I nodded, and while she typed on the computer, I started to imagine that the two of us went on a trip to Corsica, for example, and I saved her from falling off a cliff, or that, lost and alone in a furious blizzard in Greenland, we had to seek refuge in an igloo together and spend the night embracing to stay warm.
Once we had finished with my personal data, she began with the important details:
“In your request for information you said that you wanted an android companion to be your partner, your lover.”
“I said a gynoid.”
She lifted her eyes toward me for a moment and smiled, relaxed.
“Yes. Sorry, it’s my heterosexual assumption, I suppose. A gynoid.”
“You do make lesbian gynoids as well, I suppose,” I added, with a laugh that was somewhere between joking and nervous.
“Emma, we will create an gynoid specially for you, according your desires and needs. Physically, it will be however you want, and no one, not even you yourself, could distinguish it from a woman of flesh and bone. Its exterior will be made of human hair and skin, created in a laboratory. It feels perfect, as you’ll verify for yourself. The eyes are artificial implants, it’s true, but you can’t tell, and very important: the tongue is also organic,” now it was she who let loose with a little laugh somewhere between embarrassed and malicious. “Inside, the gynoid will have a metal skeleton and plastic connection cables, and a computer-brain. It comes with a ten-year guarantee, which includes repair of any technical problem.”
How did I want my gynoid to be? Neither very tall nor very short, normal weight, not too beautiful either (so she didn’t call attention to herself), short brown hair, and blue-green eyes because I’d always liked that color. There was a catalog for choosing faces and I opted for one of them. Above all, since I could choose, I didn’t want her to resemble any of my exes, so she didn’t remind me of any of them. Karol, for example, was rather short, at fifty she was starting to put on weight, but it looked good on her, especially when she wore those minimalist intellectual glasses. Manuela was never beautiful, and with her rebellious brown hair cut short, she always seemed like an eternal adolescent; I sometimes see her ghost still, with a black backpack and coat, white sneakers, I see her on the subway, or in the street...
Myriam noted the data I gave her, typing furiously on her computer.
“You’d be surprised, Emma, the number of people who turn to us. The idea that only strange people, with very severe emotional or mental problems, are the ones to look for an android as their partner, is completely false. Of course, a heterosexual, whether man or woman, who wishes to have children, wouldn’t, but there are many divorced people and older people who live alone. We fabricate androids with any apparent age. In addition, our creatures are so perfect that we include a complete personal memory in their electronic brain, in addition to a basic or even extensive cultural heritage, as per the client’s request.”
Implanted memories. What a terrible wonder. So it turned out that I could choose the look, age, and nationality of my gynoid (“many people opt for a supposed foreigner so it’s easier to explain their sudden appearance in your life and why they have such little idea of social customs here,” Myriam explained) but not the memory. This would help so I didn’t know everything about her, and that unknown part would be something new to discover, the necessary surprise, just as with a human woman.
“We also advise that your gynoid have some defects, so that the relationship be more real. Someone completely submissive and totally perfect can come to be boring, don’t you think, Emma? Of course, it’s better if you chose defects that don’t bother you unduly.”
I detailed everything: age (around my own); I listed my tastes and hobbies, so that she would share them.
“And now I will tell you the most important part: this gynoid that we’ll create for you will love you, from the start and for always, while she lasts. She will be attentive to you. She won’t be able to betray you, ever, in any way. She will never abandon you for anyone or anything. And she cannot hurt you, nor let anyone else do so. That is her Law. Her free will is limited by that Law, perhaps just like when any human falls in love and loses part of their will; but in your gynoid there won’t be that ambivalence of love and hate that we true humans feel so often, precisely for having lost free will. And nonetheless, she will feel. Although you don’t believe it now, our machines have evolved so much that I assure you that they show true emotions. As for how much they think... you’ll find a creature with a brain full of files, able to create synapses even if they’re electronic ones; that brain is also so recent, it is as innocent as a newborn baby, and just like a baby, it is able to learn. That will depend on you completely, you can contribute or not to the development of its cognitive abilities. Now you just need to choose her name, and in three months (that wait is necessary) you’ll have her here.”
I returned home as excited as I was confused; I practiced some tai chi, then I sat in the living room and little by little started to doubt. What if I was creating too many expectations and then, when I picked up Deirdre, I was disappointed? Would it really be possible for her to seem like a real woman, and not an automata that recited Carson McCullers’ biography in a metallic voice, for example? I decided to call my friend Silvia, the one who had recommended I go to the Kapek Corporation.
“For now, try to forget about it, and stop dissecting it,” she told me, on the other end of the videophone, because she knew about my obsessive tendencies. “Keep doing what you’ve done until now, have fun, and if you meet a nice girl while you’re waiting, that’s great. Although given how the market is, that’s not easy, don’t I know. Out there, and at our age, people are already tucked away in their homes, or they’re stumbling around out there, strange or crazy or even normal like us (I’d like to think we’re normal), but in search of something that we don’t find because... I don’t know why, because we try to control the other, we demand too much, or we put up with too little, or because of our selfishness, our inability to commit, or to compromise, or to live together... Anyway, there are so many reasons.”
I couldn’t complain about my life at all: I had a good job, which I liked (I was the head of a literature imprint for a print and electronics publisher), a job that had allowed me to get the credit necessary to pay the Kapek Corp.; that is, I was among the privileged elite who could make such an expenditure, even if it took me three years to pay off that loan. It’s true that, recently, work had absorbed me too much, and I was beginning to turn into a workaholic. Perhaps because on returning home I found it empty? Still, loneliness didn’t frighten me, and I knew how to occupy my time: home, reading, music, the cinema; I was always invited to some event, and whenever I had vacation days, I took advantage of them to travel.
