by Jon Jacks
‘Okay, I’ll take that as progress; see you for breakfast?’
‘Maybe.’
With a flick of my finger, I cancelled the connection, switching the screen to one of the entertainment channels.
And Dorian instantly filled the screen again.
This time, though, I was with him.
We were attending a charity ball at the Pleasure Orchard, a scene from a few weeks back.
The sound was switched off, but I hardly needed it to work out what kind of commentary would be attached to scenes like this.
The gilded lifestyle. The enviable world of the privileged. The nightlife. The glamorous travel.
It seemed I’d guessed correctly. The screen suddenly lit up with ridiculously bright pans of exotic beaches curling around shimmering blue seas. Our rumoured honeymoon destinations.
And, out in their cramped apartments, the Perma-Leisured are seeing similar scenes to this night after night on their own screens.
Shot after shot of a world they can never be a part of, unless they’re lucky enough to get a job as a shop assistant or waiter, or some other servile role.
Is it any wonder more and more of them were taking to rioting?
As if they had deliberately set out to highlight the difference between the two worlds, the scenes shifted to our arrival at the exclusive Corredo Nightclub. The invariably latex-gloved doormen rushed forward to swing open the passenger doors of our mauve Rolls Royce.
The last time someone had opened the door like that was when we’d been attacked earlier today.
And they’d done it without me having to click the DNA locks open first.
Could someone have copied my DNA?
Could someone have taken a cup, a glass, or even just a loose hair from somewhere like the Chez Stadia?
Could that someone be a very angry waitress?
Perhaps that waitress was far more furious with me than I’d realised.
*
Chapter 4
When I woke up, I was surprised how well I’d slept.
Before I’d drifted off to sleep, I’d dismissed the stealing of my DNA as the nonsense it undoubtedly was.
The locks, even on a car, worked by recognising a number of strands of DNA, not just the small sample that could be taken from a hair or a smear on a glass.
Besides, we were constantly being reassured that every restaurant, shop and leisure centre employing the Perma-Leisured had checks in place to ensure our DNA couldn’t be recovered by any means.
In Chez Stadia, only Animadroids were allowed to finally clear the tables, while every movement of the Perma-Leisured staff were closely followed by cameras.
So, however our car had been broken into, it had nothing to do with a waitress somehow spiriting away my DNA.
Maria had set the breakfast out across the long table by the window.
Dorian was already up, sitting on the sofa and finishing off the last of his coffee as he read Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
No, not Dorian – Dorian A.
Dorian had once told me he had already read that book.
He wouldn’t bother reading it again.
There were three placings for breakfast at the table.
At two of them, there were empty, used plates.
Droids could be programmed to eat food, but it was rare. It was far easier to keep them nourished with intravenous drips that they inserted every day for little more than a few minutes.
Dorian A started as he heard me enter the room.
He leapt to his feet, strangely abashed.
Then again, he was hardly used to being in the presence of a woman, was he?
‘Oh, er, sorry, I’m, er…’
‘You’re Dorian A. I know. We met, remember?’
He was wearing the badge Maria had mentioned.
The badge spelt his name DoriaN A, the D, N and A all capitalised and more pronounced than the other letters.
DNA – of course.
‘No, no; sorry, that isn’t what I meant,’ he said. ‘I meant, I’m sorry I’m here.’
‘Why should you be sorry? Dorian created you; he’s the one at fault.’
‘Er, no, no! I don’t mean I’m sorry I’m here, sorry that I exist – I mean I’m sorry that I’m here in this room.’
‘Why are you in this room?’
‘Dorian said to make myself at home while you were staying on your side of the apartment. He wants me to try and get a feel for what it’s like being the real Dorian. Please, take a seat.’
I laughed as he hurried towards the table and pulled out a chair for me.
‘Well if want to be more like the real Dorian, you can forget being so polite so early in the morning! And you should have asked Maria to remove the used plates.’
‘Oh, er, sorry.’
‘And don’t ever say sorry. Dorian very rarely says sorry, and then only to me when he wants me to forgive him.’
‘Ah, yes, the perfect match.’
‘The perfect match, yes – what has he told you about it?’
‘That both your DNA and computer profiling agree on your compatibility; you should have the most perfect of children.’
‘And be blissfully happy too – we mustn’t forget that part, must we?’
‘I was under the impression that the perfection of the children was the prime consideration.’
‘Well, your bluntness is pretty close to the real Dorian already, I’ll give you that!’
‘But that is the prime role for the profiling and the comparative evaluations, yes?’
‘If you mean love is a hopeful by-product, then yes – I presume Dorian has also already told you of our diminishing immunity to bacterial infections? Infections that we would have easily coped with only a few generations back?’
‘Naturally. Engendered by an over-reliance on antibiotics for your protection that now prove to be useless.’
While we talked, I had sat down at the table and begun to eat. I felt curiously relaxed in Dorian A’s presence.
In fact, yes –it was nice to have someone to talk to other than Maria or George the chef, both of whom were capable of only the most limited conversation.
‘So, where is Dorian? I had sort of hoped he might have shown up by now.’
