You, Human

by John Skipp

After a commercial break and several advertisements for the latest Laminex products (a division of Hanford and Cordington, who also made the toilet paper Richard liked and owned the brand of beer that Richard drank), the show came back on and the hosts were clapping along with the audience as if this was all very exciting and they needed to make it even more exciting. The cheers settled down and then the male host, between more strategically-placed stock phrases and praise for their guest’s award-winning talents, asked the famed actor if he thought someone could deliver his lines better than he could.

  For a moment, the actor feigned offense, but the grinning gave away his knowledge of what was going on. It had all been planned ahead, and the audience was loving it. The hosts called out their “secret guest,” who turned out to be an anthro made up to look just like their beloved actor. There were some differences of course. It was just a molded prosthetic face and a hairpiece that wasn’t entirely convincing, but it was close enough. The anthro actor, pre-programmed to mimic the grin of its human counterpart, walked across the stage, waving, and took a seat beside Mr. Actor.

  “Now, I know you’re all going to love this,” the male host said turning to the anthro. “We’ve got this talented … man … here with us today, and he says he can do a better job delivering your lines than you can.”

  The actor laughed, grinning wider. The audience cheered in anticipation of what was to come, louder and louder. Mr. Actor waited a moment for them to quiet down and then said: “I guess we’d better find out how good he is.”

  Cheers. Laughter. Applause.

  “I’d be worried if I were you,” the anthro-version of the actor said, its voice a little too dead to be convincingly gleeful. “I’m about to put you out of a job.”

  The audience roared louder than ever before, and the routine began, the anthro repeating the same lines, doing each of them so convincingly that Josie was certain they had programmed it to play back the actual recording of the lines from the actor’s movies. She knew they could do that. Richard may not have allowed anything of the sort, but the technical literature gave detailed instructions on how she could upload audio directly from her phone and make the anthros play it back. It didn’t matter what it was. Music. Birds chirping. Dialogue from your favorite movie. The anthro would play it back or even speak it for you. It was just another reason to have an anthro in the first place. Chores. Games. Apps for babysitting. As the commercials said: “It can walk and talk, and you’ll never have to worry about housework again.”

  But not in this house.

  Not for her.

  Josie turned and looked up at the female antro standing there in its unemotional stupidity. Sometimes she found herself envying it, wanting to be just as blank-headed and peaceful. Over the last seven years, she had tried many times and failed. No matter how many times she tried to push it all away, it was still there. She was still Josie and there was no way she could numb herself enough to not feel the way Josie felt.

  When they’d bought their first anthro, she had spent some time talking to it as she worked around the house, treating it as a private confessional where she could pour out her thoughts and fears. She had told it about what happened some nights when the roast wasn’t perfect or an errant water spot was discovered on the bathroom mirror, when she didn’t answer quickly enough or couldn’t anticipate how much anger a simple, innocuous comment could cause. She had told it every detail, from the difference between an open fist and a closed one to the way a belt sounded against human flesh, and she had shown it the bruises, as if revealing them and crying and telling it how she really felt would cause the machine to elicit a genuine sympathetic reaction.

  But there had been no reaction at all. It had been programmed to be stupid and obedient.

  They existed to serve, not understand.

  Many times, she had looked at the female anthro and considered the possibilities, the ways she could use that stupid loyalty to her advantage. For a while, the idea had almost seemed possible. The height and physique were similar to her own. With a few changes and a little programming, she thought she might be able to make it walk and talk and react exactly as she would. She’d told herself she could make it work. Maybe then she could––

  But she knew she couldn’t.

  It wouldn’t work. She’d known that for a long time now. Even if all the people she knew accepted it as her––the garbage men and maintenance people and the elderly neighbors who sometimes walked past the house with their dogs while she went out to get the mail––she knew Richard wouldn’t. His hands would know the difference.

  Josie felt her body turn inward on itself. She hadn’t meant to let the thoughts in again. It was too late now.

  With the remote, she turned the volume back up on the TV and then turned it off. She returned the remote its home on the table and stood up.

  On the wall, the clock counted down to her fate.

  She had done this thousands of times before, and still she found it difficult to pretend this was a normal night like any other. Richard arrived home at 6:45 on the dot, stepping through the front door at 6:46 and hanging up his coat. She kissed him on the cheek and asked the usual questions: How was your day? How was traffic? Would you like something to drink? And, as always, Richard gave her the same neutral answers: Work was fine. Traffic was fine. He’d have a beer.

  She did as she was expected to, pulling out his chair at the dining room table, bringing the beer, bringing the roast, hurrying to the table so he wouldn’t have to wait for her before he started eating. The routine hadn’t changed much in seven years. Most of her days bled into one another and she sometimes found herself surprised that it had been seven years and not three. She was almost convinced that she could remove the last four years of her life and replace each dinner with a duplicate of the dinners that had come before and the course of her life would be no different. She wouldn’t miss anything important like something Richard said, because the sad truth was Richard hardly ever said anything new. He’d burned off every personal anecdote and highlight from his life story in their first year of marriage. Now he just sat, cutting the roast the way he always cut it, drinking the beer the way he always drank it. Repeated movements. Efficient. Mechanical.

