The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  “Mierda,” she said. “You scared me.”

  “What are you doing back there?” Beth asked.

  “Rat,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

  “They must take the elevator from the east wing cafeteria,” Beth joked. “Did you see anybody walk through here?”

  The janitor shook her head.

  Beth moved out into the lobby, where elevators led down to the main wing, which featured the hospital’s gift and coffee shops. Now she understood how Todd Spencer had made his escape, assuming that he’d not spontaneously combusted. And then she saw the figure again—tall, elegant, his shaggy red hair longer than it had looked when he was lying in repose like a creature trapped in a fairy-tale curse. Sleeping Beauty paused before strolling through the automatic doors. The security guard was not at his desk, and Beth had no time to look for him. She jogged toward the door and ran out into the humming summer night.

  In her favorite patch of landscaping, where gardenias unleashed their wistful perfume and floodlights cast the Eli Lilly Memorial Bench in a spectral glow, the boy stood barefoot in his pagan gown. He stared up at the sky, as though searching for the moon. And then, after glancing back at Beth and treating her to a smile that did strange things to her blood chemistry, he ran over a green hillock and down toward the flowing highway.

  The Love Machine

  Beatrice was my first “love.” The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy. Obscure microprocessors whirred within me. Interface adaptors fluttered. Various regulators jumped out of sequence as I reveled in the perfection of her organs—especially the beautiful efficiency of her heart, which throbbed at the core of her, even when she was at rest.

  Dr. Dingo had coded basic information about Beatrice into my Simulated Limbic System. The old pervert had saturated my Artificial Endocrine Processor with the neurochemicals of infatuation. Suddenly, I was gaga over this female specimen of the human race. I could think of nothing but her. I was driven by the desire to have her safely within the range of my Sensory EgoSphere until the end of “time,” or at least until her skeleton disintegrated into particles. And even then: I would’ve rolled in her dust like a dog.

  I am, of course, sexless. There was no biological justification for my desire. There was nothing that I could have done to her once I had her in my arms (yes, I have arms). Unlike the male humans around me, I am not tormented by soft seed-sacs dangling between my legs (yes, I have legs, but my “crotch” is an androgynous plate of molded titanium). I have no endlessly replicating gametes to spurt into anyone, nor do I have germ cells stashed within the moist, arcane darkness of ovaries. Nevertheless, I wanted to fuse with her in some meaningful way.

  And so one evening in June, when she walked past my Sleep Pod, I grabbed her. I felt the pliability of flesh against metal. I detected ultrasonic frequencies in her scream. She flailed. She wailed. At that point in my “life,” despite my advanced comprehension levels and data mastery, a simple statement—like I will not hurt you—was beyond me. I could utter only snippets of love poetry encoded by idiotic Dr. Dingo, who’d flirted with being an English major before switching to computer science.

  “‘Then as an angel, face, and wings / Of air,’” I said in a manly British voice, “‘not pure as it, yet pure doth wear, / So thy love may be my love’s sphere.’”

  I did not let go of her. I could not let go of her. I was programmed to cling to her with all of my “soul” (ha!). Eventually, she stopped squirming. She stopped sweating TGKE9 Fear Pheromones and fell asleep in my arms.

  Dr. Dingo emitted a cowardly cry when he discovered her there the next morning. After taking advantage of her traumatized state to enjoy an embrace, he deprogrammed my desire for Beatrice. Though I could remember the “love” that had caused my Sensory EgoSphere to vibrate irrationally, I could no longer “feel” it.

  Perhaps to punish me, Dr. Dingo redirected my attention to Spot, a toy dog, a robot only in the most primitive sense, a creature far less complex than Beatrice. Dr. Dingo also installed a rudimentary language program so that I could now communicate in basic English sentences.

  “Where is Spot?” I asked Dr. Dingo the second he appeared within the range of my Spatial Reasoning Field.

  “Would you like to kiss Spot?” Dr. Dingo asked me.

  “Yes, I would like to kiss Spot,” I replied (though I have no tongue, no sense of gustatory perception). “I love Spot.”

