An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  See, I have a job to do: I am here to protect the real children from this kind of contact. This is my primary function but of course it is still a pleasure. This thing which is bad for them is good for me. Essential, actually. I am hyperventilating in my enthusiasm for the task in hand.

  It is my first job for the day and I am fresh from sleep and I do it just the ordinary way and it feels like the best thing ever. The feel of the folds in the sheet against my back where the shirt rides up, and the tugging on my thing and knowing he is looking at my balls up tight between my legs and the hairs just a fine downing there and the clean tight hole of my bum that some of them get all funny about. He gets all of it in the screen-face. Bum and balls and penis. And then when I have done the stop and breathe thing a couple of times like Hamish taught me, he gets the come shot too. Bam! Right in the face!

  But when I roll over and grin towards the computer I can see he has logged off. The old man finished earlier than me. And then he left to go cry to the counsellor about his shame, or whatever they make him do before they suck all his data into a research file.

  Blah blah blah. Boo hoo. Yakitty yak yak.

  I got shown the video for my training. All the tears for their sadness at how they can’t help who they love. But I’m glad they’re like this and I don’t care who knows it. The Hebes are my people. I live for them. I make love with them. I love them.

  There is a change in the feel of the air and I roll over on the bed. My stickiness trickles down onto the sheet, which is dirty but when I have just had a session I don’t care about the dirt at all.

  The door is open and Hamish is there, watching me. I roll my hips towards him, let my cock flop into view. I always flirt with Hamish but he doesn’t respond. He isn’t a Hebephile and he doesn’t care for me in that way. He doesn’t even comment when I run my fingers through the stickiness and bring them to my face to sniff. He lets me do all this without even a flicker of interest.

  ‘Shower,’ Hamish says. ‘Clothes.’

  I drag myself up off the bed. ‘I love the Hebes,’ I tell him.

  ‘Yes,’ says Hamish. ‘You are programmed to love them.’

  ‘No, but I love them.’

  He nods. ‘Shower.’

  ‘Where are we going after?’

  ‘Out for some real world.’

  I frown and slam the bathroom door behind me. I love real world. It is almost my favourite thing. Real world followed by free chat time and the one-on-one jobs. I love all of it. I am programmed to love all of it I suppose, but that doesn’t make it any less so.

  I am careful to turn the shower on to just a trickle. It is too much to feel the water rush hard against my skin so soon after I come. I am alive to the world now. I am a real boy. I am the angel boy on the left side of the photograph, waking up to a wondrous world.

  ‘Cam!’

  I can hear Hamish call through the door.

  ‘Hurry up. We don’t have all day.’

  When I go out for Real Play it takes a while to adjust. The world is a hard slap of sound and smell and sight and taste, and all of it turned up loud. So loud I could be deafened by it, if I were to run from the safe grey calm of my room straight into the park down the road.

  We drive there. I climb into the van and the windows are tinted and the temperature is carefully controlled but the dapple of sunlight sparks electric against my skin as we drive. I open my mouth to it and feel the crackle of light exploding, popping like candy against my tongue.

  The sounds are dulled down but I hear cars passing, an angry horn, a jackhammer digging up the footpath, and then Hamish turns the music on and edges the volume up till I am humming and nodding along to the beat. He always plays the same three or four albums on our drives, they are the soundtrack to Real Play now, and I respond to them like Pavlov’s dog and the bell. I perk up. I feel my skin tingle with anticipating all the textures I will be touching and my irises expand, keen for the bright outside.

  I push my face against the window, Hamish slides it open, the world comes rushing in. I push my hand against my shorts and he tuts, so I lift my hand away and rest it on the vinyl seat beside me. The excitement of overstimulation feels like sex but it is Important that I Maintain the Distinction between the Two States of Arousal.

  Hamish pulls up at the park and there is the automated buzzing as the door opens. I am a pressed-down spring ready to burst out into the forgiveness of grass and bright sunshine and Hamish says:

  ‘Three-five stop.’

