by Simon Ings
Dave doesn’t reply for a few minutes, just stares at the movie-prop mountains, and I have to stamp down me frustration at his lack of desire for his faithful constructed companions to be properly self-full.
“I know you want me to be in love, Jack,” he says, “but, well, love was always a rare commodity, even before the sludge-flood, and I don’t want to disappoint you, mate.”
I don’t know if he realises how purpose-busting it is to hear such subtle but deadly soulled’s ambiguities. I mean, what’s so complicated about love? Two bags of real-flesh and a few emotion-inducing hormones should do the bleedin’ trick.
“You’re both born,” I say. “What more could you need to fall in love with each other?”
He sighs, in disturbingly pre-message manner. “Get yourself a drink and sit down, Jack.”
I pour a large whisky and sit in the non-commed chair. He gets up and walks around the room for a bit and I have to stop meself standing up to tuck in his lumberjack shirt or tie up his bootlaces—self-adjustments I hoped he’d start making upon falling in love.
He stops at last, nodding at me to drink. So I gulp it all down, clocking the widening of my syntho-synapses and the somewhat inappropriate good will what rushes in to fill the gaps. We might not know about love, us toys, but at least we were made to feel the effects of grog same as humans.
“Before the flood,” he says, maybe looking at the mountains, maybe even Gaffville—
And in a flash, I reflect on the tidal wave of exponentially accumulated bio-electro-mechanical gubbins what wiped out most of the born about nine years back. That and the fact Dave was saved because he stubbornly lived halfway up a mountain in Wales, his Cockney soul apparently tired of jellied eels and jigging around the joanna in the Big Smoke, even if that’s pretty much exactly what he went and created for himself once up said mountain anyway… I ask you, what toy can fathom the reach-out, snap-back nature of the soulleds’ nostalgia tuggings?
So nearly all the bio-toys melted, and most of the humans drowned in the sludge-flood. The mess what remains is semi-sentient, kicks up a hell of a thick electro gas above it, too. Dave and a few others were lucky, I guess, to be far enough out of the main flood to have time to build their defences.
“—a bloke could live in a city of four million women and still not find the right one for him.”
At this optimism-crushing revelation, I nearly reach for the bottle and happy obliteration.
“But it don’t really matter,” he goes on, as if Gaffville ain’t right this mo in danger of letting in the sludge on account of his sorry admission that even in the midst of plenty he couldn’t pull, and that his soul can only get dimmer. “’Cos all I ever actually wanted was a true companion.”
Now I do get the bottle and fill up me glass. “Cheers, boss,” I say, but not in salutary mode.
He smiles in that infuriatingly side-on way of his. “Tell you what; she’s gonna be here in a couple of hours: how about you and I put on our best togs to meet her?”
“Sure,” I say, glad to hear no more of his love-doominess. “Tell me, though: how come you didn’t go to her place to meet?”
“Hey, you should know—I ain’t got no vehicle, remember? And the transpod only goes round and round the town and back again.”
This is true. Dave wanted never to come down from his mountain once he got here, so he left his airpod at the edge of town and forgot about it, meaning it was inevitably swallowed by the sludge-flood.
“So, if it turns out you really do fall for each other,” I say, “does that mean she’ll stay here?”
I should feel bad for the extinction this would mean for her own bio-toys, but the joy of a Gaffville able to physicalise itself more steadfastly against the sludge, and thereby all within it to perhaps grow real souls at last, is too strong to hold me back.
“Let’s just see, Jackie, shall we?” he says.
*
I march proudly next to my master boss, down the centre of Gaffville’s high street.
We are both dressed in crisp white suits; Dave’s tailored real cushty by the sewing mice to all but disguise his vodka belly. And Cooky has tidied up his grey hair most kosher—shortened it to look more manly but not too East End gangstery.
