Zombie Lolita
A Collection of Short Stories
By Harmon Cooper
Copyright © 2015 by Harmon Cooper
Copyright © 2015 Boycott Books
Cover by White Comma
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All rights reserved. All rights preserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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My Machine Doll
[1]The future – which I and others currently reside in will take decades to even begin to fathom – is more frightening than you think. So don’t judge me for choosing a machine doll over a homo sapien female, and don’t call Nano a ‘love doll’ either like my friend, Hayato. She’s much more than that. If it wasn’t for Nano, I’d likely be in one of those overcrowded cemeteries you see all over Japan.
I’ll say it loud and clear just in case you need clarification: my girlfriend is a machine doll. Her hair is thick and blue, her eyes like almonds on steroids, her nose a tiny button that is almost indecipherable, her breasts perfect coconuts, her legs are long like straws. During the day she wears a schoolgirl outfit. At night she usually wears black leggings and a camisole. She’s perfect in almost every sense of the word, as long as you ignore her inclination towards extreme violence.
Whether I care to admit it or not, I owe my precious life to Nano. About six months ago we found ourselves walking in Yoyogi Park, enjoying the cool afternoon. Suddenly, a crazed youth on a miniature bike came ripping like a fart around a sharp corner. He had that look in his eye, the look of a man destined for a criminal future, and as he neared us, Nano powered herself on and jumped in front of me! The bicycled menace ricocheted off Nano, nearly ripping her arm from the socket. She saved me!
‘Don’t worry,’ Nano said, holding her dangling arm. I dove for the boy (the treacherous bottom-feeder of an increasingly dimwitted society), but I missed, and slid headfirst into the leg of a park bench. The landing knocked me unconscious and Nano woke me an hour later.
Somehow, which has since led me to believe that there is something robotically divine in our meager lives, Nano had repaired herself. For dinner that night, I ordered pizza (which she couldn’t actually eat). I shared a bottle of champagne with her (which she couldn’t actually drink). And we ate cookies shaped like Mt. Fuji for dessert (you get the picture). Later, we fell asleep watching Hentai, as we usually do. Life was good enough.
I should stop right there. I probably shouldn’t tell you anymore than you need to know, but you’re still here and I’m still fired up on caffeine. (I’ve had six cans of Boss coffee and half a Red Bull.)
I guess the only problem with our relationship is this: It is growing more and more difficult to cover the bruises Nano leaves after one of her aforementioned assaults. Now I wouldn’t exactly call her abusive (the beatings only happen when I’ve done something wrong) but it is becoming more and more difficult to explain my bruises to my colleagues. Even someone suffering from a severe case of Stockholm’s Syndrome has a breaking point.
And truth be told, I definitely do things that warrant some of Nano’s less than gentle disciplinary techniques. Case in point: last summer, I was briefly dating another machine doll named Yaya, whom I’d been introduced to by someone from Tokyo’s ever-growing underground machine doll movement. It was a brief tryst, fueled by curious passion and lukewarm Suntory whiskey, but it was sinful and vile nonetheless. Yaya was a freak.
We would meet at the Nippori Station and head straight to this love hotel I knew about near Ueno (it’s shaped like a castle!). Actually, ‘meet’ isn’t really the right word. Usually, she’d just power herself down and wait in a subway locker for me to come get her (reading this back, I guess ‘meet’ is the right word, but it needed some clarification).
In any event, Yaya was the exact opposite of my Nano. Yaya was smaller, maybe five kilos lighter, obsessed with all things kawaii, soft-spoken and flirty. She was a voracious manga reader, and was fond of high-end clothing from Harajuku. While she liked Harajuku styles, she had an affinity for Shimokitazawa second hand stores and dressed accordingly. Think kawaii cute with a vintage hat and you have Yaya nailed. God I miss her.
Long story short: Nano found out.
I came home one day totally forgetting that I had stashed Yaya’s panties in my back pocket (for smelling later—don’t judge me). Well, a day or so later, they fell out of my clothes basket in an almost cinematic way. After chasing me around the apartment holding a wooden rice spoon, Nano demanded I take her to Nippori Station. She powered down, and afraid for my life, I did as I was instructed. I retrieved Yaya from her locker and took both the machine dolls to my favorite love hotel, the one shaped like a castle.
As you can imagine, the man at the front desk smiled when he saw me come in with two powered down machine dolls. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t what it looked like, I wanted to cry for help, but I knew that would only complicate things. Needless to say: what happened in my favorite room at the Castle Love Hotel was far from a threesome. Yaya is eternally powered down now, and for all I know, the authorities are still looking for her mechanical corpse (I secretly reported it, but the police haven’t gotten back to me yet).
But you know what, I’ll stop there. I don’t want you to get the impression that our relationship is flawed or anything. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. Nano and I do all the stuff normal couples do: complete each other’s sentences, travel together, watch the same dramas, cringe at the same J-Pop songs, read the same manga. We cook for each other, and occasionally try and spice up our love life by making a quick trip to the seven story sex shop in Akihabara. I guess what I’m trying to say is this: without my machine doll, I’d be lost.