  The words pin me to the seat. I am still like stone as he hauls himself out of the drivers seat and around to the side of the van. He leans on the duco and watches me. He has used the safe words and I can’t move until he undoes the hold he has over me. There are parts of me, human parts, that can’t be programmed to obey. I feel the skin on my neck pricking to gooseflesh, my human skin cheeks pinking with real blood; the organic bits of my design are not properly obedient. But I am enough of a computer to obey a simple enough command. Three-five is my model number. I am the thirty-fifth Cameron, so of course I am the best. More modern, more streamlined, more real.

  ‘Three-five go.’ And I bounce out of the van and run on the spot in my excitement to be free. Hamish reaches into the van and pulls the deck out from under the seat. It slips into the crook of my arm easily, as if the skateboard was a part of my body.

  ‘Cam,’ he says and I am all eyes staring up into his face, jiggling on the spot, keen to be off. ‘Have fun.’

  Haha. I don’t need to be told that more than once.

  The deck turns the path into a river. I weave upstream, paddle once, twice, my foot sweeping the concrete, then on the downward ride I shave my speed, scuffing rubber from the bottom of my shoe. If I go too fast I will fall. If I fall I will bleed and it will hurt. Just like any other boy.

  Wind in my hair, wind making my T-shirt into a sail that flaps behind me like someone applauding. Everything all at once and I disappear into a simple Processor of Sensory Stimulation—for the period of the downhill run there is nothing but the human shell of me in the wind and sun. My skin is a canvas for nature to paint on. I feel it like a single ant must feel his feet on the ground but it comes with an awareness of the whole ant nest. I am all the synthetics that have ever been made, the thirty-five Camerons, the fifty-four Lucys, the baby Brees and the baby Andrews. I am one to one hundred and whatever. I am all the Pedo models and the Hebo models and the millions of ordinary sex models that go out there unmonitored. I am the normal boys and girls, I am everything and I am all at once.

  I am a sudden stop. Flailing for words, a sense of balance as I trip towards standing. I am this breathing in of the world.

  A group of boys about my age kick a football between them on the field. Even watching them play sets my muscles twitching. They are full of stored energy like batteries, their bodies swerving and shimmying and bouncing, unstoppable. I know the medical facts of their bodies. I know about beating hearts and neurological pathways. My own body is nothing more than a careful replica of theirs. I watch them run and call out to each other and I’m torn between joining them, throwing myself into the scrum, becoming an indistinguishable part of their boyish huddle…Or stomping off into a corner away from the flailing limbs, sulking on my own while the other boys play. They are the real thing, the true objects of hebephilic desires, and I am a fake. I am…a lack. I am like the story of Pinocchio when he realises he would give anything to be a real live boy.

  ‘You going to ask them to play? Cam?’ Hamish has caught up to me. He is panting a little from his jog down the hill but he pulls out a pouch of tobacco anyway and he is already rolling a durrie. He likes it when I play with the other children. It is an important part of my socialisation programming. It is true, I pick up new phrases, mimic their body language. I become more myself each time. I play with the other children, but today I look at the clamour of bodies and I feel shy. This is part of it all, I am picking up on Non-verbal Signals and my nervousness is probably war
ranted, even if I don’t quite know why I can’t bring myself to play. No point getting into a scuffle with an angry kid. I know I stand out from the crowd. I’m different and they can sense that, they just don’t really know why.

  There is a multicoloured climbing gym, a gel slide, a glass bridge, an interactive tower with holographic tea parties played with known brand characters. There is a branded cola lake with candy fish to chase. I should care about the brand recognition. The other kids do, but the only things I really like at the park are the gel slide and the swings. I like the swings the best. The handgrips test your pulse but if my hand goes to the monitoring grip it is purely coincidental. I like the feel of the cold chain soaking up the heat from my hand much better.

  Anyway, I know how fast my heart is beating. Everything about me is carefully monitored, the data is stored and analysed later. There is a woman who does that, Liv. She says she is my biographer. She says it like it’s a joke but I’m not sure why that would be funny. Every time I hear my heart beating too fast or build up a sweat or fart, I think of Liv, reading the data later, knowing everything about me. Following along.