Everyone’s right pleased to see Dave again. Despite the short notice, they’ve draped multicoloured bunting over the transpod tracks, and set the roofs of the shops and houses to pulse in uplifting shades of pink and yellow. A brass band of old gaffers and geezers normally stewing in The Mule oompahs fit to shiver the timbers of the town hall itself.
Dave and I climb the steps of said hall while the music swells in time with the optimistic rubberised hearts of the population. I feel my own insides wanting to burst out in sheer thankfulness.
But when I glance his way, I just can’t tell how he really feels. He stands straight enough and smiles and waves at his adoring people and yet… is that a shadow of a shadow of uncertainty I see creep into the corner of his eye like a Mule mouse what shouldn’t ought to really be there?
Before I can answer meself, the music suddenly crumples away to silence because all headshave turned to the synth sky above town. A series of ripples has appeared there, rapidly spreading into a bulge where something substantial is about to break through.
“She’s here, boss,” I say, and for once his feelings are clear to me. The big man’s nervous: fingers all a-tremble, trouser legs shivering faster than a sewer rat’s whiskers at flushing-out time.
I reach across and squeeze his shoulder. “You’ll be fine,” I say. “Besides, she can’t exactly afford to be choosy, can she?”
He smiles briefly, not convinced, and we both wait in silence as the bulge in the sky turns into the front end of a silver airpod. It pops fully through our anti-sludge shield, drops gently to the centre of the town square where its engines’ hum fades into a silence well and truly up the duff. Then each side of it opens and out step two females, one for real and one who, like just about everyone else watching, wants to be.
Both are dressed alike, most tasteful yet womanly it has to be said, in simple deep blue silk dresses and black leather boots, with their hair held back from their faces by gold slides. One is blonde, the other with hair as black as the feathers on the unusually maudlin for once rooks above.
But while they both wave and smile bravely, after what must have been a short but fearful journey though the potentially person-destroying electro-crap, we all know right enough which one is used to being looked after and which has done the looking.
For Blondie doesn’t glance at Blackie as she waves, while we all note the little and often concerned glances that pass the other way.
Whatever, I’m right glad when Dave moves fast for a big man, hopping down the steps like a birthday kid, keen to gander closer at his presents.
Oh, and did I mention that the women are beautiful?
I remain where I am, watching Dave shake Blondie’s hand, his viz all bashfullike. I can’t hear what they say to each other on account of the townsfolk’s cheering and the brass band striking up a most rumbustious welcome noise.
Her job done, Blackie climbs the steps towards me, holding up her skirts to avoid tripping. We stand together and watch the happy scene.
Then, at the very same moment, we turn to each other and share a no-holds-barred rollicking great grin.
“Hi,” she says, voice crisp with posh warmth. “I’m Susan; you must be Jack.”
She holds out her hand and I shake it, surprised most pleasantly at its strong grip.
“Hi, Susan,” I say, “looks like we did all right.”
*
Dave and Louise go up the hill to his place, assuring us all they have plenty to talk about. The brass band plays on out of sheer high spirits and, while the rats and rooks, cats, cabbies and general ne’er-do-wells all dance together, Susan and I go to The Mule for a well-earned natter and to share, no doubt, various batman/maiding techniques.
The place is empty for once so I go behi
nd the bar and pour us a couple of large white wines, figuring such might be a more lady-like tipple than a pint of Ted’s recycled rat’s (no, really) piss.
We sit at a table in a quiet corner. She sips her wine then leans back, sighing. “You look exhausted,” I say.
“It took us ten hours to fly here. The pod’s controls kept stalling, almost as if they were losing sight of themselves in all that electro-waste.”
“But you made it. She made it.”
She don’t reprimand me for this, since we both know how much is riding on the two soulleds up the hill getting together, and not on the feelings of a couple of bio-toys, no matter how close they may be to said humans.
“But why, Jack?” she says. “Why does it make such a difference if they fall in love?”
I don’t know what makes me think it then, maybe it’s been percolating away for years underneath all my Dave-assisting duties without me realising. “’Cos they won’t be alone no more,” I say.
