You, Human: An Anthology of Dark Science Fiction

by Stephen King

  I suppose that makes me a celebrity in my own little way.

  In any case, while the novel features of newer model bioconstructs are always far more popular, Madame Augette never seemed to lack for wealthy clients of discriminating tastes who wanted something a little more—what’s the right word?—vivid than any of the other Intimate Companion series on the market. I heard Madame gripe more than once about what a pity it was that Owen designed me with an exclusively same-sex orientation. I always suspected it was difficult for her to resist the temptation to have me re-oriented. Fortunately, I think she worried that mucking around too much with my basic programming would end up doing more harm than good. So long as clients showed a continued willingness to pay whatever princely sum she charged for my services, she was too wise to risk screwing up a good thing.

  Of course, I owe it all—everything I am or ever will be—to Owen. The history texts universally acknowledge Owen’s genius, even the ones that inevitably follow their praise with harsh criticism of his supposed depravity. To me, though, he was simply Owen, my Owen. I was heartbroken when they took him away.

  No one could have possibly called him handsome, not in the classic sense. If anything, he was quirky looking. Every angle of his face—his chin, his nose, his cheekbones—was too sharp. His eyes, deep and soulful and the color of burnt butter, were overlarge and looked like they belonged to someone else. One of his detractors, a reporter at the trial, wrote that he looked like a cartoon insect; the specific comparison was to a grasshopper, I believe. But to me, he was beautiful. I’ve known dozens of incredibly handsome men in my time. Few of them, even when approaching the climax of the sexual act, could ever arouse me the way Owen could by simply walking into the room.

  Owen’s fashion sense was unconventional as well. I used to tease him about how someone as hopelessly and perpetually rumpled as he was had ever managed to put such an exquisite sense of style into my programming. He’d laughingly counter that he did, indeed, have style; he simply didn’t care enough to indulge in it.

  He insisted on wearing a pair of antique spectacles, for example, the sort you’d find on the comedic milquetoast characters that populated pre-holographic cinema. Deceptively slim, his body appeared fragile and overwhelmed by the bulk of his favorite, tattered and stained white laboratory coat that he wore while he worked. Whenever the inspectors were due, he would grumble for hours about having to relinquish it for a uniform. I can’t say that I blamed him. Though the uniform jacket hugged his wide shoulders, it hung over his torso like he was wrapped in a set of curtains, and made him look like he’d need to gain twenty or thirty kilos before it would start to fit.

  Ah, but underneath! Underneath lurked the lean, powerful physique of a long distance runner. During the long, sweat-drenched nights of passion that we shared, Owen amply demonstrated that he possessed a stamina to match my own.

  In those early times, no one knew that I wasn’t a natural biologic entity. I was simply Owen’s “assistant,” though I’m sure, most visitors assumed that I shared his bed as well. I was never able to find out how the authorities penetrated our charade and, of course, I can’t risk exposing myself by digging too deeply. But I will never forget that awful, final night when they broke into our bedroom and tore me from his arms.

  At first, he was outraged, demanding to know who had authorized the search. When the officer-in-charge presented the warrant, Owen had to squint to read it and I wondered if, perhaps, the amusingly anachronistic eye glasses weren’t an affectation at all. He fumbled for them on the bedside table, but they had fallen during the struggle and lay broken under someone’s boot heel. Once we were separated, most everyone’s attention was on Owen and I was able to surreptitiously bend down to retrieve the twisted metal frames with their cracked lenses. Once I was allowed to dress, I absently slipped them into my pocket, undetected.

  It became clear that Owen was having difficulty making out the document himself, so one of the junior officers took it from him and read the warrant aloud. Though I had no difficulty understanding the words, I struggled with their meaning. It was shock I suppose, and numbness. By the time the recitation of his transgressions was finished, Owen looked scared. He forced a chuckle, as if to trivialize what was going on as minor and inconsequential; but no one else laughed. Instead, their eyes flickered back and forth between him and me; the expression on most of their faces was clearly disgust.

