Lingering

by Melissa Simonson

  “The highest quality silicone. You ever felt one of those Japanese sex dolls?” He looked up from under a fringe of lashes the halogens had gilded and snorted at my disgusted expression. “Well, it’s the closest thing to human skin you can ever find. Amazing how lifelike those things are, and no, I didn’t test drive a sex doll. But that’s where I bought the skin. Japan. Imported miles of it.”

  I blinked around the bright lab, feeling distinctly dirty due to the utter lack of dust and debris. The shirt I wore wasn’t even clean. I’d picked it up off the floor that morning and it had passed the sniff test. But he didn’t look any cleaner than I did.

  “This is what you do down here? Mess around with robotic limbs while Jess does all the heavy lifting upstairs?”

  He picked up an arm, cut off at the inside of the elbow, and arranged the fingers so the middle one stuck up straight, flipping me off. “I wrote all that code, you know. All the algorithms, the software, the programming—all me. Jess didn’t even know Python before we got together. I’m the guy behind the curtain, Dorothy.”

  I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing his setup—whatever it was for—was impressive, but my eyes couldn’t help swiveling around the place, examining the purring air filtration unit that wouldn’t have been out of place in the meth lab of Breaking Bad, the silver cabinets that could have doubled as three-hundred-and-sixty-degree dressing room mirrors, the tools hanging from hooks on the far wall.

  Squinting over at Nick, I said, “How did you build this? I figured you were just renting the place. It looked abandoned. I kind of thought you guys were squatting here.”

  “Better to keep it looking like that. From the outside, anyway.” He waved the arm around in a circle at the ceiling, and I noticed it was clearly feminine. Unpainted nails filed into neat ovals, willowy fingers, small, sculpted wrist, slender forearm. “I bought the building a few years ago, when I got back from Switzerland. The lab took over a year to set up. Fucking contractors.”

  I rubbed a palm down my arm, over the gooseflesh beginning to sprout. “Switzerland?”

  “Went there for school. Wound up staying an extra ten years. That’s where I learned French.”

  I didn’t like the glint in his eyes or the way his tongue curved over the word French. He said it like he’d said Carissa’s name the last time I’d seen him, like it had some secret meaning. Carissa knew French—did he know that about her, too?

  The more logical part of my mind scoffed at that. Carissa had been my world, but I couldn’t see how she’d mean anything to this guy, this idiot hipster stranger. Why would he be interested enough in her life to dig into her background? The machine simulating her voice had confirmed that only Jess had interacted with it.

  I gave him a mock bow. “Well. Congratulations. It’s a cool lab. Cooler than the server labs I’ve been inside.” I jammed my thumb over my shoulder at the door. “But I gotta go.”

  He wagged the arm at me as he moved closer, shoes squeaking like mice over the linoleum. “Not yet. This isn’t all that I wanted to show you. See that case over there?”

  “Which one?”

  “The smallest one.” He pointed the fake arm’s finger at a case the size of a laptop bag atop the far table. “Can you grab it for me?”

  I sighed, crossed the room to grab it, and thrust it into his chest.

  “Careful, Ben. Be gentle with this one.” He tossed the arm aside and fingered the clasps on the case, a tense kind of excitement simmering just beneath the surface of his skin. “I feel like there should be a drum roll, or something.”

  Blood pounded in my temples, exacerbating the headache the cleanroom’s stench had inspired.

  “All business today, huh?” He popped the case open, smiled at its contents, and turned it around on his palm so I could look within.

  IV

  C onfusion set in first, but slowly, some distant chamber in my mind dawned bright with comprehension. My heart rate picked up the pace, as if to compensate for my two seconds’ befuddlement.

  “What the fuck” seemed to be my mantra today, and dimly I registered the fact that my voice hadn’t cracked like that since the ninth grade.

