Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A Novel

by Judd Trichter

  Eliot grabs his suit jacket off the back of his chair, buttons his shirt incorrectly, and messes the knot on his tie. He wrinkles his pants with his hands and turns off his brane to check his reflection in the liquid screen. His eyes look terrible. His lips are dry, hair’s a mess, and his face is in desperate need of a shave. Perfect.

  He walks the hallway, enters the conference room, and finds it isn’t only the Hairy Mole inside; Gita’s there, too, as is the head of office security, and that well-despised cunt from HR. They’re seated at a long table with a sample bottle of cologne and a handkerchief on display. Eliot’s sample bottle. Eliot’s handkerchief. Taken from the inside of his desk.

  “Mr. Lazar, can you please take a seat?” Erica Santiago stares down at her brane as she points Eliot to a chair facing the long table. There’s a small scar on her lip where the mole used to be.

  Well, will you look at that, thinks Eliot as he sits before the firing squad. She finally got it removed. And come to think of it, now she doesn’t look half bad.

  “Let’s get started,” says the woman from HR.

  “Get started with what?” Eliot asks.

  By the way Gita averts her eyes, Eliot knows right away the old girl did him in. This is what he gets for ignoring office politics: Outflanked in a war he forgot he was waging.

  In the course of the hearing, Gita testifies about the horrible suffering she endured while working for a man with a drip habit. The erratic behavior, the lies, the temper. Gita tells how she had made numerous attempts to confront Eliot, but he denied he had a problem and refused her offers of assistance. She speaks about Eliot’s use of office personnel and office time to conduct extra-office activities, mainly a search for some missing bot with whom he is obsessed. She cries while confessing that she desperately wanted to keep his secret but worried about losing her job because of the division’s declining sales.

  “And more than anything,” says Gita with eyes glossing in his direction, “I’m doing this because I’m worried about you, Eliot. I couldn’t live with myself if I did nothing and you OD’d. It would be a scandal if you didn’t get help. Think of your family. Haven’t they been through enough? After what happened to your sister and your poor father, don’t you think your mother and your brother need to be spared another tragedy? Eliot, you need to take care of this before it’s too late. We love you. We want you to get better. We are doing this for you.”

  Eliot can’t help but admire the performance. Heck, he feels like applauding at the end. It’s bullshit of course. Everyone in the room knows it’s just a money grab, Gita’s attempt to grab all Eliot’s accounts and the corresponding commissions. And just to play along, Eliot denies the charges.

  “I’ve never seen that drip before in my life.… Don’t use the stuff … Hear it’s terrible for you … No idea where it came from … Perhaps someone planted it there.… I’ve been framed.”

  The whole situation leaves the Hairy Mole in a pickle (if you can still call her that now that the offending blemish is gone). Had Gita come to her first, the Mole would have forced Eliot into treatment and called it a sick leave. She would have held the favor over his head and coerced him into a humiliating role as her permanent fuck buddy. But Gita screwed her by going to HR first so the Mole couldn’t make her play. Now there is no option other than to order a temporary leave pending a review at which Eliot has no chance of keeping his job. It’s over for Eliot at GAC, and it’s over for the Hairy Mole’s hope for an intra-office fling.

  And to think, she just got her blemish removed.

  Eliot is dismissed from the meeting. Sadly. They tell him to go home and await further notice about his severance. He wishes them all good luck.

  A securitybot watches over his shoulder as Eliot clears his desk. He grabs a plant that had been given to him as a gift. He takes his workbrane, a loop of his sister, and a scented candle. He leaves everything else.

  All of his effects fit into a box he can carry against his chest. The securitybot escorts him to the elevator and pushes the button.

  “Is Tim around?” Eliot asks.

  “He’s in the showroom.”

  “Give him my best, will ya?”

  The doors open and the bot tells Eliot to take care.

  “Yeah, you too.”