  “Obviously, there’s been a mistake,” Owen stammered. He pointed to me and, though I could see the apology in his eyes, his words sounded harsh and cut me to the soul. “Matthew is an experimental model. Do any of you honestly think that I’d be stupid enough to …?”

  “Matthew?” The officer-in-charge raised her eyebrows and sneered. “You gave it a name? Evidently, your obsession with this … thing is worse than we’ve been told.”

  “There’s no laws against testing him out.” Owen quickly corrected himself. “Against testing it out, I mean.”

  It might have been my imagination, but in those last seconds before I was dragged from the room, I thought I saw a look of anguish on Owen’s face that I fancied had nothing to do with his fear of being arrested. Nowadays, of course, any client who becomes too emotionally attached to a bioconstruct simply seeks therapy. But at that time, the phenomenon wasn’t as well understood. It was still a criminal offense and the idea was depraved and juicy enough for the news media to seize upon it with gusto.

  Much later, I managed to catch some snippets of transmission from the trial. I thought Owen looked haggard and, if possible, even thinner than usual. If you knew him, you could see heart-break in his expression and defeat in the way his shoulders slumped and his hands shook. I knew him; and it wasn’t easy for me to blink away tears.

  I know that many would scoff when I say that Owen was my first love, but it’s true. When I heard he had died in prison, I grieved even more deeply for the fact that I was forced to mourn alone and in secret.

  Whether or not Owen intended for some of my memories to survive the scrubs has always been a mystery to me. I like to think so. The scrubs steal a lot. I’m never able to remember all the details, but I’m usually able to hang onto enough.

  After the authorities no longer needed to retain me as evidence, Madame Augette purchased me at the Confiscation sale. I don’t believe she had any idea of my true value at the time because, for quite a while, she kept me busy with short term assignments, renting my services as if I was little different from any of the other merchandise she dealt in, except perhaps for my extraordinary good looks. As technology progressed, however, and the new models were unable to capture that je ne sais quois that distinguishes me from most other Intimate Companions, she realized what a gold mine she had. Thereafter, she issued only long term leases on my services, and, even then, only to her most favored customers. “Most favored,” as Madame understood the term, was a not very discreet euphemism which referred directly to the amount the client was willing to pay.

  One of my early assignments was with Bobby Cammage. Unless you’re an afficionado of nostalgic cinema, you probably won’t recognize his name. When I met him, he was at the top of his car-eer. All of his holos were box office smashes; I remember hearing about a riot on some frontier world because the only theater on the planet oversold seats for one of his premiers. On occasion, whatever studio that released the picture would demand that he make a public appearance. When he did, even if the place wasn’t very highly populated, hundreds of fans would show up, all clamoring for his attention.

  I accompanied him only once. Bobby could see that the sheer size of the crowd intimidated me and that I worried for his safety. He laughed at my concern and said there was never any real chance of his being mauled. To Bobby, his fans fell into three distinct categories: those that wanted to be his best friend, those that wanted to be him, and those that wanted him to fuck them. He never thought that any of them might pose a danger.

  You’d have thought that such adulation would have gon
e to his head and he would have become an insufferable egoist. But that wasn’t the case at all. For someone who was at the peak of an industry famed for selfishness and arrogance, he was surprisingly careful not to hurt my feelings. Even in bed, his focus was often on trying to please me. No matter how many times I explained to him that my only purpose was to serve his needs, he never seemed to fully believe it.

  Not that he was entirely selfless. Bobby was an actor after all; perhaps he was an uncommonly sensitive and emotionally generous one, but he was still an actor. It would have been foolish of me not to expect a certain inevitable amount of self-absorption. I soon learned to recognize the signs that he was in one of his diva moods, and to anticipate when he needed to be the center of attention.