  Nick peered over the rim of the case. “There were so many pictures to work with. So many angles, so many details. I didn’t do this myself, obviously, sent it out to that Japanese sex doll company, but I just got it in a few days ago. What do you think?”

  I think I knew where we were headed with that glass eyeball that kept shadowing my every thought and stalking my dreams. I think I had some misty idea where Nick was going with this lab he’d been dying to show me.

  “You can’t do this.” I shook my head so fast my vision blurred, a nauseated kind of vertigo seizing hold of my body. “I’m sure this is twelve kinds of illegal. It’s practically identity theft.”

  “’Fraid there aren’t any laws when it comes to this kind of thing.” His expression was almost pitying, if pity can be coated in artificial sweetener. “To be honest, I was expecting a much different reaction. Lingering clients aren’t exactly ready to move on.”

  “Why did you have to use her as the model? What the fuck is your problem? Don’t you get how messed up that is?”

  “Who else did I have to choose from? The male YouTuber? No offense, but she’s much more fun to look at.”

  I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to see Carissa’s face replicated in silicone nestled atop a swath of black velvet. That he’d had so many details to work with was obvious. The slight bump on the ridge of her nose, the tiny freckle beneath her swollen bottom lip, the heart shape of her face—all there.

  I slammed the case shut. “What are you planning on doing with this?”

  I shouldn’t have asked. I already knew.

  He locked the clasps into place and slid the case onto the table next to a bodiless leg. “You know what I did at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology?”

  “Robotics, I’m assuming.”

  “More than that.”

  “You’re trying to build an AI?” Please say no. Please laugh and say hell no, I’m just trying to build interactive sex dolls and shit. A huge part of me would have been furious if he’d intended to slap her face on a sex doll, but at least those wouldn’t speak through her voice, wouldn’t parrot her vernacular, wouldn’t blink with her eyes.

  But my reaction would have had nothing on Carissa’s. She would have slit him open throat to groin and disemboweled him.

  “Not trying. Succeeding. There’ve been a few prototypes already—well, more than a few, actually, but whatever. You’d think the hardest part would be the brain, but it’s the balance that’s the biggest pain in the ass. What good is an AI if it can’t even walk without falling over every few steps? YouTube that if you ever get a chance, “Robot Fails,” the funniest shit ever—but gyroscopes have kept the models from the past six years upright and walking.”

  I needed a gyroscope. My knees were threatening to give way, forcing me to keep a white-knuckled grip on the lab table.

  “I still don’t understand why it had to be her. Why it had to come down to her or the YouTuber. You could have made up your own face or used some celebrity’s.”

  “I didn’t want a celebrity’s face,” he said with the air of explaining something simple to an emotional child. “I wanted hers.”

  “Why?” I nearly yelled, drawing the word out as though it had three syllables.

  “Because I’m trying to prove consciousness. Back in Switzerland, my team and I already proved true artificial intelligence. But Carissa was a real person. And you guys were all in love, right? About to get married? You can’t manufacture or simulate real love, it’s one of those intangibles that can’t be measured. So when I finish building her,” he said, waving an airy hand around the lab, “I want to see if she loves you or if she’s just simulating it, going through the motions, what have you. It’ll be interesting to watch, at the bare minimum. I want you to help me test her. It has to be you for the
experiment to go the way I’ve designed it. I can walk you through some of how her brain works before I wake her up, but not all of it, obviously, since the intellectual property belongs to me and my team back in Switzerland, but—”

  “You can’t do this to her.” And to me, I thought, but I couldn’t bring myself to say so.

  He pressed his lips together, the palest ghost of something near sympathy washing over his face. It was almost obscene, how out of place it looked on his features. “There is no her anymore, Ben. She’s gone, and I don’t need her permission or yours.”