  The doors close; the steel box descends. It feels good to know he’ll never have to be in this fucking building again. The plan had been to quit soon anyway, or rather just to flee to Avernus and never bother saying good-bye. And he never liked the job in the first place, just needed it to pay for his rent, his drip, and his ne’er-do-well brother, who seems to be better off now that he has that gig at Revealed!

  So screw it. Good riddance, GAC. It’s been a blast.

  In the garage, Eliot finds his car and pops the trunk. He puts the box inside and throws in his jacket as well. He doesn’t see the white van pulling up behind him as he opens the door to his car. Behind the wheel, he plugs his pocketbrane into the charger and checks the rearview mirror so he can back up. He sees two bots with black bandanas in the backseat.

  “Wussup, heartbeat?”

  One holds a gun while another slaps a hood over Eliot’s head.

  “Keep real quiet, y’hear.”

  There’s only darkness beneath the hood, but Eliot can hear the door open on the van as he is hustled out of his car. His feet come off the ground. The bots throw him in the back and stuff him under a seat.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  A Spectacle

  Eliot remains still with the black hood over his head. His hands and feet are bound. A disciple keeps a boot on his ear and kicks every time the van hits a bump.

  “So much as move down there, I’ll crush your fucking skull.”

  They’re quiet for the first leg of the drive, then the radio comes on, then the bots relax and talk among themselves.

  “Yo, I’ma get this operation, right? You get this thing in your dick so you can cum like a heartbeat. I be sprayin’ in bitches’ faces and shit.”

  “How you even know how a heartbeat cum?”

  “Cuz, I seen it in the pornos, yo.”

  “Yeah, you seen it in the eye when you hustlin’ faggots in that house in Beverly Hills.”

  “Oh shit. He just called you a fag.”

  “Shut up, bitch.”

  “You shut up. You know that old motherfucker does you in the ass.”

  One of the voices belongs to Pedro, or Pablo, Eliot never can remember which. The others are unfamiliar.

  The van stops, and the bots hustle him into the trunk of a different car. This is a longer drive. It winds and twists, possibly in circles. At one point the car makes a series of short stops that Eliot assumes serve no purpose other than to jostle his body in the confined space.

  The next time they pull him out, the air is thick, and Eliot can hear the roar of large, industrial engines, the kind that run power plants and factories. An automated voice calls out the time. There’s a bacon and sulfur smell. His shoes stick in a gelatinous puddle as he’s hustled through a door. Even with the hood over his head, Eliot knows he’s in Heron, somewhere near the tannery that bordered Mun’s maquiladora.

  The bots march him down a hallway. The ground gives beneath his feet. The disciples laugh as Eliot tumbles down a flight of stairs. They lift and drag him into a room and leave him on a cold concrete floor. A door closes. Somebody throws a lock and what sounds like a bolt to keep him in. Then it’s quiet except for the drone of air coming in beneath the door, the tap from a gas line, and the whimpering of a man’s voice a few feet away.

  “I’m gonna die,” the man mumbles. “Gonna fuckin’ die. I’m gonna fuckin’ die.”

  Clawed feet scamper on the concrete. Eliot feels a rat sniffing his ankle. He times a kick and sends the rodent hockeying across the floor.

  “Fuck was that?” the man screams. “What was that?”

  The voice sounds familiar. It seems to be saying everything Eliot’s feeling, which raises the question whether it�
��s a real voice or an auditory hallucination expressing his own fears. He wonders if by speaking to it he could ascertain his own sanity.

  “Can you see?” Eliot asks the voice.

  “What? Fuck you say?”

  Not a friendly voice.

  Eliot waits for the man’s breathing to slow, his mood to calm, before he dares reach out again.

  “I asked if you can see. I thought maybe if you can see, we could…”

  “Fuck you.”

  There’s a rustling sound as if the man is attempting to attack but can’t because he’s struggling against some kind of restraint. The sound continues for a few minutes, on and off, until the rustling stops. The men’s breath becomes labored. He cries a bit before mumbling a Hail Mary in Spanish.