  It was Bobby’s close friend and agent, Deirdre Dreyfus, who arranged our first meeting. Once I came to know Deirdre and what machinations she was capable of, I realized that I was initially intended as a short term solution to Bobby’s propensity to “settle down” with a certain class of opportunistic young men who inevitably cost him a great deal of money when they took off some time later. The most recent youth, not content with what valuables he’d been able to cram into travel bags, was responsible for a vicious legal assault that Deirdre and the publicists only narrowly managed to keep out of the press.

  The night we met was magical. It was during one of Bobby’s extravagant parties; he’d often use mild depression or a celebration of some minor professional triumph as equal excuses for hosting a gala. Unused to the glamourous surroundings of Bobby’s estate, as most of my interactions with humans until that time had been restricted to more intimate circumstances, I stood next to the stone balustrade overlooking the canyon. I kept the thin invitation clutched in my hand, ready to show to anyone who questioned my right to be there. Had I been capable of perspiring for emotional as opposed to mere physical reasons, the charmingly old fashioned invitation, printed on real paper, would have looked like I’d dunked it into the pool behind me.

  When the holographic fireworks started, I was transfixed. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything more beautiful in my life. First, an epic space battle unfolded in translucent splendor, lighting the walls of the canyon with reflections from the ship’s lasers and torpedo explosions. Next, incredibly realistic dragons and other fantastic creatures fought overhead, their gigantic bodies undulating in the air. Finally, we watched as myths from a dozen cultures, some Terran and some from the Outer Colonies, played themselves out in the canyon air. Undoubtedly, like many of the guests I found a lot of the references obscure, but I abandoned myself to the spectacle. Moments later, when the last flashes of color-saturated light were fading, I found a new definition of beauty, one that eclipsed the marvel I’d just seen.

  There’s a reason Bobby was a matinee idol for so many years; even so, the image recorders never truly did him justice. He had a confidence, a strong sense of himself as a sensual being, that none of his films ever truly managed to convey. He was powerful and primal; even the little bit that audiences got to see was enough to make him a star. In person, his very presence made it hard to breathe. His hair was the ebony darkness of deep space, so black that under certain illumination deep purple highlights appeared. His eyes were pale lavender flowers; his teeth were like fragments of a seashell, polished white and smooth by eons of waves.

  Later, when we were naked together, I would discover that his skin was tanned the color of antique amber and that, when he broke a sweat during vigorous love-making, he smelled like warmed hazel-nuts and heather. How I loved to rest my head upon his smoothly muscled chest, breathing in the familiar scent of him, listening to his measured, even breathing while he slept. But on the night of the party, when I first realized that I would be sharing a bed with this magnificent man, I was as nervous as a ship captain making his first interstellar flight.

  “Good gods, Matthew,” he breathed without irony, just before our lips met for the first time, “I had no idea you would be so beautiful.”

  I have rarely participated in as intense an experience as he and I shared that night. The next morning, I awoke to the happy news that Bobby had been busy while I slept. He and Madame Augette had come to terms and my lease was extended indefinitely.

  I adored Bobby Cammage and, I believe, he cared deeply for me in return. The scrub, when my lease ended, was a harsh one. Many of my memories were destroyed. But Bobby and I stayed together for a very long time and I managed to retain a fair amount, especially from our earliest years and from the very last few. The biggest gaps are in the middle; entire decades are lost to me except for a few brief moments, most of them inconsequential.

  I sometimes wonder if I would trade those later memories for happier ones if I could but, in the end, I think I would refuse. Though it is painful for me to recall the horrible way Bobby suffered at the end, I can remember no greater moments of intimacy than when I lay next to him, holding him gently while he fought to breathe. Deirdre, well into her advanced years by then, had lost none of her feisty ability to manipulate people into doing what she wanted. In this instance, she was determined to get the studio to acknowledge that Bobby’s condition was their fault, and that they knew the planet in question was contaminated when they first decided to shoot there.

