More Real Than Him
Page 3
A warning blinks inside Stephen. His Creator enters the suite but refuses to look at him. Morgan unzips her duffle bag. Tampons well up like a fountain as she digs through it. Stephen asks Morgan if she’s seen the news. Ko Yohan is taking a break from the military. There will be a Ko Yohan Live Handshake event this February.
“Oh,” Morgan says, not looking up.
Her indifference puts him on a tilt. From the nightstand, Stephen rests on a cliff. Without Ko Yohan, what purpose does he serve? One Creator threw him away. Will another? Since his inception, he’s been whittled down from body to torso to head, with the constant horizon of nonexistence looming before him. Stephen tips over. The floor rears up. His cheek hits the carpet. Morgan hears the muffled thump. Her eyes widen at him, then her narrow face twists.
Stephen reads it as disgust.
She bends down wearily when her Scopes vibrates. Annie Kim has uploaded a new picture.
Did her mother accept her friend request? Morgan pulls up the social media account. She can’t, for the life of her, recall using the name Minamoto Maki, but whatever. She was probably drunk. She clicks on the alert, time-stamped three minutes ago.
It’s a photograph of her mother and a girl, blowing out a candle on a chocolate cupcake. Morgan sinks onto the bed. The girl looks to be ten years old, which was Morgan’s age when her parents divorced. The girl is a refurbished Sakura-2C. The model was discontinued for being slow in the head, but the slowness has turned into a sweetness in her Wheat Gold eyes. Her mother has bought a robot child, designed to look like a hāfu, the “real” take on being half-Japanese, half-British or French, instead of the half-Korean mongrel Morgan is.
“I thought she wanted a son,” Morgan says.
“She must have changed her mind,” Stephen says.
Morgan looks down. A beeping kicks inside Stephen. His system has detected the possibility that his owner might pick him up and hurl him against the wall. He may have overplayed his hand. If he had limbs, Stephen would leave the room and shut the door behind him. The alarm urges him to brace himself.
The door slams. Stephen opens his eyes and waits.
* * *
Morgan orders whisky on the rocks, then scrolls through her mother’s album. Mother and daughter in a sunflower field. Mother and daughter, cheeks pressed against a tiny Christmas tree. Mother and daughter smiling with mouths full of watermelon rinds. Morgan likes every picture. She punches every heart, determined to burn her mark, like the thumb of God upon Cain’s flesh.
“New boyfriend?” Di teases, as she sits beside her.
The comment is so tone-deaf, Morgan wants to slap her. Then she sees Di’s smile, tinged with fever. Morgan asks if something is wrong and Di replies, “Everything is fine.”
The smile doesn’t waver, as Di types something on her Scopes. “My father didn’t show up tonight.”
“He was supposed to come?”
“I sent an invite. I guess it didn’t reach him.”
Morgan can detect relief in Di’s crumpled voice, an invitation for punishment, which Morgan is willing to dole out: “You have to stop putting your father on a pedestal.”
“I know.”
No, you don’t. He left your family. It took fourteen years for Morgan to forgive her mother, once she confirmed her mother was alone and miserable. But now her mother has gone and adopted a robot child to fill some stupid hole in her life. Now she’s a cheating whore and a hypocrite.
Morgan would tell Di about her mother, but she isn’t brave enough. She’d give too much of herself away, losing any upper hand in their relationship, already so tipped in Di’s favor. “Your father is an asshole,” she says instead, with a tone of finality.
“An asshole wouldn’t—an asshole couldn’t have created something so wonderful.”
Morgan has a history’s worth of arsenal to disagree, Picasso, Wagner, Lennon, an unflagging parade of masculine assholery where she’s tempted to blame the mothers, wives, and daughters for enabling them.
“Did I tell you about my brother?” Di leans in, and Morgan catches the reek of vodka, as Di scrolls through an album, frantic, only to dig up a clip with a triumphant, quivering smile.