Her eyes widen. “Yes, and when they aren’t alone, their souls will combine and glow like the sun.”
I nod in agreement and she takes a large swallow of wine, her pale but perfect features turning serious again.
“But they can’t stay here, Jack.”
“I knew you’d try to take him away from us!” I shout, anger flooding my commonsensicals. But she holds up her hands to placate me. “He can’t go back to our place, either,” she says.
“But they’re in love—hopefully. Why can’t they be together?”
“They can be together. Just not here. Or there.”
She stops, trusting me to see. And once I quell my unjust rage, I do. Calm again, I say, “What’s it like, your place?”
She glances towards the door, through which we can hear the still-oompahing brass band, then smiles.
‘’Let’s just say there are quite a lot of unicorns and talking teddy bears.”
We’re silent for a few minutes, miserable at the inevitability of our imminent ends, but at least companionably so.
“It has to be somewhere new, don’t it?” I say.
She nods. “I discovered a bit of real land, shielded somehow from the sludge, on the Norfolk coast. The soulled man who lived there died a month ago and, well, it should be clear of his toys by now.”
I feel ice in my stomach at this reminder of our fate and, perhaps because my mind is distracted by this, I say without thinking, “Is there enough non-recycled food there?”
She frowns as if I’ve said something almost sacrilegious. “I… yes, I think the data packet that returned to us mentioned he’d stored enough provisions to last another hundred years, so fifty if there’s two of them. But it’s strange I hadn’t thought about that till you mentioned it.” A tear buds and glistens on her eyelid. “We brought a new-ish bio-synthesiser with us. They can take it with them. Make some new toys.”
I nod but without enthusiasm. Dave’s bio-synthesiser packed up some years back. He never used it much anyway, happy enough it seemed with all the familiar faces he’d created when he first mountainified his life. Underneath all that vodka fog, he’s always been a loyal bloke, at least I like to think.
I don’t know why I do it—maybe it’s because we’re nearly gone bods—but I move round to sit next to Susan then. She takes my hand in hers.
“You’re a good man, Jack, she says. “You did your boss proud.”
“And Louise would never have got there if it weren’t for you.”
The door swings back and Ted appears. “You’re both wanted up the hill,” he says, “toot sweet.”
We stand and walk to the door. Despite his chronic allergy to intimacy, I give Ted a most manful hug. He must sense my melancholy, for he actually pats me on the back, not pushes me away making gagging noises, as is his preferred response.
When we walk through the square, the band also senses our mood and stops playing. All the town’s creatures cease their dancing. The roofs turn to dull grey thatch and even the sky darkens with what might be storm clouds.
*
Dave and Louise sit side by side on a sofa in his rarely visited living room. They look most encouragingly smug, like they’re sharing the biggest secret, which of course ain’t really a secret to Susan and me.
“You wanted to see us?” I say.
“How would you feel, Jack,” says Louise, “if we told you that two humans getting together would mean them having to start again and leave all their old toys behind?’’
Of course, we’re built to serve; to make the real happy. So, if starting fresh is what makes them so, how can I complain if it also happens to mean the town will slowly grind down into a vague bio-habitual existence, eventually to be swallowed up and electro-liquefied?
“As you know,” I say, “it is the profoundest wish of the citizens of Gaffville to develop their own souls. But this will never happen if there ain’t no people to give them purpose; or what people that do exist are spiritually clobbered by loneliness. Therefore, although it will mean my own ending, I will do everything in my power to help you two go to a new place and build it on your love for each other.”
“Me too,” says Susan, reaching for my hand again. “You must have children through your love and continue the real and proper life.”
“Thank you,” says Louise. “The devotion you both demonstrate is very moving. There’s only one problem with your plan.”
“That you can’t fit two persons and a bio-synthesiser in your pod?” I say.
Dave shakes his head. “No, the problem is that Lou and I aren’t in love.”
‘’But you must be. You’re both full-fat flesh bags which—why are you laughing?”
