking on death’s door but determined to see the job through—you have to admire the dedication. But why my case? Eliot wonders. Of all the open murders in Los Angeles, why was I so lucky as to draw this persistent bastard from the deck?

  “We have time,” Flaubert says as he stretches a bandage across the side of Eliot’s head. “The department has more pressing concerns tonight.” He tapes the bandage in place then steps away to evaluate the quality of his care. Back on the couch across from Eliot, he struggles to find a position that doesn’t cause him pain. “Should you come clean, the courts might show leniency in their judgment.”

  Sitting in the boat’s dark galley, the two adversaries face each other like weakened pugilists in the championship rounds of a fight. Each can hear the other’s labored breathing; each can see plainly the other’s wounds. Eliot is stiff, his neck bruised and swollen, an ear missing from his head. Opposite him, Flaubert’s leg is compromised, his clothes charred, his eyelids drooping from exhaustion.

  “Was it your hope,” the old detective asks, “that Plath would take the rap for your crime?”

  “I’m not the o
ne who made her a suspect.”

  “Nor did you do anything to exonerate her. Did she matter less than your C-900?”

  Eliot pulls at the restraints on his wrists. He looks at the curtain that blocks his view of the woman on the bed in the cabin. He looks at the eyes in the bag by the detective’s side. A pair of handcuffs, a curtain, and a man stand in his way. And time, of course, of which Eliot has little left.

  “How many were harmed as collateral in your campaign?”

  “How many did Pink kill?” Eliot asks in response. “How many would he have killed were he to survive?”

  Flaubert squints toward the stern of the boat as if the answer might lie somewhere near the bridge. “My feeling about Mr. Spenser is that he was a sociopath whose actions, though legal, were far from ethical. Nonetheless, it is my job to find his killer. It is the role I play in a process.”

  “A flawed process.”

  “The best process we have.” His shoulders spasm as he coughs. “Democracy, capitalism, America—none of it is perfect, but we are always becoming, always improving toward an ideal. Call it an illusion, but it is a working illusion.”

  “Working for whom?”

  “For those who opt in and play by the rules. Some of them anyway—you made a good living, did you not?” The old detective stifles a cough then clears his throat. He removes his pocket square but finds it charred beyond the point where it’s useful. “Of course, if your quarrel was with the law, there were avenues open through which you could have attempted reform. You could have spoken out or offered financial support to a cause. With your famous last name, you could even have run for office if you had wanted.”

  The galley bobs up and down from the wake of a passing vessel. The curtain sways between the rooms. She lies a few feet away, thinks Eliot, fully assembled in the cabin except for her eyes. Just beyond the curtain, but completely beyond my reach.

  “You played a role in this, too, y’know.”

  “I did,” Flaubert agrees. “I should have done more to stop you.”

  “Or help her.”

  “Help her?” The old detective looks toward the curtain as if utterly confused. “They’re here to serve us, not the other way around.” He wonders if Eliot’s misunderstanding of that fundamental relationship lies at the root of his illness.