  “Jess said she’d give me back her phone and delete all her files if I wanted out. Well, I want out. You can’t keep her information indefinitely.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “You really think Jess is in charge around here? Look.” He held up a hand to quell my spluttering. “In other cases, I wouldn’t have a problem getting rid of her data. I’ve done it plenty of times before, but you should have read the fine print on that pamphlet you signed. All her information belongs to me now, and I can do with it what I will. I’m not deleting her data after all the work I’ve already done, but I’ll give you her phone back if it makes you feel better.”

  “It doesn’t. At all.”

  I was damn near positive he’d have already milked that phone for all it could give him, downloading everything of importance, archiving every text she’d ever sent, every picture she’d ever snapped.

  Nick threw up his hands in a what do you want from me? gesture. “Well—” he began, but suddenly stopped and rummaged in his back pocket. He pulled out a cell phone, inputted the code, and frowned at the screen, a hank of dirty blond hair falling over his left eye. “Speak of the devil. Jess just came in.”

  I headed for the door backward, injecting my voice with all the strength I could muster. “I’m not going to let you do this.”

  But we both recognized how feeble that sounded, and an image of Detective Matthew’s face exploded inside my head, the expression he’d make when I burst into his precinct shouting about robots and dead fiancées and miles of sex doll skin.

  “It’s not really a matter of what you’ll let me do, Ben. It’s not up to you. But I’ll let you know when I switch her on.”

  J ess rounded the corner to her cubicle and almost smacked into me on my way out of the building.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked around a bite of her breakfast, crimson crescent moons staining the bagel in her hand. “Did we have an appointment?”

  “Do you know what he’s doing back there?” I flung my arm toward the direction I’d come.

  The lump of bagel slid down her throat, reminding me irresistibly of an anaconda swallowing a mouse. “He took you down there?”

  “He’s a fucking psycho. He’s building my fiancée. Someone needs to institutionalize him.”

  “What?” The thick liner rimming her upper and lower lids slanted weirdly in her wide-eyed surprise. “Nick!” She cast a helpless look down the hallway as I pushed past her. He wouldn’t hear her calls, not when the lab was a flight of stairs beneath us, tucked away behind a thick steel door. “Nick, goddamnit, get your ass up here! Ben, wait. Hold on.” Her hand snared around my elbow, but I wrenched out of her grip.

  I heard her bellow her boyfriend’s name one more time before the front door swung shut behind me.

  Sweat beading along my hairline froze the minute I hit the arctic outside air. I jammed my hands in the pockets of my hoodie and headed back to my car, clouds of pigeons scattering as I blazed a path through them, dead leaves swirling around my ankles.

  “Ben!”

  I flipped my hood up and kept walking, eyes on my Timberlands.

  “Ben, come on.” The staccato of her boots clacking against the cracked pavement drew closer. “Jesus, will you hold up, I’m in heels! I just want to talk to you.”

  “About what?” I aimed my key fob at my car and punched the unlock button. “You set me up for all this. I don’t have anything left to say to you.”

  She jogged the last few steps to the driver’s side door, her hand pressed flat against the doorjamb. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t set you up, for Christ’s sake, this isn’t some double cross in a bad movie. I didn’t know that’s what he was doing.”

  “Get out of the way.”

  She puffed out a sigh that ruffled the overgrown black bangs brushing her eyebrows. “Seriously? You won’t even give me five minutes?”

  We stared at one another in frosty silence for a few seconds.

  “Do you want to go for a ride?” I heard myself ask, as if my subconscious was plotting moves without giving my higher brain a heads-up.

  “Right now?” She moved aside, shocked into silence for once.

  I slid into the driver’s seat, jammed the keys into the ignition, and turned the engine over. She skirted the hood of the car, grappled with the passenger’s door, and let herself in.

  I backed out of the parking space as she fumbled with her seatbelt. “No talking on the way.”

  “On the way where?” she asked, but slumped silently into her seat at my deadpan expression.

  W hy did you bring me here?” Jess stuffed her hands in the pockets of her parka, looking up at me from under the fur lining of her hood.