  I’m over at the swing when Hamish sits himself on the bench nearby, one foot on my skateboard, pushing it back and forth as he lights a cigarette. I kick off. The rush of warm air on my cheeks makes me grin. The rush of air on my gums in my mouth as I laugh. I swing high and goosebumps of delight rise up on my arms. Hamish nods at the sound of my laughing but continues to smoke and scroll through something on his phone.

  I try to stop my trajectory with my feet but I have a bit of momentum up and the swing rocks crazily, curling one way and then another. She is standing directly in my path when the swing kicks forward a little. She pushes at my knees, sends me spiralling back, and then she laughs. She runs away from the upswing and throws herself hard against the gel bounce of the ground. She rolls one way and then another. She is about my age, the age I am supposed to be, maybe a little younger. Her chest is mostly flat but I can see breasts, small; tapering to a point like little cones. She isn’t wearing a bra and when she rolls on the soft surface her red velvet skirt kicks up and I can see a flash of pale knickers.

  She pushes her head down into the fleshy ground and blows onto it, making a farting sound with her pursed lips. It’s too unselfconscious for a girl her age. It is playful, rude and childlike. A demonstration of joy. She rolls onto her back and she laughs and I notice how pointy her nipples have become and how she strokes the squidgy surface of the ground with her fingers. She is touching everything, rubbing the world against her bare flesh. That is how I am: I recognise myself and I wonder for a moment if she is a synthetic Hebo like me. I have met a few before and you almost can’t tell them from real boys and girls.

  I squint at her and glance quickly towards Hamish, who is busy with his phone, before I slip off the swing and move to stand beside her stretched-out body. She spreads her knees wider. Yellow knickers, smooth, plump, pale thighs. I am sure she is like me. I look around for her Guardian but there is no one else nearby. Surely they wouldn’t let her just wander off? She is a valuable bit of government property. I drop to my knees beside her, stare at a bright blue bruise on her knee.

  ‘I get bruises too,’ I tell her, kicking out my calf and turning it in my hand to show her where a patch of skin is a different colour.

  ‘What?’ she asks, rolling over and commando-crawling closer to me. She reaches out and pinches my thigh just under where the shorts end. ‘When I do this?’ she asks and pokes me again, hard. ‘And this? You get bruises from like this?’

  I gently push her hand away and glance behind me to where Hamish has finally looked up from his phone, checking to see that everything is okay with me and this strange, wild girl.

  ‘Stop it,’ I tell her.

  ‘Why? You going to cry?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘but I’ll punch you,’ which is a lie because I can’t punch anyone. It is Counter to my Programming. She punches me on the leg, hard, and I know she has to be a real girl, a real girl whose brain is somehow programmed a bit like mine. A kindred kid. She rolls onto her front and bounces her hips down, humping the floor like I do when I’m alone in my room.

  ‘Do this,’ she says and I shake my head no.

  ‘Go on, it feels like a big bag of blubber. I know, it feels like a whale that has been trapped under the ground but there’s, like, a tank of water just around his head so that he can still breathe in the water like it’s the ocean. Salt water for breathing.’

  ‘They breathe air,’ I tell her.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ she says and rolls so quickly to a cross-legged sitting position that it is as if she just blinked out of one position and into another, like magic. Teleporting.

  ‘Dummy,’ she says, ‘why don’t they just live on land if they breathe air? You would see a big killer whale wobbling down Queen Street going to buy a can of tuna from the 7-Eleven.’

  She is back on her belly and whale-wobbling around in a small circle. She makes humfing noises with her cheeks bulged out and then a groan that is possibly meant to be whale song.

  ‘They do breathe air.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because…’ I look back towards Hamish. He has lost interest in us. He smokes as he reads his phone. ‘Because I’m a robot.’

  Her eyes become large circles. The eyes of a manga cartoon. She leans closer, presses the warm expanse of her leg against mine.

  ‘Are you one of those sex dolls?’

  I frown, purse my lips. ‘I’m not a toy.’