  She imagined him acting the same way at work. In fact, she didn’t have to imagine it. She knew. He sat at his desk all day long, staring at his monitor, reading reports and double-checking data tabulated by software and outsourced clerks on the other side of the world, adding his electronic signature to prove that a human being had been involved in this stage of the process and sending it up to management, spending an hour in the break room at lunch, dryly recounting what he had watched on TV last night to disinterested co-workers, telling them how he planned to head into the woods this weekend to bag a deer, recalling old hunting stories in an attempt to impress them, and his co-workers would then smile distantly and nod, because they had heard these stories before, and they would hear them again, because that was Richard, a broken record that never wore itself out.

  After the roast was consumed and the third can of beer was empty, he sat in front of the TV for two hours, watching his favorite shows and laughing at the moments when he was supposed to laugh. Occasionally, his eyes shifted and took her in, as if searching for some reason why her sitting there beside him and laughing when he laughed the way she did every night wasn’t good enough. She willed herself not to deviate in any way. She was her usual self—reliable, obedient, stupid. He watched the shows and watched her, and only once looked down at the carpet to the spot where the marks from her bare feet had been vacuumed away.

  At 10:00, he switched off the TV and they went into the bedroom. She undressed in front of him slowly, allowing him to scrutinize every inch of her body to be sure she hadn’t been overeating or manipulating the scale which he sometimes forced her to stand on. He showed no signs of approval or disapproval. He simply waited for her to lie down on the bed, and then undressed himself.

  Their lovemaking w
as as routine as it was loveless. He moved and moved and moved, expecting her to move with him. She made the usual noises, allowing the autopilot to take over the way it usually did. She was there and she wasn’t. Her body responded. Her mind didn’t. He kept moving, sweating, moving, grunting.

  And then it was over.

  Richard rolled onto his back, breathing a little harder than he had seven years earlier. She had never pointed this out of course, just as she had never mentioned the extra weight that hung around his middle. He was getting older, spending more time at home on the weekends instead of going out hunting the way he used to. She’d dreaded the extra time with him at home, especially now, just as she had started to realize the possibility of a life outside of the routines. But she had made it work.

  It was already over.

  In twenty minutes, he was asleep, snoring deeply as he always did. She lay beside him, eyes on the clock that sat atop the dresser across from the bed.

  An hour passed.

  Two.

  Three.

  When she was certain he wouldn’t wake up, she slipped out of bed and dressed in her nightgown. She took her phone off the night-stand and slipped it into her pocket, keeping her footfalls silent as she stepped out into the hall.

  She found the two male anthros standing in the guest bedroom, staring expressionlessly into the darkness.

  She pulled the phone from her pocket, navigated through the apps, and opened Anthro-Pro-Morphic 2.5. She scrolled through the saved folders. Cleaning tile. Fixing the roof. Fixing the sink. Moving the couch.

  She found the one called Making the Bed and opened it. After entering her login and authorization code, she uploaded it, a blue bar quickly moving across the screen from left to right.

  The anthros seemed to come to attention, their eyes flickering with recognition of their new programming.

  “Don’t speak,” she said quietly. “Follow me.”

  They did as instructed, following her out into the hall. She headed toward the living room, stopped at the closet, and slid the door aside. The bag sat on the top shelf as usual, its zipper securely closed. She took it down and felt the weight, the promise held within it.

  She had feared hiding things from him for so long, her thoughts, her feelings, a suitcase packed in a closet, ready at a moment’s notice for her to escape. She had feared it and she had known he would discover it.

  But not this.

  There was nothing to hide because it had always been in plain sight, as innocuous as the flatscreen TV bolted to the living room wall. The only way it would be out of place was if she had removed it from the shelf and put it somewhere else.

  Josie carried the bag down the hall, the anthros following her into the bedroom. Richard continued to snore, his body heavy and prominent under the thin covers. She knelt at the foot of the bed and slowly pulled back the zipper on the bag. A dark slit opened between the folds of rough fabric. She reached inside and turned to look at the anthros.

  “Stand in the corner.”

  The anthros obeyed. She stood and took a step back, staring down at her husband.

  “Wake up,” she said.

  Richard stirred, the snoring faltering for a moment and then returning to normal.

  “Wake up, Richard.”

  His snoring rasped sharply and he moved under the covers, rolling to one side and then the other. He lifted his head and blinked into the darkness.

  She continued to watch him, moving her hands with smooth and practiced efficiently. She had practiced for months. There was no fear. She had programmed it out of herself for this moment.

  She heard a metallic snap.

  She knew he heard it, too.

  He started to sit up, his voice coming out in a dry half-groan as his eyes came fully open and saw what she was doing.

  “Josie, what the fu––?”

  She raised the crossbow and fired an arrow into his chest. It made a neat little home just off center and to the right, the way the same arrow had done dozens of times before as she had fired it into old cardboard boxes in the garage while Richard was at work.

  Richard made a small wheezing sound––perhaps the most unroutine sound he had made in seven years––and fell back onto the mattress, his eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling.

  She looked at him and searched her mind for one of the many feelings she had locked away within herself.

