by KT McColl
The plywood covering the front door bore a faded plastic sign that said Private Property. Keep Out. Though or else might have been implied long ago, I didn't feel any or else now. In this context, the sign looked sad and forlorn, demanding attention but finding none.
I looked up and down the street. I was completely alone and had no sense that unseen eyes were observing me.
I wheeled the bike into the back yard and leaned it against a rusting swing set. Compared to my shack in Lowville, the house was huge and it was hard for me to imagine that a single family could ever need so much space.
As I walked around the building, I looked for signs of forced entry. There were none, and it was obvious from the undisturbed grasses and the leaves and debris piled up against the doors and basement windows that no one had been here for a long while.
It seemed that the sign had worked its magic after all.
Retrieving a screwdriver from my pack, I set to work on the plywood that covered the back door. I might have used the pry bar, but I wanted to be careful and not damage too much of what was still essentially private property. I guess I still harbored hopes that one day the descendants of the family that had decamped so many decades ago would come back and see where it had all started. Maybe even raise a family here. Mow the lawn and have barbecues and resurrect the Optimist Club.
I set the plywood aside and was confronted by a door with multiple small panes of glass. The door was locked, of course. Having little other option, I broke the glass closest to the handle and reached in to unlock it.
The door opened on creaky hinges. I slowly entered a mudroom and then the kitchen. Whoever owned the house had taken pains to clean up before leaving, but time had done its work. Dust lay everywhere, and there were signs that some vermin had preceded me as scavengers. Dusty cobwebs darkened corners. But what struck me most was the musty smell. If it were possible, I would have opened the windows.
Setting my pack on the table, I looked around the kitchen. Against my better judgment, I peeked in the fridge and saw some gray, dusty things that might once have been vegetables. There were some bottles of beer that tempted me for a minute until I remembered just how much time had passed.
The cabinet next to the fridge held some cans. Stew and soup, fish, vegetables. I smiled to myself. Abigail would be pleased. I grabbed a can of peaches, wiped the top on my jeans, and opened it with my knife. I sipped the juice from the can and ventured from the kitchen to the dining room. All of the valuables had been taken but the china cabinet remained, empty.
Down a short hallway was a study with heavy, dark furniture. A man's room, I thought. I sat at the desk and slurped down the remaining peach slices. There was no computer, but some cables told me that one must have been here at some point. I opened the drawers and found some pens, pencils and paper, which I set on the desktop to pack later. A humidor on the desk held some cigars, Montecristos and Romeo y Julietas. They smelled like nothing after all this time but still I took one, bit off the end, and got dry tobacco flakes all over my tongue. So much for the sweet taste that had been there a second ago. Still, I lit it. It tasted like shit, but it felt good to be making clouds. I sat there at the desk, puffing away, tapping ashes into the empty peach can and imagined what it would have been like to be the lord of the manor, blissful in the ignorance of how fleeting this life might be.
Coming back to myself, I saw that the cigar had gone out. I didn't relight it.
I climbed the stairs to where the bedrooms were and wandered into a child's room. Cartoon characters danced along a wall and colorful letters over a rainbow spelled out the name Hanna. A shelf above the small bed held a pair of stuffed toys that looked bewildered and forlorn at having been left behind. I didn't bother looking into the dresser or the closet.
Just down the hall was the master bedroom. The wallpaper here was peeling and the drywall behind it showed signs of water damage. The slow process of nature was reclaiming everything. I ventured into the ensuite bathroom and avoided looking in the mirror. Under the sink, I found some toothbrushes still in their packages, which I slid into my pocket. Back in the bedroom, I looked in the closet and found some serviceable clothes; jeans that would fit me, a pale yellow dress with flowers that was perhaps a little too large for Abigail but still looked pretty.
There was a skylight above the bed and I thought of how nice it must have been to stretch out under the covers, all cozy and snuggled up with someone to love, and look up at the distant stars.