  Eliot wishes he too had a prayer, something he could mumble to pass the time, but raised a Jew in a secular home, all he knows are the blessings over wine and bread. He concedes that chanting those probably won’t help much. Then again, neither will the Hail Maries.

  “I’m Eliot,” he introduces himself.

  “I know who you are, shitbag.”

  The voice is muffled even though Eliot senses the man is near. He, too, must be wearing a hood and perhaps nursing some injury that makes it difficult to breathe and therefore speak. But it’s the man’s anger that Eliot recognizes from the night he first encountered it in Iris’s apartment.

  “You’re that detective,” Eliot says. “The one with the eye patch.”

  The voice doesn’t answer. Time passes, and hours later (as much as anyone can measure time in such a circumstance), the man begins to snore. It’s a muffled, gurgling sound like that of an animal drowning in a shallow pool.

  Eliot tests the binds around his wrists. Too tight. No way he’s going to wriggle out. He rolls about the floor trying to find the shape of the room. He imagines he’s moving just like Iris’s torso did when it was squirming about Shelley’s boat. They put the bot back together again in the days since, the two brothers working like they had as kids in their family garage. They used the tools in the boat and watched loops on a liquid screen to make sure they weren’t skipping any steps. They made incisions when they needed to; they reattached the joints. They soldered wires, tightened screws, and smoothed a few layers of smart metal flesh over the wounds. They reattached the head, the left arm, and both legs. They dressed the bot in Iris’s clothes and laid her on the bed behind the curtain in the boat’s cabin. Eliot even put the locket around her neck, but they didn’t power her on. If they had, who knows what would have awoken from their unfinished assembly?

  And that’s how she’ll remain, Eliot thinks, unfinished if I don’t make it out of this room alive. If I fail my mission, Iris as I knew her will never again exist. Only some approximation of her will continue—or not. Will Shelley power her on the way she is? Will he buy new parts to replace the missing eyes and the right arm? Or will he sail out into the ocean and commit her remains to the deep?

  “I got a wife and two kids,” says the voice in the room, awake again in the darkness. “Bot got no familia. No history. He just come out the factory and take. No mom or dad to tell him right from wrong. No brothers, no sisters. He just takes from heartbeats and leaves ’em with nada.”

  Eliot rubs his face against the floor so he can roll up the hood enough to see out the bottom. He can see the silhouette of the detective against the light seeping in from beneath the door.

  “Watts,” the voice continues to mumble. “Disciples wiped us out the barrio. Raped my sister,” he whimpers. “And you build and sell them. You fall in love with one like a pinche pendejo.”

  Eliot listens but can’t find the words to respond. It’s true, he likes the bots. Many of them, anyway, at least the ones he knows. He never blamed the whole species for the crimes of a few rogues. He remembers fondly the pride his father took when he showed Eliot the factory, the rows and rows of androids on the assembly line, where no two were alike, each unique and beautiful in its own way. His father said they were our children, our vessels to the future, and the better we built them, the better the chances our values persist into the void of eternity. “They have our infinite capacities,” said the great engineer, “and our limitations as well. After all, it was we who built them, the first ones anyway. Though they will surpass us in many ways, they may also be inhibited by those same propensities for selfishness and prejudice that have held us back. They are tethered to humanity by their flows.” Hiram lobbied for laws and regulations to guide their manufacture. He worried about foreign-made knockoffs, counterfeits, and low-quality metal. He worried about how bots were treated, and how they’d respond when abused.

  “Were you tailing me?” Eliot asks the man with whom he shares his confinement. “Were you about to make an arrest?”

  The detective cries beneath his hood, muttering prayers and curses in Spanish. “I hope they do you first,” he says. “I hope I watch you die before they do me.”

  Time passes, hours, a day, who knows? Eliot sleeps eventually. At least he thinks it’s sleep. He dreams he can hear Iris’s voice calling to him, but he can’t see her. Following the sound, he approaches a giant labyrinth, where, guarding the entrance, is an android as primitive and ridiculous as the robot from the graphic novel at Pound’s store.