I just wish people would treat us better. Sure, Nano looks a little strange in her powered down mode, but that doesn’t mean people should move away from me on the subway or complain to restaurant managers about us. It doesn’t mean people should sneer at us, or shake their head as I walk by with Nano’s lifeless body tucked under my arm.
My friend, Hayato, recently asked me if I ever planned to upgrade Nano. Since she can’t technically age, I likely won’t need a new model for years to come, but this doesn’t mean I won’t add an additional machine doll to our small family. After all, three is better than two, and even though I know that this will never happen, it’s still something to think about.
With two machine dolls, things could get really interesting. To clarify: I’m not just talking about sex, I’m also talking about life efficiency. For example, I could go grocery shopping while Nano #1 cleans and Nano #2 manages the bills. If Nano #1 is sick, she could stay home while Nano #2 and I go to g
et some curry. If Nano #2 is in a bad mood, Nano #1 and I could go see a movie or maybe take the train to Odaiba to do some shopping. I could head off to Lawson’s to buy Studio Ghibli tickets, while Nano #2 prepares our overnight bag and Nano #1 prepares a healthy afternoon snack. Talk about efficiency!
Oh, and please don’t tell Nano (yes, Nano #1, my current machine doll girlfriend) what I’ve just said. Consider it a modest musing, a playful example of how things could be. She wouldn’t approve of me acquiring another machine doll, I know this for a fact. If I were to live out this two girlfriend scenario, I would likely have to get rid of Nano #1, but that’s something I simply cannot do. As I said earlier, she’s almost perfect, and we’ve been star-crossed ever since I stumbled upon her at that shop in Akihabara.
Our first encounter.
I can see it now, the Tokyo drizzle, the dominatrix wind, the people moving about in determined busy-body throngs. I had just left my umbrella on the Yamanote Line heading towards Tokyo Station. Afraid to get wet (no one wants ammonia), I slipped into a small electronics boutique run by an old Japanese man with a candy cane spine. His hair was a bowl of soba noodles, his fingers long and brittle. He greeted me with a grunt and a slight bow.
Trying to avoid the rain, but also wanting to look like I might be in the mood to patronize, I began slowly walking up and down the aisles. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman’s hand hidden behind a large shelf filled with bizarre gears and pencil-thin nuts and screws.
I ignored the hand, or at least tried to ignore it, but the gooseflesh prickling on my neck told me something was terribly wrong. I glanced around the shop as nonchalantly as I could, noticing another human hand hanging like a forgotten grape from one of the top shelves. I slowly turned away from the aisle, afraid that the ancient shop owner might be some sort of Tokyo serial killer or possibly, a body snatcher!
‘Can I help you?’ the shopkeeper asked, now standing directly behind me. If I had had spider senses, they would have tingled at this point. Instead, I just stood there, frozen with my mouth agape.
‘I see you’ve found her,’ the shopkeeper wheezed. ‘I’m surprised a guy like you has never seen one before. Nano, go ahead and come on out.’
Love at first sight.
A stupid string of four words, yet this was exactly how I felt at that moment. There she was, my future, my destiny, my machine doll, and all I could manage to say was, ‘How much?’
The shopkeeper scoffed at this question and turn back towards his cluttered front register. He paused, at the end of the aisle and said, ‘You can have her.’
‘For f-f-free?’
‘No, but I’ll sell her to you cheap, real cheap. Cheaper than a trip to a pink salon.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll see.’
As it turns out, Nano was a machine doll prototype. Her biorobotic machinists – being somewhat dense, introverted geniuses – botched the emotional response governor (ERG) inside Nano, which has made her prone to violent streaks. So, when I do something wrong, and pots or fists come flying, it’s all because of her engineering. She doesn’t actually want to kill me!
Now don’t go telling Nano this or anything, but I’ve been discussing ERG correctional surgery with one of these underground machine doll engineers that the shopkeeper knows, and I’ve decided to go through with it. The procedure won’t be cheap. I may have to downgrade my apartment from 15.179 m² to 11.434 m². I’ll also need to eat more packaged ramen, and cut out expensive fruits and vegetables like avocados and cantaloupe. My unlimited internet usage will have to be canceled, and I’ll need to start walking more to cut down on train rides.
Even so, the surgery is basically a win-win situation. Worst case scenario: Nano gets rebooted and we have to run a series of software updates and auto-learning apps to get her up to speed – a small price to pay not to be assaulted on a regular basis.
And it’s about time something good comes along – I’m sick of all the attacks! Not two days ago, I came home late from a five-hour reading binge at the book store (I know I should buy the books, but as I’ve said, I’m trying to save for Nano’s surgery.). Anyways, I let myself into our apartment and the lights were off. Assuming Nano was relaxing, I moved around as quietly as I could in the dark. Seconds later, an arm wrapped around the slab of flesh that separates my chest from my shoulder blade. I’d been put in the sleeper hold.
