Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A Novel

by Judd Trichter

  “Got it,” says the Kindelan from another part of the room. The scraping sound stops. There’s a shuffling of feet, then Eliot hears the bots take their positions behind his and the detective’s chairs. Eliot looks down beneath his hood and can see a small part of the poured-concrete floor. He smells the sulfur and bacon scent from outside and sees the red dye from the tannery on his shoe.

  “Am I in frame?” asks the leader.

  “You’re in,” says Pedro. “Go ahead and slate.”

  “Ritual beheading, March Third, year forty-seven of the New Bot Age. Take one.”

  Someone claps, and Eliot hears the leader unfold a crumbled brane from his pocket.

  “And … action!” says the Kindelan.

  The leader puts his hand atop Eliot’s hood, at the crown of his head, and sounds as if he’s reading his speech word for word.

  “In the name of Lorca, Holy Mother, hallowed be her name, I present these blessings to you, my brothers and sisters in the struggle.”

  “Amen,” says the chorus.

  “Today, we are here, warriors at arms, because, once again, the heathen heartbeats have attempted to infiltrate the temple of the faithful. Once again, they have tried to breach our walls and set our homes afire. And once again, with God on our side, the heartbeats have failed in their attempt.”

  “Amen.”

  Eliot hoped, while he was waiting in the cellar, hog-tied next to the other hostage, that should it come to this, he would at least be given the chance to argue in his own defense. At the very least, he hoped to explain, whether the bots believed him or not, that his intentions were noble and his only desire was to save one of their own.

  “Do not believe the lies and propaganda of the heartbeats and their Zionist media. For the heartbeats have never, as they claim, engineered or designed us to be their slaves. They did not build us. They did not produce us. They have never and will never create us. It was we who built our temple in the dawn before man, and it is we who will build it again with the blood mortar of our enemies on this defiled Earth.”

  “Praise Lorca,” shouts the female bot.

  Even if he could speak, Eliot doubts his words would sway the present jury. At least in their lower ranks, the disciples seem resistant to a well-reasoned argument or any logic at all.

  “Fuckin’ fucks,” says the detective.

  “Praised be Lorca,” the leader continues, “the Holy Mother who stokes the fire amid the shadows of Babylon. For only she can deliver us from the oppression of heartbeats, Jews, and homosexuals. Only she can return to us dominion over the ancient holy city of Bot. And only she can anoint our souls, as we harvest the heads of our enemies until the final beat of their vanquished hearts.”

  “Amen,” say the other bots.

  And in that moment before the killing begins, Eliot remembers watching helplessly as his father and his sister burned. His body recalls the paralysis as he faced the same menu of illusory choices that have no effect on a predetermined outcome: run, beg for mercy, remain still and accept your fate. The only difference at stake is what dignity one wishes to retain in the concluding moment of life. Where did I misstep? Eliot wonders. If it was my choice to recover Iris’s parts in the first place that did me in, then why only now should karma catch up to me? Why not during my fight with Pink or my flight from the reservation? Why only when I try to recover the arm off a bot who doesn’t need it should my time run out? What did I do wrong, and what right?

  “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 tide of blood 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!”

  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 in that final moment, the last thing Eliot thinks about is Iris and how he let her 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 earn that ephemeral glimpse before his lover’s soul was yanked back into the abyss.

  “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 my life.”

  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 and the windows are closed in front of 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.

  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 questions remind 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?�
��

  “I was told it was you.”

  Lorca looks at her hands as she rocks 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 under my watch. Raised ’em good, too. From Bel-Air to Rolling Hills to Malibu.” Her face flushes with pride. “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. He suffered an asthma attack from this foul air you breathe. 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 as she speaks.

  “As punishment, 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, horrid shape.”

  The 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 as she looks toward her knitting. “I became.”

  The word hangs in the air in a way that tempts and promises some hidden knowledge, some secret jargon accessible only to Lorca’s acolytes. But the drip offers Eliot a different perspective on the matter. This room with its lights and candy cane wallpaper calls to mind the saccharine interior of a holiday adbrane. It looks like a family’s living room, but what family actually lives here? The floor is concrete painted brown to resemble wood. The windows open to bucolic daubs, but 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. “She was a creative?”

  “She made Chug-Bots,” says Eliot. “For children. 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. “I’m sure the rest of her was just as lovely.”

  “She is,” says Eliot, trying to find an angle. He tells himself, Just think of it as a sale. What does she want and what do you have to offer? “Her name is Iris,” he tells her, “and I can see how her arm affects you.”

  Lorca seems intrigued by his choice of words. Perhaps it isn’t often that a heartbeat, the kind she would have raised, enters her lair with a challenge.

  “Affects me?” she asks.

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

  The android looks skeptically at Eliot but tantalized as well. “In what way,” she asks, “do I resemble your C-900?”

  “Have you always knitted?” he answers 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. It means she’s enjoying herself. She spent a lot of time with rich kids like me, she must have liked us a little. It must be nice for her to see one turned out well.

  “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 grown 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 admits. “It’s been replaced a few times as I outgrew it or as newer models came to market. 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 can see what made her such a good caretaker 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?”

  “An excess of compassion?” he suggests. “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 just found out she has to return the found puppy to its rightful owner.

  “It feels good to wear it,” she says with disappointment, “but it doesn’t quite fit.”

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

  “This arm is no longer hers,” Lorca warns as she approaches. “It is mine, and I am giving 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 and wraps it tight.

  “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.

  “I do it for her as well,” 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 the forensics crew. “Branes. Anything that might have belonged to Mr. Spenser or Detective Ochoa.”

  His partner’s disappearance hasn’t hit the newsbranes yet. Every badge on the force is working to find him. 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 was 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 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.