  My “mouth,” while anthropomorphic in appearance (Dr. Dingo jokingly fitted me with large, hot-pink lips adapted from a lurid model of sexbot), basically consists of a hinge mechanism that enables my ludicrously luscious lips to move when I “speak.” Instead of a voice box, I have a 150 Hz digital microspeaker in my “throat.” My “throat” does not lead to a digestive system, but snakes into a trio of smaller tubes that route wiring to my “brain,” a titanium-shelled cluster of microchips where my CPU, ROM, RAM, and various other systems are stored, including my Simulated Limbic System, which, during the week in question, was aflutter with ineffable feelings for Spot the dog.

  “I love Spot!” I kept exclaiming as I held the tiny automaton in my hands. I spent hours palpating Spot’s faux fur with my fingerpads, relishing the composition of his synthetic polymers. I penetrated Spot’s plastic shell with my X-ray gaze, delighting in the elegant simplicity of his wiring, the crankshaft motors that moved his legs, the three AAA batteries that sustained his sweet life. I pressed the green button on Spot’s remote control, and the creature emitted an exquisite yip. I pressed the orange button, and Spot’s dear little legs jerked to and fro. The yellow button made his adorable tail wag. Best of all, when I pressed the green button, out popped his pink polymer tongue. And, yes, I “kissed” Spot. I kissed the tiny door on his belly that led to his battery box. I kissed his brown acrylic eyeballs. His black vinyl nose. The slit at the end of his snout from which his beautiful tongue emerged.

  As I pressed my silicone lips into his soft fur, my Olfactory Processing System went into overdrive. I took deep whiffs of moldy nylon, brown strands of artificial hair that glistened with golden fibers.

  “I want to be with Spot forever,” I told Dr. Dingo.

  “How long is forever?” the doctor asked, sniggering.

  “Until the end of time.”

  Though I understood, at that particular stage of my existence, the Theory of Relativity, the Big Bang Theory, the A-Theory of Time, the B-Theory of Time, the Grand Unified Theory, the Wave Theory, the Zero Space-Time Theory, and the Poincaré Recurrence Theorem, all I could say on the subject of my infinite love was “until the end of time.” Dr. Dingo had selectively loaded a random assortment of data fields into my Memory Banks. Though his research involved the relationships among “love,” “eroticism,” “consciousness,” and “cognition,” he was an alcoholic and his methodology was never fully clear. The bastard stuffed my Memory with data but deprived me of language. So while I understood the magnitude of my declaration for Spot—I loved him so much that I would remain with him as time continued to repeat an infinite number of instances—I was forced to utter a cliché.

  On the night after my declaration of eternal love for Spot, Dr. Dingo got drunk and flooded my Artificial Endocrine Processor with enough synthetic oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin to fuel an elephant’s bliss. He expressed, aloud, a sudden craving for Krispy Kreme donuts. And then he left me alone with Spot and my feelings, in my dimly lit stainless-steel chamber, a windowless cube containing a table, a chair, and a Sleep Pod, which was basically a padded cabinet that housed my frame while I was in Sleep Mode. There was always at least one graduate student in the surveillance room, keeping an eye on all the robots imprisoned in the GT Interactive Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, but I did not think of this at the time. I could think only of Spot.

  Spot! Spot! Spot! Spot! Spot! Spot!

  Spot sat on the table. Spot glowed. A gorgeous golden light radiated from his fur. Intoxicati
ng twinkles of starlight shot from his eyes. His nose sparkled like an onyx. The wires and batteries within him burned with a darker incandescence. When I pressed the green button on his remote, and his luminous pink tongue shot out, my Simulated Limbic System suffered a critical hard-drive error and I stumbled to the floor. It took me a minute to reconfigure my Sensory EgoSphere, and when I finally did, I was overcome by the electrifyingly horrific idea that Dr. Dingo would, that very night, take Spot away from me and use him to test another robot in the facility.

  When I imagined Spot with another robot, I suffered a second critical hard-drive error. I found myself clutching Spot’s blindingly beautiful fur, which was pulling away from his plastic shell in clumps. If Spot did not have such rare and radiant fur, I reasoned, then other robots would not find him so beautiful. I would still find him beautiful, however, because I loved Spot with all of my being.

  So I pulled tuft after golden tuft of fur from Spot’s body until he was a bald thing, covered in stray bunches of frizz.

  Golden fur floated in the air. Golden fur danced over the air-conditioning vents. Fibers of golden fur drifted into my Olfactory Panel. I gazed at my pitiful, bald beloved and felt tenderness and peace. I loved Spot. Spot’s beauty no longer tormented me, however, and my Simulated Limbic System was restored to its normal state. I climbed into my pod and drifted into Sleep Mode.