  For once in her life, I don’t think Deirdre was doing it for the money. I think she did it to help deal with her grief; in her own way, I think she loved Bobby too. Once he was gone, to my surprise, she keep me on for a few years. It certainly wasn’t for my services as an Intimate Companion; Deirdre’s idea of an intimate relationship had more to do with her bankers than with taking anyone into her bed. She said it was because I was the only surviving first hand witness to the contaminated film shoot. But I thought it was because I was familiar and, having been around for so long, I was more of a witness to her life, a way for her to connect to that long ago time when she and Bobby, together, took the film industry by storm.

  By the time she joined Bobby, no one cared anymore and the case languished, a brief footnote in cinema history. I still have the paper invite to that first party. I store it, along with Owen’s broken glasses and some other keepsakes, in a little cubby hidden in the wall of the main scrubbing room, right next to what used to be Madame Augette’s office. Mademoiselle Augette does not know it is there. Doubtless, it is one of the many things Madame forgot to tell her about running the agency as, in my eyes, she is not nearly the business woman, nor the human being, that her mother was.

  As a result, none of my next several leases lasted very long. Mademoiselle was all about maximizing profit. I understand that she charged outrageous fees on extremely stringent terms, at least until General Eisley came along.

  Earth’s conflict with the Colonial planets was just reaching the turning point that eventually ended in our favor. But the war was still ongoing and Mademoiselle was just savvy enough to understand that if she financially raped the General as badly as was her custom, there was a risk that she might be accused of profiteering. Though the General never shared the details of his transaction with me, other than to assure me that it was likely to last for most of his life, I got the distinct impression that he felt he’d gotten the better part of the deal.

  It’s strange how I always thought of Harold Eisley as the General, never as merely Harold. To me, it was as much of a pet name as it was his rank or a title of respect. Our relationship always contained a certain formality; you might even say it held a paternal quality. Not that we weren’t physically intimate; we certainly were that! But I don’t think the General could have been content with a lover of his own age, much less one who was substantially older.

  In private, I came to learn that he modeled his intimate life on romantic ideals taken from the warriors of ancient times. As a soldier, his fierce reputation was unmatched; had it not been for the General’s military skill, while it is doubtful Earth would have lost the war, the conflict certainly would have dragged on longer than it did. In private though, he had a quaint
affinity for the Ancient Greek traditions of an older man taking a younger under his wing, to cherish him and to teach him about life, to bestow upon him the fruits of the elder’s vaster experience.

  I cannot truly say that I loved the General; but I bore him a deep affection. And it was a mark of my respect for him that I never once did anything to contradict his idea that he was the experienced teacher and I, the eager acolyte. To have pointed out that, in spite of my youthful looks I was old enough to be his grandfather, would have been petty and mean spirited.

  Sadly, the General was killed a scant few months before the colonials surrendered. Before I returned to the agency for scrubbing, I managed to acquire one of his medals. It wasn’t one of the impressive ones, not like the gold and silver embossed discs he received for Battlefield Valor while he was still a dashing young Lieutenant, nor the glistening unbreakable cluster of crystal he was presented with when he retired from the Planetary Honor Guard. It was merely a small, blue and gold ribbon awarded to him, even before he became an officer, by the residents of a small, distant colonial planet for his part in rescuing them from some native menace.

  He never gave me the details; the General was far from a boastful man. But from what little he spoke of the incident, it was clear that of all his accolades for bravery, that innocuous tribute was the one he was most proud of. To me, the tattered ribbon was the quintessential essence of General Harold Eisley as both a military officer and as a man.

  Once the war was over, of course, the battled grounds shifted arenas from the frozen deserts, stifling jungles and atmospheric domes of the Colony worlds to the more local colosseum of Terran/Colonial politics. Peacetime drastically altered many popular styles and fads and, for quite a while, Intimate Companions fell out of fashion. The intervals between client assignments stretched on and, during those years when I was languishing in the showroom, existence seemed hollow and bland. It was my first real experience with what humans call loneliness and it is not a feeling that I envy.