Returning to the kitchen, I set my small treasures on the kitchen table.
I peeked outside through the back door and saw that I still had an hour or two before I had to head back.
A door in the kitchen opened onto a set of stairs that led to the basement. Basements could be hit or miss. Sometimes they were empty, but sometimes they revealed treasures. I debated doing a more thorough search of the main floor or going down. In the end I fetched the flashlight from my pack and descended into the darkness.
At the bottom, I played my light around. Save for a furnace, water heater, and some boxes, the basement was largely empty. Unseen mice scurried away from the disturbance that I represented. Towards what I guessed to be the front of the house was a door. It was bolted from the outside but wasn't locked. I slid back the bolt and opened the door, revealing a root cellar. Shelves ran up to the floor joists above, filled with orderly stacks of cans, bags of rice, and packages of pasta.
Eureka, I thought to myself. I'd landed in a survivalist's wet dream.
The stuff here would keep me, Abigail, and Rabbit going for a good long while. I mumbled a word of thanks to the family while I poked through the windfall.
While checking another row of shelves, a large bundle of blankets in a dark corner caught my eye.
With the toe of my boot, I poked at it. Stupid, I know, but something about it made me cautious. My boot hit something substantial wrapped up within.
I squatted next to it, peeled back a corner, and was greeted by the sight of a lock of hair.
My breath caught.
"Shit," I muttered.
I stared at it for a long while. Part of me was tempted to leave and not look any closer, but I knew that I'd be coming back here several times to empty the shelves. I couldn't have a body waiting for me each time. And so I pulled the blanket back while I played the flashlight over the body as it was revealed. I braced myself for the sight of a grinning skull.
What I saw instead was beauty.
Chapter 4
It was a woman. Despite the dirt that covered her face, I could see an unlined beauty that was unfathomable in my world. My heart stilled but my hand shook, making the flashlight beam jitter in the darkness. I didn't understand. Judging by the dust and grime that covered her, she'd been here for years, decades maybe. I'd seen corpses before and this didn't look like one. I should have been facing decay, maybe desiccation, but there was no evidence of either.
With my free hand, I touched her face. I couldn't help myself. It was cool, soft, and smooth. I eased my fingers down her cheek, across her jaw, and down to her throat. I felt for a pulse and of course found none.
Straightening, I took a step back. The woman appeared to be asleep. There was no sign of trauma that I could see, but then, in the feeble beam of my flashlight, I couldn't see much.
I stood there, debating what to do for several minutes. In the end, it was disgust at my dithering that prodded me into action. Feeling unnerved but not knowing what else to do, I gathered her in my arms, grateful at how light she was, and ascended the stairs.
Putting her down on the kitchen floor seemed wrong somehow, undignified even for a corpse, so I carried her up to the master bedroom and placed her carefully on the bed. At least here she would be out of the way if I ever came back. In the brightness from the skylight, I saw the extent of the filth that covered her. Her black hair was matted and streaked with webs. Grime and dust coated her face as though she'd been mining coal.
It seemed unfair th
at she should be so dirty. I'd seen little enough beauty of late that dirt seemed like an insult, even to the dead.
I moistened a rag with water from my canteen and wiped her face, staring as its flawlessness revealed itself to me. A shame, I thought to myself. A terrible shame. She was breathtaking, or had been. Arched eyebrows over wide-spaced eyes, long lashes, a petite nose, and full lips. She had a square jaw with a slight dimple at her chin and finely sculpted cheekbones.
She was the prettiest corpse I'd ever seen.
Sighing, I felt for a pulse again, knowing there would be nothing.
It didn't make sense. The last beams of evening light that seeped in from the skylight revealed no reason why she should be dead. She might have been asleep save for the fact that there was no breath in her.