  ‘Yes, you are. There was something on the news about it, on the internet. Someone, this lady, said you might be dangerous.’ She purses her lips, makes her face into a prune. ‘Morally corrupting the youth of the nation. Evil robots. Evil sex robots.’ And then she laughs.

  ‘I’m a highly sophisticated mix of cells and circuitry. I’m not dangerous. Hamish says I’m a hero.’

  ‘A superhero?’

  ‘I suppose. I’m here to protect you anyway.’

  ‘From what?’

  ‘From sex.’

  She laughs. She rolls on her back and kicks her legs up in the air. When she’s finished she rolls back over towards me and scoots up till her mouth is close to my ear.

  ‘Tell you a secret?’ she says, and I nod. ‘Sex isn’t as bad as what they say.’

  If I were on the swing right now, holding on to the pulse-measuring handles, the sudden throbbing in my chest would set off all sorts of playground equipment alarms. This isn’t the first time I’ve told another kid about my purpose, but I never got this reaction before and I’m confused. I was ready for a grimace—disgust—or a flinch—fear—but this wide-eyed conspiratorial grin is something new.

  ‘You want to know how I know that?’ she says, close to my ear.

  I sneak a look at Hamish, who has rolled another cigarette which he knows is bad for him. He is leaning back with his head tilted towards his phone but I can see his eyes are closed. I nod to the girl. ‘What’s your name?’ I ask.

  ‘Ellen. Do you get a name? Or just a number?’

  ‘I have a name.’

  ‘No.’ She puts her hand up to stop me speaking, ‘I am going to call you Robo…no. Machi…Machiney.’

  ‘My name is Cameron.’

  ‘Machiney. Don’t speak back to your human master.’

  ‘You’re not—’ but she shushes me before I can point to Hamish, who has clearly fallen asleep, the unlit cigarette drooping at an angle between the loose V of his fingers, the phone resting on the bench near his hand.

  She takes my hand and half-drags me towards the rainbow-coloured coil of the giant slinky. The flexible bones of it are covered by soft rubber, bright green and blue and orange. Inside little stars dance in mid-air as if someone had tipped in a giant vat of glitter then shone a torch in.

  ‘Machiney Boy,’ she commands. ‘Sit.’

  I sit. Then she stands in front of me, rolling from foot to foot as the tube moves w
ith her shifting weight.

  She whispers, ‘The secret is…’ She looks behind her and when she can see that there is no one else in the tube she quickly pulls down her yellow knickers and lifts up her skirt, which is at my eye level.

  ‘I had sex. See?’ There isn’t anything to see except the clean, smooth place where her fingers are pointing. It is the first human vulva I have ever encountered. I suppose my eyes are as wide as hers were a few minutes ago.

  ‘I had sex and it is a secret but it feels really nice like when you lie in the bath and let the water go on your place and it makes you nice and dizzy. And they warn you about it because it tears a bit of skin when it first happens and that skin is supposed to be special. Magic skin. It makes you a good girl when you have it, but I am not ever going to be a good girl, and sex isn’t really anything except a good dizzy feeling. You know?’

  She pulls her pants up and sits next to me and I am glad. It is a relief not to have to process the way she looks down there.

  ‘You have had sex,’ she says. I nod.

  ‘And is it good? Does it feel good?’

  I shrug. I am programmed to enjoy it. I am programmed to protect children like her from the damage it does. The information that someone under the age of eighteen might enjoy sex is completely new. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the details I’ve been given.

  ‘Who does it?’ I ask her. ‘Who does that to you?’ It is in me, this need to help her, to protect, because it must be that she doesn’t know what is good for her. Some adult has harmed her; manipulated her.

  She leans in so close that I can smell the scent of gum, sweet and powdery on her breath.

  ‘A toy, silly. A doll, just like you. Only not a whole doll, not a head that speaks like you do or anything. Just a body and the bits that count, but it does the up and down thing. You put it in the bath, my mother does that when she thinks I’m asleep, and its belly feels soft and warm.’

  She puts her hand out then and touches my leg. ‘Warm as you,’ she says, ‘and I call him Robo Bot because he has a bottom like a real boy with a bum hole in it and everything.’