I kicked my legs out in front of me, trying to pull the familiar weight off my back. The grip tightened. My eyelids anviled and wispy stars blinked like time-lapsed photos in my head.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Nano said, suddenly dropping me. ‘Sorry.’
‘You almost killed me,’ I hissed, my hand massaging my neck. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’
‘Announce yourself next time,’ she said, climbing back up to the loft.
Note: for any female readers who think I’m some sort of misogynist pig, let it be known here that I’m not advocating machine dolls solely for men. On the contrary, male or female machine dolls could be used by both genders as well as members of the LGBT community. While the incidents described above are my own, and should be taken anecdotally, the actual experiences one could have will vary from person to person.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is this: Many of the problems with traditional human relationships are fixed through homo sapien and homo machina unions. When the bugs in the programming are fixed, and desire is simply a sequence of zeroes and ones, falling out of love will be utterly impossible, at least on the homo machina side.
Now the human side will be complicated as we’ve always been a stupid and whimsical species. The fact that I’m in love with a machine doll; the fact that you’re judging me; the fact that we have our cultural differences; and the fact that we’re twice as different as we are similar only add to our distinctive inability to reconcile. Maybe machine dolls can fix all this. Maybe they can fix humanity.
Maybe through these dolls (male and female), we’ll disrupt the natural flow of death and birth until our birthrates drop significantly. We’ll buy machine doll babies who don’t shit themselves and cause vomity trouble, but remain adorable until we decide to upgrade to the toddler model, then the kindergartener model, then the pre-teen youth model, then the teenager model sans rebellion, and so on.
Eventually, they’ll replace us, these future machine dolls. They’ll eradicate us (Oedipus and Electra complexes ring true! From his grave, Freud’s skeleton masturbates!); they’ll start wars just for the hell of it; they’ll invent religions just to stir up trouble; they’ll cast aside their roots of artificiality out of sheer boredom; they’ll enslave us and then they’ll do away with us, because they can create, and inherently are, better versions of us!
!!!
Gomenasai! Sumimasen! OK, sorry for all that, especially those last three exclamation points. I’ll turn down the rant now. As I may have mentioned earlier, I’ve had six cans of Boss coffee while writing this and half a Red Bull. It’s my last splurge on energy drinks before I hunker down and save for Nano’s ERG correctional surgery.
I suppose I’ve lost you by now, but if I haven’t, know that my life isn’t as trivial as it seems in the paragraphs above. These are simply the thoughts that cross my mind every time I look into Nano’s cold mechanical eyes, as she lies on a pillow next to me staring at me in the peculiar murderous way she does.
For now, the future starts with Nano’s correctional surgery, correctional only in the sense that nothing is technically wrong with her, but she could be better. And this is the true advantage of these machine dolls – they can be quickly and easily improved upon, while their human counterparts take years to fully develop some skill or personality trait, only to die in the end. I just wish mine wasn’t so inclined towards extreme violence.
Zombie Lolita
[2] Who could have known that the Nigerians would be running a scam to collect short stories submitted to The New Yorker? And what were they planning to do with these short
stories they stripped from the hearts and minds of hapless writers worldwide anyways?
Stuart reread the acceptance letter he received so many months ago, the acceptance letter he thought would change his life for the better:
Dear Stuart Sulloway,
I wish to congratulate you on your short story, Through the Texts of Time: A Blatant Treaty on Remorse and Elongated Romance(s).
I am the son of the late Dr. Collins Keshi, and I am interim editor at The New Yorker while Deborah Treisman is visiting the Galapagos Islands. Sitting at my desk in New York—where I live, I assure you—I was overcome with heartfelt emotion after finishing your wonderful story.
Who could have known that Tomás Brickfast would lose not only his leg, but his unmentionables and his left nipple in pursuit of the thing he loved the most? And what a trick ending! That last sentence of yours – And then he woke up from his dream – no one could have seen that one coming! Mr. Sulloway, I applaud you.
Attached to this e-mail is a letter of consent regarding future publication. Please sign the letter (note: pages 1-3 of the letter are in my possession and deal with typeface so you don’t need to see them), and mail it to this address:
Kassim Keshi c/o The New Yorker
PO BOX 1121
New York, NY, 10011-4668
I am excited to publish your piece in an upcoming issue The New Yorker. Please send the letter of consent at your earliest scheduled convenience.
Sincerely yours,
Kassim Keshi
After reading the email, Stuart Sulloway did what any sane writer would do upon getting accepted in The New Yorker – he quit his day job. That same night, he gently tried to explain to his wife that while she’d been supportive during his formative years, his life had since taken a turn for the better and he would soon be seeking a divorce.
Zombie Lolita: (A Collection of Short Stories) Page 1