‘He was here earlier.’
He indicated the plate containing little more than the bones of the kippers Dorian had chosen for his breakfast.
‘He said I should offer you his apologies; as soon as he’d showered and shaved, he was heading straight down to his office.’
‘Ah, there’s the real Dorian, you see? Can’t let any possible friction between us get in the way of his work!’
I looked up from the plate of salmon and scrambled eggs I’d been delicately nibbling at.
‘Is this the role he intends for you, do you think? As his apologist?’
He laughed.
I’d never seen a Droid laugh before.
‘No, I’m almost sure that isn’t my intended role.’
His eyes sparkled with genuine amusement; Dorian’s eyes.
It was so odd, seeing those eyes looking at me, but knowing they’re not really Dorian’s eyes.
‘So,’ I said, a little unnerved by being observed by familiar eyes in an unfamiliar body, ‘what is your intended role, do you think?’
Unfamiliar body? Was that the right expression? But what sort of body did lie beneath those loose fitting clothes?
‘From what I’ve learned from Dorian,’ he said in answer to my question, ‘I believe it revolves around the lack of immunity we mentioned.’
‘Hah! Two brains working on it are better than one you mean? Or are you fated to be nothing more than some kind of human guinea pig?’
Human? Was that the right word?
He chuckled again.
‘From what little I’ve managed to find out about Dorian, I still think I’d be
right in assuming he wouldn’t exactly be eager to create someone who could rival his intelligence, right?’
‘Right.’ I laughed with him. ‘Though that’s a pretty wise assumption to make, I might add.’
Was his reply reassuring or worrying?
Morally, it would have been cruel beyond belief for Dorian to grant his twin with even average intelligence. Yet Dorian A’s answer revealed a perceptiveness and sense of humour I wasn’t expecting.
Yes, undoubtedly, there was a difference between Dorian and his creation. While Dorian had characteristically laughed at my discomfort at being fooled yesterday, his twin had been embarrassed, sympathising with my humiliation.
Empathy.
Wasn’t that the very worst emotion you could grant a human trapped in the body of a Droid?
‘Praise indeed.’ His eyes shone with a kindness I had never seen in Dorian’s eyes.
I intensively reached out, giving his arm the lightest of concerned touches.
‘He can’t use you as a guinea pig; that wouldn’t be right!’
He rewarded my concern with a gentle, dismissive chuckle.
‘It depends on what you mean by guinea pig, I suppose.’
Beneath his shirt, I could feel the hardness, the suppleness, the contours and slivering movement, of human muscle.
I was sure of it.
Or was I imagining it?
And if I wasn’t imagining it, just how far did his human appearance extend?
‘I think Dorian’s intention is to somehow use me to develop more biologically based treatments to replace the now redundant antibiotics,’ he continued.
‘If I’ve got the history correct, it took generations of work to successfully develop a number of highly-efficient antibiotics, only for a combination of misuse and abuse – such as stopping treatments too soon, allowing resistant strains of bacteria to evolve – to render them useless within a matter of years.’
I nodded.
I struggled to hold back the tears.
When we had first been placed together as a couple, Dorian had promised me that his wedding present to me would be some means of preventing what had happened to my parents ever happening to anyone else.
If he hadn’t arrived at an alternative to our now useless antibiotics, he had assured me, he would at least have developed some process setting him on track to make the right discoveries.
Was Dorian A that promised ‘process’?
It seemed so.
He hesitated, like he wasn’t sure how to act.
His arm waivered, as if he felt he should reach out to console me, but was held back by a natural fear that I would be disgusted by the touch of a Droid.
‘I’m…I’m sorry,’ he blurted out. ‘I shouldn’t have spoken so matter-of-factly when your parents–’
‘My parents?’ I snapped. ‘What do you know about my parents?’
He was taken aback by my anger.
So was I.
I couldn’t understand why it upset me so much that Dorian A knew of my parents, or that Dorian must have told him what had happened.
‘Dorian didn’t have the right to tell you!’
*
It was hardly a secret, of course.
I was so famous that everyone knew what had happened.
I had been there when it had happened.
A child who couldn’t even begin to understand what was going on when, just as yesterday, our car was surrounded by a rioting mob.
A man had broken in, his face warped with fury and determination.
He had grabbed me, trying to pull me from the car. But my mum and dad had fought back.
Even when the police had finally dragged him out of the car, and he had run off into the crowd, I had still been terrified.
‘Don’t worry, don’t worry Angeic! The nasty, nasty man has gone.’
My mum and dad had tried to reassure me that everything was all night now
But everything wasn’t all right, was it?
Mum and dad had only received the most minor scratches trying to protect me.
But it was enough to kill them both once the wounds became infected.
A man had been found, killed as he tried to escape the police.
Good; he deserved it.
*
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Just about everyone has lost someone through an infected scratch or wound. I guess I’m just feeling a bit more raw than most people at the moment because of yesterday; it was too close to what had happened to my mum and dad for me not to keep on bringing it back and going over it in my mind once again.’
‘I understand,’ he said, nodding.
But did he?
How could he?