I sat on a chair in the corner of the room and observed her. Had she been a runaway from the city? It happened sometimes, though rarely. If so, she hadn't gotten very far. Sometimes people got it into their heads that traditional was the way to go and tried to make it to one of the coastal cities where, it was said, men and women lived as they had before the Ultimate Sin. I didn't know if it was true about the other cities and wasn't curious enough to risk what little I had to find out. The devil you know and all that... As far as I knew, runaway women were invariably brought back, re-educated, and exiled to Lowville or the surrounding villages. Men tended to disappear.
No, she wasn't a runaway. There had been nothing to suggest that the place had been broken into. If not that, then she'd been left behind, sealed up in the house. The thought gave me a chill. Had she been dead already or had she been left here to die? There was no way of knowing. Either way, it didn't explain her condition. Even if she'd done herself in with pills or had allowed herself to starve despite all of the food around her, then surely her body would have decayed in the time she'd been here.
Standing up again, I freed her from the rough blanket and saw with some amazement that she wore a short, filmy dress. I didn't know what the fabric was called, just that I'd never seen the like before. Save for the fact that her feet were bare, she might have been readying herself for a night out. It was bizarre.
I was tempted to search her for injury. That would have meant touching her in places I wasn't prepared to go. In the end, I didn't. What did it matter how she came to be dead? Knowing how wouldn't make her any less so.
I reconsidered my decision to leave her here in the bedroom. She would have to be buried, I thought. It was the right thing to do. Maybe I could fashion a cross or something. The back yard was as good a place as any and the garage probably had a shovel I could use. Digging a grave wasn't the way I wanted to spend the rest of my time but I couldn't just leave her. It wasn't some great altruistic impulse on my part; I just didn't want the distraction of an unnervingly attractive corpse in the house when I returned.
A wave of sadness overcame me at that moment. So little beauty in the world, I thought, and I had to bury it. With the backs of my fingers, I traced the line from her temple to her chin.
I wished Rabbit were here with me, if only for his uncanny ability to render things on paper. I didn't trust my memory however much I knew she would remain there. Memory was such a fickle thing.
Her eyes opened.
With an unmanly shriek that I would remember however fickle my memory, I crashed onto my ass and crab-walked as far from the bed as I could, which regrettably was only a couple of feet away.
I was shaking and my heart thundered. Get a grip, I told myself.
A minute passed. Inside, there was no sound. Outside, a bird chirped.
More minutes passed. I waited. There was no motion from the body on the bed. Maybe I'd imagined it. Maybe the peaches I'd eaten earlier had gone bad and I was hallucinating. At length I got up again. I looked at her. Hazel eyes moved and took in her surroundings -- the skylight, the rotting walls and peeling wallpaper, the dirty squares that outlined where pictures had once hung.
Finally, her eyes shifted to me. "Hello," she said.
I swallowed down my panic and took a deep breath. "Hello."
Her expression was blank. Given how I didn't know how reanimated corpses were supposed to look, I couldn't really have expected different.
I willed myself to be calm even though my heart was pounding.
She didn't appear to be interested in conversation so I prompted her. "I'm Jude," I said. "What's your name?"
"Jessie."
"Jessie," I repeated.
The name evoked a niggle of recollection, a niggle that was accompanied by an unmistakable sinking feeling although I didn't know why it should be so. My knees felt weak.
The puzzle pieces shifted and moved. Jessie. An unusual name. Almost a forbidden name, certainly one that had fallen out of fashion. Like Adolph or Idi. I felt some alarm as the pieces clicked into place. I held my breath, not quite wanting to see the full picture but knowing now that it was inevitable, that it made sense.
Oh shit, I thought. A Jessie. A prototype maybe.
I sat down heavily on a chair. I watched her watching me. I held my head in my hands, ran my fingers through my hair, and pulled a little until I felt pain. I felt dizzy. Damn, I thought. No, that wasn't enough. Fuck, I whispered. Better.
Of all the derelict houses in all the abandoned towns in all of this shitty world, a Jessie had to land in mine.