  “She’s in the next room,” says the bot, “but unless you give me your arm, I won’t let you enter.”

  Eliot gives it. He snaps off his mechanical arm, and the android lets him pass. He gets to another door, where there’s another android, this one more advanced, more human than the one before. She too won’t let Eliot pass without sacrificing a limb. Eliot relinquishes a leg this time and hops through the door. He hears Iris’s voice a bit more clearly now, but once again, there’s another door. This time, he gives an eye, then an ear, then his other leg. Eventually he pulls himself along the ground with only his chin. The bot standing at the next door looks altogether human. It’s a woman similar in appearance to his sister, Mitzi, had she grown up instead of being cut down at a young age. The bot says that Iris is just beyond one final door but Eliot must surrender his torso to see her.

  “But then I won’t be able to pull myself into the room,” says Eliot.

  “Then I’ll carry you,” says the bot.

  Eliot wants badly to see her. He wants to believe the woman at the door, but something in her face, in her eyes, tells him he can’t.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks. “Don’t you trust me? And even if you don’t, what choice do you have?”

  A door unlocks and opens. Eliot wakes from his dream. The bots lift him to his feet and drag him down a corridor, into a room with the buzz of fluorescent lights. He can’t see with the hood over his head, but he can hear the detective resisting the androids nearby. He can hear the voices of the Kindelan, some girl, and one or two others. He can hear a scraping sound like metal rubbing against stone.

  “Sit down,” says the voice that carries authority in the group. Eliot feels for the metal chair beneath him.

  “Dim the lights,” says another.

  “We can’t. We need ’em for the loop-cam.”

  “Duh.”

  The girl snickers.

  “Shut up.”

  “You shut up.”

  “Wanna make me?”

  Eliot has seen loops of beheadings before in the newsbranes. He always wondered what the victim thinks in the buildup to such an event. The horror, he suspects, is the helplessness more than the final act. Death’s waiting room is likely worse than the execution itself. Some of the victims resist, futilely, while others move through the ordeal passively as if they’re already dead. Eliot wonders which he’ll be.

  “Is it working?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t give me ‘I think so,’” says the leader. “Tell me it’s working.”

  “It’s working,” says the Kindelan.

  “Are you telling me that ’cause it’s working or ’cause that’s what I told you to tell m
e?”

  “Aw, now you got me confused.”

  “Christ, maybe it’s the battery.”

  “It’s not the battery.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a new battery.”

  How appropriate that his end would come at the hands of machines who can’t figure out how to work a machine. These are not the androids his father intended to build.

  “You put it in backward.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Let me do it.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, we ain’t got all day.”

  Eliot takes a guess at the Kindelan’s name. “Pedro?”

  “Hey,” says the Kindelan, “you got it right!” Then to the others, “Usually he thinks I’m Pablo.”

  “Stupid idiot, we’re recording this, and you just said your name. Now everyone’s going to know it’s you.”

  “Oh,” says Pedro. “Can we edit that out?”

  Says the leader, “We’ll fix it in post.”

  “Cool. And don’t say my name no more, okay, Eliot?”

  “Okay.”

  A sharp pain stabs into his shin, and Eliot cries out.

  “Do not speak unless spoken to,” says the bot who kicked him.

  “He was being spoken to,” says the girl. “Pedro was speaking to him.”

  “Don’t say my name,” says Pedro.

  “My bad.”

  “Idiot.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “You’re all idiots!” says the leader. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you do anything without fighting?”

  The bots quiet and mumble their apologies. Eliot can hear them futzing with the loop-cam. Then it’s the detective’s turn.

  “Let me out of here, you fucks! You fucking fucks!”

  His curses are followed by the dull thuds of fists pounding his body. He curses and scrams out in pain. Eliot can feel blood or sweat splashing into him. He wishes there were something he could do, some way to calm them, but his shin still smarts from the kick he took a moment before. He doesn’t like pain. He has dealt with it most of his life and doesn’t want any more of it than he already has.