  She couldn’t find one.

  Not for him.

  She turned to look at the anthros. They were looking at the bed, seeing nothing wrong at all.

  “Clean up,” she said.

  One of the anthros moved to the bed and began to fold the sheets around Richard, moving in an exact duplicate of the way she had demonstrated while running the teach your routine mode on Anthro-Pro-Morphic. In moments, there was a large bundle on the mattress, tied at one end. The anthro lifted it and carried it out into the hall, moving toward the garage.

  She turned to the remaining anthro. “Follow me.”

  Josie walked to the kitchen and turned on the light. The room felt new to her, a foreign place, clean and welcoming. She had never been allowed in here in the middle of the night, not even for a drink of water.

  She opened the cabinet doors beneath the sink and pulled out the trash can, removing the bag and allowing it to drop carelessly to the floor. The box was still there, unopened, waiting. She set it on the counter and sliced through the tape with a paring knife. As she pulled open the flaps, the smell of packing peanuts and cardboard wafted up at her. There was an order sheet confirming her purchase and thanking her, along with a couple brief paragraphs on 3D printing and the lifetime of medical-grade silicone. Sorry. No refunds for custom orders.

  She dug through the packing peanuts and found plastic, layered and sealed tight, obscuring the object within. She pulled it out. It weighed almost nothing at all and flexed loosely in her hands. She found the edges and unwrapped it.

  She wasn’t afraid to look at it. She’d feared she would be, but she could see it for what it was, just another illusion, nothing to fear, nothing to stir the nightmare of memories within her.

  Josie turned to the anthro. It stood beside the counter, waiting.

  “Change,” she said.

  The machine did as it was told, reaching up and probing its neck just below the jawline with articulated mechanical fingers. She watched as the artificial flesh stretched and warped, turning recognizable features to abstractions. Beneath there was contoured metal, bundled wires and tubes, eyes set in sockets lined with ball bearings. The machine gave her little time to marvel at its inner workings. It continued its task, reaching to the counter, and gripping silicone, moving, pulling stretching. Just before the inner workings were covered again, she saw the minute adjustments being made, nose, cheekbones, jaw, forehead. The anthro pulled and tugged and then pressed and smoothed until everything was in place.

  She looked at it and found herself impressed, even amazed at how lifelike it was.

  “Well?” she said. “Introduce yourself.”

  A stiff smile spread over the anthro’s face, synthetic muscles trying to best approximate everything she had programmed. The manlike machine then reached out, as if to shake the hand of someone who wasn’t actually there.

  “Hi there,” it said, the voice a perfect replication. “I’m Richard Borland.”

  Josie waited a moment, and then cleared her throat, gently nudging the anthro with her elbow.

  The anthro managed to take on an apologetic expression that Richard himself had never been able to, wrapped an arm around her and said: “I’m so sorry. This is my lovely wife Josie.”

  KEEPSAKES

  HAL BODNER

  Matthew the Beautiful is what they’ve always called me. It’s printed right on the brochure in ornate calligraphy underneath the holographic image of my naked body. Just above the terms for renting me.

  The adage “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” seems true in my case. Even though I’m an
old model, I understand that I still command hefty fees. I’ll admit that I’m curious about the details; I think anyone would get a boost out of knowing that they were worth more than the next guy. But I’ve learned not to inquire. Only once was I boorish and indiscrete enough to ask a client about the fees he paid. My only answer was an expression of amusement mingled with mild concern. Concern must have won out, and the client must have complained, because Madame Augette, who founded the agency that owns me, wasted no time bringing me in for an unscheduled scrubbing session as soon as the client was finished with me.

  Sparing the details, memory scrubbing is never a pleasant experience. I don’t think I’m supposed to know that, so I keep my mouth shut. I just chalk it up to something that must be endured. I’m not so much of a fool as to seek it out.

  As to why I’m still so much in demand, I can only surmise that it is because my designer, Owen Bradshaw, was even more of an artist than he was a scientist. Owen often told me that I was a one-of-a-kind creation, his masterpiece. I’ve read—though I have to be careful not to get caught doing it—that in the immediate wake of his arrest, there was a huge effort made to duplicate Owen’s designs. But though I was available for other designers to use as a template, they were ultimately unsuccessful. The reason for their failure had nothing to do with any inability to reproduce my physical beauty; they could do that down to the micron. What bested them was their failure to capture the subtleties that Owen built into me on some unknown level. They never managed to accomplish that!

  Today, some of the better bioconstruction engineers have come closer to perfecting the mimicry. I’ve encountered some bioconstructs from the Domestic Assistance series who are almost as truculent and inattentive as their human counterparts; in some cases, it’s hard to tell the difference. And I’ve seen some Intimate Companions whose programming is so refined that many clients, had they not used an agency, would have been hard put to tell that their bed mates were the products of design and not natural birth. But when I was built, no matter how physically desirable the exteriors were, most bioconstructs were cold and emotionally sterile. I was decades ahead of my time and, to this day, I possess unique characteristics, some of which I obviously have to be careful not to reveal. Even so, my uniqueness in other areas has made me the subject of more than a few essays in some of the more obscure cybernetic journals.