  I bent forward and brushed the impacted snow off Carissa’s headstone. “Because I wanted you to look at this. I know you troll cemeteries all the time so this may mean nothing to you, but Carissa was a real person. She had a real life, with real feelings and real people who loved her. Do you honestly think it’s okay for your boyfriend to try to build some disgusting caricature of her?”

  My blood ran cold every time I thought of what it might look like, this built to scale model of the dead girl I loved. How flat those glass eyeballs would look, how her skin would shine like plastic under all those harsh lights. She’d be violated all over again, forced into sex doll skin for Nick’s twisted research. To see if she loved me. I choked back a bile-laced laugh. To see if it loved me, more like; I should have corrected him back in that lab. I had a hard time deciding who I wanted to kill more, Nick or the asshole who’d murdered her. Both heartily deserved a bullet to the brain as far as I was concerned.

  She sighed, running her tongue over her gums. “I didn’t know he was going to build her, for God’s sake. Can you cut me some slack? I don’t know what you’ve pictured, but I don’t go down there too often. I don’t know everything he’s up to. He never told me he wanted to use her as the model.”

  “She has a name.”

  “I know that, Ben.”

  “You think it’s okay, what he’s doing?”

  “He’s been working at this for years and years, it’s not like he just decided to try to build one once he heard about Carissa. He’s a genius. Graduated high school when he was fifteen—”

  “I don’t care how smart he is,” I said, my voice cracking whip-like over hers. “You think that matters to me?” I waved a hand at the headstone. “You think that would matter to her?”

  She scuffed her boot in the snow, avoiding my gaze. “Think about what this can mean, though, if he actually builds an AI with true consciousness. He spent years in Switzerland perfecting this technology, worked on tons of different teams with some of the smartest people in this field. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is the number one school on the planet for this type of thing, and he was studying there since he was sixteen years old. This isn’t just about you or her. It’s world-changing stuff.”

  I jabbed a finger at the grave. “She was world-changing stuff to me. And it’s not right that he’s going to use her and her death to get wherever the hell it is he wants to go. And if you think that’s right, then you’re as bad as he is.”

  She closed her eyes, but her face grew stony and resolute. “I don’t agree with him using her specifically. I never said I did. I don’t think it’s fair to you or to Carissa, but if he’s using her, then it’s for a good reason. He wouldn’t do it maliciously.”

  Ha
ve you even met him? I wanted to shout. He wouldn’t do it maliciously, my ass. Everything about him was malicious; I knew that from the moment I met him, from the second he’d opened his mouth that first day in the office.

  “God, you don’t even know him at all.” I shook my head, looking around at the headstones, the frozen black pond, the ground cloaked in white. Everything felt somehow deader here, blanketed in snow. It might be beautiful in spring, once the cherry blossoms unfurled and the grass grew lush and green, but it felt like a ghost town now, everything—including myself—caught in a type of limbo. So silent it could have been underwater.

  Her eyes flashed with anger as they snapped open. “You don’t know him at all. We’ve been together for three years; I think I know him a little better than you do.”

  “If you don’t think it’s right, if you really mean that, then do something about it. Talk to him.”

  Her gaze strayed to Carissa’s headstone, lingering for a moment before she looked back at me. “I will, but I doubt I’ll be able to change his mind. I’m telling you I’ll try, though. I really will.”

  “Maybe I should call the police, then. Tell them what he’s up to down there. You guys keep it all under wraps for a reason. Can’t even park in front of the building because you’re trying to be discreet. I’m sure the cops would be interested in his little lab.”

  She brushed the black bangs grazing her lashes out of her eyes. “You can call the cops, but there’s nothing illegal going on down there, and he’s got the grant papers to back him up. No laws govern this area yet. Most that’ll do is put him out of commission for a few days while the police stand around scratching their heads. It wouldn’t solve anything, okay?” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, shivering. “Just let me talk to him, all right? I promise I’ll try.”