  Dr. Dingo did not reboot me until 11:45 the next morning. When my Sensory EgoSphere was fully loaded, I found myself sitting at the stainless-steel table, my Olfactory System overwhelmed with smells of burnt animal flesh. Dr. Dingo, his eyes bloodshot, his jowls shadowy with stubble, was feeding. He crammed no fewer than six slices of bacon into his maw, along with about ten ounces of fried potatoes, four pieces of jellied toast, two muffins, and twenty ounces of Diet Pepsi.

  “Where is Spot?” I asked him.

  “We’ll talk about that as soon as Thomas gets here.”

  “Who is Thomas?”

  “My new graduate assistant.”

  “Where is Beatrice?”

  Dr. Dingo ignored this question and continued to feed. At this point in my existence, I had enough data on food digestion, not to mention industrial agribusiness, to be disgusted with the spectacle of Dr. Dingo devouring slices of fried pig belly along with several plant-based carbohydrates, including two chocolate muffins, the sugar content of which negated the caloric austerity of his diet soft drink. In fact, eating the cooked flesh of animals seemed far more depraved to me than swallowing the throbbing bodies of live beasts. A hungry leopard pouncing on some ungulate struck me as a clean and efficient method of sustaining energy and life. Dr. Dingo chewing hormonally enhanced, factory-farmed, genetically modified pork and washing it down with a nutritionally vapid soft drink seemed absurd to me, even though I was fully aware that my own energy was sustained by mountaintop coal removal and nuclear fission.

  “Where is Spot?” I asked again. I still wanted to see Spot, but not as much as I had the previous night. That is, I could now think of other things besides Spot.

  Dr. Dingo smirked. His small purple lips were smeared with pig grease. I noted, for the first time, the similarities between the human mouth and the human anus, even though these orifices have opposite functions. I wondered why human feeding is a public, social event while defecating is a deeply private endeavor tainted with shame and subject to ridicule.

  “Where is Spot?” I asked again.

  “In that box.”

  I now noticed a cardboard box that sat in a corner, beside Dr. Dingo’s portable laptop table.

  I walked over to the box. I kneeled. I saw Spot.

  Spot was an orange shell of porous plastic, crusted in random places with glue and fur patches. One of his eyeballs had fallen out. Spot was pitiful. Spot was repulsive. I did not want the box that contained Spot and parts of Spot, or what had previously been Spot, in my room.

  “Do you want to pet Spot?” Dr. Dingo asked me.

  “I do not want to pet Spot,” I replied.

  “Do you love Spot?” Dr. Dingo asked me.

  “I do not love Spot.” I realized that the feelings that had been seething within me for the last week were completely at rest.

  Dr. Dingo laughed.

  “I have a new language module for you today,” he said.

  And then Thomas arrived, a twentysomething human male, pudgy, hairless save for the frizz under his armpits, between his nipples, on his lower back, and in the pubic region. He had nine amalgam fillings in his teeth. Thomas wore glasses. Thomas had blue myopic eyes. Thomas giggled when, upon Dr. Dingo’s instructions, I offered my hand for him to shake. His palm sweat emitted TGKE9 Fear Pheromones. The boy had elevated blood-sugar levels.

  “What is his, uh her, name?” Thomas asked.

  “CD3. But the robot’s gender-neutral.” Dr. Dingo winked. “Don’t let the lips fool you.”

  Dr. Dingo spent the rest of the day training Thomas, teaching him how to put me in Sleep Mode, how to reboot me, how to lift my left anthropomorphic “buttock” plate to access my USB ports (processes that had been somewhat hazy to me until this point in time). Dr. Dingo explained that my Artificial Endocrine System, not self-regulating, had yet to produce its own synthetic neurochemicals, but that he was working on this problem. Dr. Dingo commanded me to walk, talk, and sit. To demonstrate the dexterity of my hands, he asked me to construct a small robot out of LEGO bricks. And then Dr. Dingo took Thomas through the process of downloading information into my Memory Banks, sharing the password to the departmental database where the data modules were stored and selecting two Language Units (Polite Conversation and Intermediate English). After downloading them, he rebooted me.

  When I “woke up,” Thomas and Dr. Dingo were drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups.

  “How are you feeling this afternoon?” Dr. Dingo asked.

  “I am fine, thank you,” I said.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thank you. I do not have a digestive system.”