It’s a boy in a dumb bowl-haircut. Morgan recognizes the face from Di’s workshop. But she also doesn’t. She’d hoped Di’s Pinocchio brother would prove to be wooden enough, so she could tell Di to open her eyes, You were fooled because you were a child!
But Yoyo could have fooled anyone. Even her, even now. Di flits through them with bright-eyed desperation. Clips of Yoyo helping Di up a ginkgo tree, yelping as stinky berries rain on him; Yoyo on a bicycle, both hands lifted in the air; Yoyo looking up from a cake, slopped in yellow frosting, HAPPY YOYO, the BIRTHDAY eaten. His smile is grateful and uncertain.
What is it? Morgan wonders, feeling that prickle, as she finds herself comparing Yoyo, outdated by nearly two decades, with Stephen. What is it that makes him so real?
It’s not the mark of Zhou Bing. Morgan can’t find the coveted logo (冰), abused from the fakes online, branded on Yoyo’s neck. She studies the clip of Yoyo smearing Di’s baby face with his cake, and Morgan is three again, massaging chocolate between her palms. Her mother, laughing, eyes closed, so Morgan could stamp those perfect cheeks with her handprints.
Morgan gets it now. Yoyo is self-conscious. In every picture, even the candid ones, Yoyo wears a look of slight embarrassment. Robots are never self-conscious, secure in how they’re supposed to appear, which role they’re supposed to serve. But Yoyo looks just as displaced as the rest of them, like her mother, who was lying to herself as much as she was lying to her family, with a self-awareness that renders Yoyo as real as he is fake.
“I’m sorry,” Di says. “What I said. About Stephen being the best you’ll make.”
So it had been a slap. Morgan touches her cheek, as if she can feel the heat.
“I meant it. But for myself. I was kind of jealous. Did you see how anxious he was? You made him that way. I couldn’t have made him like that. I could never make something like that.”
Di, eyes of liquid, reaches for Yoyo’s mirage.
What happened to him? Morgan wants to ask, but doesn’t. She should tell Di he’s not real. He was never real. That would be both cruel and merciful. Di has built her life, perfect-on-paper, on this lie. How many boyfriends has she dated in the time Morgan has known her? How many more will she date, then discard, always searching for the ideal boy who lacks the capacity to hurt her?
“I miss him so much,” Di whispers.
Morgan should tell her. And then she’d have to face herself in the mirror and ask, Why are you still a virgin? You’re obsessed with a twenty-three-year-old actor. You made a robot after him, so you could love and be loved, but you can’t finish him because no one, not even a robot, could love you. What is wrong with you? Her stepmother used to fling this in her face, sometimes even in despair, What is wrong with you?
Morgan doesn’t ask Di what is wrong with her. She thanks Di for being honest. She squeezes the warmth of Di’s hand.
“I think it’s brave that you can be so open with me,” Morgan says, echoing what Di seemed to prize: bravery. Her voice quivers. “I wish I could be brave like you.”
* * *
At home, Morgan drops her duffle bag, crushing her three-inch heels. Her hand touches the wall. Ko Yohan fills her room. His pictures are black-and-white and nostalgic, like an old movie star who died in a car crash. Morgan turns on her computer. She places Stephen’s head on the desk. His eyelashes seem to tickle his cheeks. His mouth is austere in sleep mode. His legs, she finds under her desk. Dust lines the moon curves of his toenails. She digs out an old Q-tip from her waste bin and swabs each toenail until they gleam. The arms are still wrapped. The wrapper resists, then tears, crisp and toxic with plastic fumes. She unsheathes an arm, straightens each finger and presses her thumbs into the creases of the palm, massaging it, as if to improve blood flow. The hand presses a cool palm against her cheek and
Morgan, helpless against such tenderness, closes her eyes.
Stephen’s eyes are closed. He smiles at the tingle, soon to be his.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Silvia Park
Art copyright © 2019 by Dion MBD