How could a Droid, who didn’t have the full range of human emotions, who didn’t have a family – let alone a family now lost to him – possibly understand?
For the first time, I noticed the scratch on his cheek.
It was the one that I’d made last night, when I’d attempted to pull off what I’d assumed must be a latex mask.
‘You’re…you’re bleeding.’
As I would with Dorian, when he’d cut himself shaving (he was always cutting himself shaving; his shavers were stored in their own Heat-Treat), I tenderly touched the cut.
The blood seemed fresh, as if I’d scratched him only a moment ago.
Without thinking, I licked the blood from my fingers.
When I realised what I had done, I gagged.
I looked around for something to spit into, something to swill my mouth with.
I spat into a coffee cup.
I swilled my mouth out with orange juice and spat it out again.
Dorian A look horrified.
‘Sorry,’ I said, wiping away the last of the dribble with an undignified swipe of a napkin. ‘You can just never be sure what’s in a Droid’s blood.’
‘Well, if my whole purpose is to help Dorian develop immunity against infection, I can only presume my blood must be very much like yours – and, probably, is exactly like Dorian’s!’
‘Ah, yes, yes; of course.’
I felt like an idiot.
He’d made an informed assumption that I should have made myself if I hadn’t been so prejudiced against him being a Droid.
Having run his own fingers across the cut, he was now observing the blood on the tips with obvious fascination.
‘I must have scratched you pretty badly for it still to be bleeding! I’m sorry, ever so sorry Dorian – Dorian A!’
I had to instantly correct myself. Yet it felt so strange placing an ‘A’ at the end of his name.
It could be Dorian I was speaking to.
A calmer, kinder Dorian.
‘Oh, don’t worry; you didn’t scratch me,’ he insisted with a smile. ‘Dorian checked. If you had, he would probably have put me under observation as part of his experiment.’
I chuckled.
‘Then, just like Dorian, you must be extremely careless at shaving!’
I wiped the cut with the napkin. Now that I took a closer look it, I could see that it definitely had the sharp lines of a razor cut.
‘Shaving? Thankfully, I don’t need to shave. Dorian hates shaving, so he made sure I wouldn’t have to suffer it. I can’t grow a beard, see?’
He ran a hand over his smooth, well-defined jawline.
‘Well, that’s thoughtful of him. But, making you superior to him; that’s not like Dorian at all!’
I dabbed at the cut, glad to see that the flow of blood was easing.
‘But cuts don’t just appear out of nowhere; can’t you remember how you might have got it? You must have knocked it or something.’
He shook his head.
‘It wasn’t there, I’m sure, before breakfast.’
‘Well, th
at’s ridiculous,’ I snorted, finally bringing the napkin away as the cut from the flow dried up. ‘You haven’t hurt yourself while you’ve been with me! You must have knocked yourself earlier and just forgotten it.’
He smiled.
I smiled back, hiding my unease.
As I’d said, cuts don’t just appear out of nowhere like that.
Unless, of course, there’s some terrible defect in a Droid’s makeup.
*
Chapter 5
As I’d expected, I found Dorian on one of the laboratory floors.
‘Dorian, I think you need to take an urgent look at your twin; a cut on his face opened up out of nowhere, while I was with him this morning.’
‘A cut?’
For a brief moment he seemed horrified, only for his eyes to almost immediately narrow in curiosity.
‘How bad? And when exactly.’
‘Not too bad; like a shaving cut. And it was just about half an hour ago.’
Dorian touched his cheek in the exact spot where Dorian A’s cut had appeared.
‘Where exactly on his face?’
‘Strangely enough, exactly where you just touched your own cheek – is there something I should know Dorian.’
He chuckled.
‘No, no; course not, Angeic.’ He took my hands in his. ‘When you said like a shaving cut, well, I know where I’ve had plenty of cuts, right?’
‘But he doesn’t shave; he said you made sure he wouldn’t have to.’
He shrugged.
‘I’ll take a look at him to make sure he’s okay – but, honestly Angeic, I can’t believe this change in you!’
It was a light-hearted comment, yet I sensed a barb hidden in there.
‘Change?’
‘Yeah, change; yesterday, when I introduced you, you were appalled – now it seems to me like you’re caring perhaps a little too much for him, considering he’s a Droid.’
‘I was appalled because it was a dirty trick to play on me Dorian! And I’m still far from convinced it’s right to make a Droid from a human; even if he was raised from nothing more than a DNA strand. And yes, that’s even though he’s explained how you’re intending to use him to work out some way of protecting us from infections.’
‘Hah, you have been talking, haven’t you?’ He grinned hugely. ‘Looking at it another way, Angeic, isn’t that what you said you were missing around the apartment when I was out? Someone to talk to?’
‘You know I didn’t mean it this way!’
‘Hah, but what other way is there, Angeic? Do you really want someone from outside walking around our apartment on a daily basis? You more than anyone should know that even with the gloves, the vetting and the heat treatments, they can still bring in any of the infections riddling the unprotected zones. Besides, as I’ve said so many times now, how would it look? – the world’s most successful creator of Droids refusing to use his own products in his own home?’