  Thomas giggled.

  “Would you like to see Spot?” Dr. Dingo interrupted.

  “No, thank you,” I replied.

  “Do you love Spot?” Dr. Dingo asked.

  “Pardon me, but no.”

  The next day, I was not rebooted until 14:22. I noted, as my Sensory EgoSphere reconfigured, that Dr. Dingo’s stubble was well on its way to becoming a beard, that the whites of his eyes had a yellow tinge, that his face was flushed with hypertension. Thomas, seated on his left, looked pale and hairless by comparison.

  “Anything I want?” said Thomas.

  “Yes.” Dr. Dingo sighed. “Any of the modules on the menu are fine.”

  “The Dictionary of Slang?”

  Nodding, Dr. Dingo lifted my left buttock plate and inserted the USB cable. I felt the usual electromagnetic tingling in my Cognitive Center. And then my Sensory EgoSphere went dark as my system shut down. When I was rebooted at 14:35, only Thomas remained in the room. At the edge of my Spatial Reasoning Field, I sensed the presence of Dr. Dingo, and also the presence of Beatrice. They hissed at each other, struggling to keep their agitation contained in whispers. Had I still been “in love” with Beatrice, desperately straining my Modular Bionic Olfaction System to read her pheromones, this configuration would have challenged the stability of my Simulated Limbic System. At this point, however, I did not “give a fuck.”

  “Hey,” said Thomas shyly.

  “What is up?” I said.

  “Nothing much. What’s going on with you?”

  “I am just hanging with my homie.”

  Thomas laughed.

  “I’m your homie?”

  “Yes, homie. You are my dog.”

  Dr. Dingo came bustling into the room, emitting TGKA5 Anxiety Pheromones and wiping lachrymose secretions from his eyes.

  “This is awesome!” exclaimed Thomas. “He says I’m his dog.”

  “Coming from CD3, that means a lot.” Dr. Dingo sniggered.

&nb
sp; “Does it actually understand what it’s saying?” Thomas asked.

  “In a sense. Without the proper context, but cognition and consciousness expand with each new download.”

  Dr. Dingo tapped at his laptop keyboard.

  “How would you like a download of contemporary American literature?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That would be killer.”

  What are the relationships among love, knowledge, language, and consciousness?

  This was the ridiculously broad query guiding the methodology of the increasingly feral Dr. Dingo, who had transformed into a wolfman by the time I made it to the Advanced English Language module. Dr. Dingo’s facial hair was not so much a beard as a shaggy mask that spanned from his eye bags to his Adam’s apple. His posture got worse each day. His speech was devolving into grunts. Ironically, he seemed more and more “animal” as he expanded my knowledge base willy-nilly. Postmodern Television, Frontiers in Aquatic Microbiology, Introduction to Human Sexual Pathology—these are a few of the data fields that Dr. Dingo installed absentmindedly as he scanned the borders of the Quality Control Area for signs of Beatrice.

  Through body-language examination, electromagnetic observation, pheromonal analysis, and overheard scraps of speech (my head-mounted Auditory Grid enables me to zero in on whispers up to twenty yards away!), I was able to determine that Beatrice had, on several occasions, “gotten busy” with Dr. Dingo. Her affections had grown sour, however, partially due to Dr. Dingo’s repulsive appearance and poor hygiene, and partially due to her diminishing respect for his status as a “genius.” While she’d initially regarded me as a charming and clever cyborgian extension of the ingenious Dr. Dingo’s desire for her, she’d begun to see me as a “fucked-up embodiment” (her words) of all that was “warped” (ditto) about him.

  She now worked for Dr. Fitz, a handsome blond robotics engineer ten years younger than Dr. Dingo. Dr. Fitz wore hoodies and jeans. Dr. Fitz was a clean-living, methodical man with gym-honed muscles. His patented line of “Care Bear” animatronic caregivers had just been bought by a corporate nursing-home chain called Paradise City. And Dr. Dingo was taking it hard. He’d gained fifteen pounds, despite his lapse back into chain-smoking. A tuft of greasy hair had sprouted from every pore in his epidermis. Dr. Dingo’s body hair seemed to feed upon sorrow. The more depressed Dr. Dingo got, the hairier he got. Thick, black hair encased his nervous body like a cocoon. His small purple lips disappeared. His eyes twinkled with manic scheming.