"Is something wrong?" she asked. In spite of everything, I liked her voice. Not too high, not too low. A Goldilocks voice. Just right. She had no accent that I could discern and the spoken words were quiet and calming. Smooth. But then, that's how her voice had been designed.
"Yeah. Something's wrong."
I felt a headache coming on and felt unbalanced in that unnerving space between curiosity and repulsion. A Jessie. I could hardly believe it.
She looked at me and I stared at her. Slowly, my pulse returned to normal. Strange how adaptable people could be. I took another one of those deep, cleansing breaths that Abigail said would do me good at moments like these.
It did.
"Give me a minute," I said.
As far as I could recollect, the Jessie model had never quite made it into production, the Enlightenment having brought that particular industry to a screeching halt. She'd been advertized and had been rolled out to some early adopters to generate buzz. She had, if I remembered correctly, created quite a bit of it. A buzz that had grown into a roar. Jessie, or Jezebel as the Sorority would later name her, was the last straw.
It came back to me. Jessie/Jezebel. Too perfect, too real, too too many things. Indistinguishable in any way that mattered from the real thing, but all too distinguishable in her ability to fulfill whatever desire her owners might have had. She was the pinnacle, the acme. The perfect marriage of form and function, of hardware and software. She was what every filthy rich toy collector dreamed about, what every living woman feared. She was a model that did everything better while not appearing to be a model at all, except perhaps a model of perfection.
She was the last straw and the final threat.
I'd been staring at my boots. I looked up at her again and shook my head. "You look so real."
Jessie frowned like I'd said something stupid. "So do you," she said.
Okay, I had said something stupid.
"What happened?" she asked.
"Uh..." Where to start? "How long have you been here?"
"I don't know. I can't connect right now and my internal clock doesn't make sense. What year is it?"
I told her and she frowned again.
Looking at her, I could see how my father could have been seduced. He never had the Jessie model, but had barely managed a Haley, used, breaking the bank and my mother's heart in the process. Jessie and the models that came before her were made primarily for sex. Of course, they were made for other things too -- companionship, housekeeping, playing chess -- but sex was the driver. The early models were good but Jessie promised to be the best. Based on her appearance, I had to concur. Unti
l she'd mentioned her name, there was no way I'd have known that she was a fembot.
"Tell me what happened." There was a frantic edge to her voice. I marveled at the programming.
Seeing her now, I understood how it could have happened and how we got from there to here. We did this to ourselves. I got it. I understood.
Tell me what happened? The seed of a headache sprouted and I could feel its tendrils growing, wrapping themselves around my addled brain. I wondered whether the medicine cabinet held some Aspirins or something.
I hadn't thought much about the chain of events, not recently at least, and it was hard for me assemble the story in a way that made sense. It had nothing to do with me, but still I was guilty by association. I shared the chromosome of those who had made such a hash of it. Guilt by gender. I remembered only bits and pieces about it as I was only five or six when it happened. As a young adult, I'd been curious about how I'd ended up where I was and had pieced together some of it, the unofficial story. Then I realized how little knowing mattered and so I stopped thinking about it.
Until now.
I didn't answer Jessie. It wasn't just because my own recollection of the Ultimate Sin was sketchy. It was because of the crushing weight of shame that overwhelmed me that moment. I was sitting here with a Jessie, after all.
There were things I remembered, if dimly. I remembered how my father had retreated to the uncomplicated embrace of a fembot, never understanding what complications that embrace would unleash. Of course, it wasn't just my father but countless millions of men like him. They were beguiled; I could see that now. Could understand how it would happen. Fembots could be programmed to be challenging but would acquiesce in the end. They could play hard-to-get but could always be gotten. They could tease and seduce. They were willing and able and would take just about anything with a subtle smile of encouragement. They never got old, never had cramps, flatulence, bad breath, stretch marks, or headaches. They would leave you alone when you needed solitude or could be networked with others of their kind if you were into that kind of thing.