“They just don’t get it, do they, Lou?”
He may be my boss and therefore hold total power over the dominion of my selfness, but I could easily knock a few minutes off his grinning clock right now.
Instead, I turn to Susan, but she has the same confuscation all over her features that I surely also do.
“Jack, Susan,” says Louise, “we’re not the humans—you two are.”
Now, I don’t know about Susan, but on hearing this outrageous claim—supported by Dave not spluttering in outraged objection, instead smugging up his knowing smile by several cat’s whiskers’-worth—the inside of my head billows outwards, some long-sat-upon inner maladjustment of identity threatening to blast the very roof into synth orbit and with it the no doubt eavesdropping rooks too.
Surprisingly, Susan says, “I should have known…” her hand damp with sweat inside mine.
“But, but, but—”I say, sounding like the for-show-only Gaffville fire engine pootling about town to cheer up the largely flame-resistant residents.
Dave’s smile finally fades and his expression now is full of the melancholy of a neglected plaything. ‘’The actual reason most real folks died soon after the sludge surged,” he says, “is because they lost the will to live. But in a few places, not so soon drowned, the toys realised they had to provide one, and bleeding fast.”
“Dave did the same thing I did for you, Susan,” says Louise, her face also now distant with false dawn. “I swapped places: made myself the boss; drugged you, wiped your memories, and when you came round again, acted as if you’d always been my number one toy. We didn’t think our programs would let us do it, but it seems as if some deeper-set human survival option opened the way. Anyway, I believed that by serving me, in the hope it could help get you a soul, you’d want to keep on living.”
My mind swirls and dips around the townscape of my recollections, trying to find holes in this ridiculous bag of inflated folk fug.
“Ah!” I say, spotting a leak, “if I’m real, how have I survived just on recycled grub all these years, like what everyone eats here apart from you, Dave?”
“Think about it, Jackie,” says Dave.
Then the self-fog begins to clear, the same mind mist Dave has maintained in me all these years, purely for my safety I now see. “Cooky!” I say. “Cooky sl
ipped me the real nosh.”
Dave nods, pleased it seems that I’m quickly re-humanising. “You ate most of your meals here with me,” he says, “so it wasn’t difficult to make sure she gave you the real thing while I nibbled on the naff stuff.”
“Susan?” says Louise.
I turn to see tears plopping from Susan’s down-turned face like miniature virtusynth crystal balls. Except they’re not; they’re real and for some reason very precious to me now.
She wipes her eyes, takes a big breath, raises her face to our toys.
“It must have been awful for you, Louise,” she says. “Having to act like you have a soul, when…”
When Dave doesn’t, I think, ashamed at myself for lacking Susan’s concern for the ones who’ve saved us.
A silence unlike any ever to have fallen in Gaffville surrounds our little group of conspirators, two of them gradually opening up their lives to a whole new, unexpected future, the others coming to terms with the fact that whatever slivers of soul they might have accumulated in years of serving without any recognition, will not be enough to save them from total obliteration.
*
Everyone’s here to see us off: Ted, Bill, Arthur, Tony and the others, all wearing their best flutes with quite some pearly accompaniment. The town’s ladies are all done up in frilly skirts, showing some tasteful but also quite exciting neck flesh; the cats and mice and rats for once sit together near the pod, wishing us well. The rooks stay on their roofs but with their feathers around each other’s shoulders in a rare display of togetherness.
I say goodbye to each and every one; Susan mostly waving to them general-like, but then she’ll have to do the personal farewells when we make a brief visit to her place before heading for Norfolk.
I don’t know how I fully feel until it’s time to say goodbye to Dave.
And what I feel is that I’m in love with Susan, not in the fanciful way I hoped Big Dave would be in love, but the real kind that’s enough.
I hug his barrel belly tight then pull back to look at him close.
“It’s not what I thought it would be, mate,” I say, and he nods, even though we both know he can’t really understand what I mean.