“And if you want to carry on with all that coming and going you do,” Sylvia said, “that’s no problem. My friend Leticia, who already has her gynoid and lives with her,” (Sylvia had told me about them when she recommended the Kapek Corp. to me) “disconnects her whenever she wants, or leaves her home if she goes to see her family or the few friends she has left. Luckily her partner is an gynoid, because Leticia is pretty unbearable, a flesh and blood woman couldn’t take her. Your case is different, you have trouble finding a girl because of your shyness and your insecurity. And look at it this way, you can keep your independence and freedom without having to give any explanations. And of course you avoid the problem of not liking your partner’s friends or family, or that she doesn’t like yours.”
But I only wanted to come home early, and let myself fall onto the sofa, my head on Deirdre’s lap, and to tell her about my day, and to not think, to not perceive that miniscule black hole that I sometimes found when I looked around, like a cockroach that you find in the bedroom: that black hole that threatened to swallow me some day.
“I haven’t met Leticia’s gynoid,” Silvia continued, “but I have met the one that belongs to my friend Laurie. His name is Ray. If you want, we can
meet with both of them, Laurie does take his with him when he meets with people. Not at first —at first he left it at home, I told you about Laurie, the typical gay sex-addict who hooked up with everyone he met. He wanted to have a partner and keep carrying on with that lifestyle. What happens is that he discovered that Ray could... participate in his adventures without any problems. In the first place, he’s not jealous, he ordered for him not to be jealous. And also, since he’s an android, in other words a machine, he never gets tired of sex, he can handle anything, and he does anything he’s asked to do.” Silvia cackled. “Think about it, what a StarLotto jackpot to have an android like that for someone who likes sex a lot. Ray looks completely human, I assure you. He’s very handsome, of course, tall, muscled, a stud who makes even me swoon, dark, green eyes, elegant, educated, and as much of a sybarite as Laurie, who’s educated him very well. You don’t notice at all that he’s artificial. What’s more, talking with him, he seems very educated and of course more intelligent and sensible than a high percentage of humanity.”
“That I can believe.”
“Ah, and finally, I have a neighbor who also ordered an android. She’s an older woman, a widow, and a PhD in quantum physics or something like that, retired already, but she’s sick, so she can’t go out much and meet people or she had problems precisely because of her sickness, the thing is she decided to get an android. I’ve dealt with him, and I’ll tell you the same thing as with Ray, this one also seems human. She had asked for an old-style gentleman, one of those who opens the door for you and lets you go first instead of closing it on your face or stepping on your toes in the subway. Let me describe him for you: an older gentleman as well, not handsome but pleasant looking; I don’t know why she didn’t order one who was more attractive, but of course, androids can also be ugly or normal. And you can’t believe how he takes care of her, with affection, dedication, and patience. And he also knows about quantum physics! Oh, it’s eight, I’ve got to run and see my bus girl.”
Silvia was madly in love with the driver of the bus she took at 20:16 to go to her tai chi class; she spoke with her every day, although it hadn’t gone beyond her subtle, failed attempt to ask for a date. In any event, she had a better time than when she and I went out trying to score. Since I had broken up with Karol, Silvia and I went out a few nights: the last time, we got mugged. The time before that, we went to a party that turned out had been cancelled at the last minute, but we had to stay and help put everything in order and clean up the place because they were friends of Silvia. The time before that, a young girl approached us and began to cry (she’d drunk too much) and tell us about her family and romantic troubles, which were considerable, and it felt too cruel to abandon her to her fate and her sorrows, so we spent almost the entire night consoling her, until she hooked up with a foreign student who appeared suddenly. And the time before that there was a cold snap and all the bars on the scene were empty... After that, over the past months, we usually met at Silvia’s house or my own to watch a film, chat quietly and analyze the behavior of our exes and the reasons for our failures with them.
Now it turned out that there were lots of people with android companions and I was totally unaware of it. After my conversation with Silvia, while I was preparing dinner, I called another friend, Mercedes, who likewise knew about my decision to go to the Kapek Corp.
“How did it all go?” she asked me, after ordering her two children to quiet down and study, under the thread of a severe punishment. “It’s normal that you have second thoughts now, but since they guarantee that they’ll give you your money back if the android isn’t what you wanted... Well, you’ll keep me up to date, maybe I’ll decide to order to android children in place of these monsters. I hope that everything works out well, although if I were in your place I’d feel so happy to be alone that I wouldn’t even want an android at my side. Sometimes I imagine myself in a house as pretty and comfortable as your own, sitting on the terrace in the afternoon, with all my time to myself, and I envy you. And yet, you’re not satisfied. That’s how life is.”
Yes, I sat on the terrace in the afternoon, in summer. The views from there were magnificent: a horizon of rooftops and air, and in the distance, the mountains of the Sierra Norte. I read or listened to music while night arrived, alone and often happy. It was just that at times the freedom of my time became too vast a territory; all the possibilities around me, but no desire to do any of them.
I turned my attention back to Mercedes. “In any case, this... girl, let’s call her that, will be good for you, so that you forget about Karol once and for all. At least with this one, you won’t fight so much or understand one another so poorly, and if any problems come up, well then, just do what your friend Silvia told you and disconnect her.”
“Don’t be crude,” I had to answer. “It’s not like that, I don’t want a robot, to put its batteries in or take them out, whenever it suits me. Precisely what I want is someone with whom I don’t need to fight for foolish reasons because they consider that that’s normal behavior for a couple: arguments, lack of respect and treating one another like crap.”
An analysis that Karol, my ex, no doubt wouldn’t share. We never agreed on almost anything, not even on what the problems in our relationship were. Of course, I thought she was the problem, and she thought it was me.
“You’ve done the right thing, Emma,” Mercedes concluded. “We humans are horrible and an android is better. And I’ve got to go, these two are up to their tricks again. Let’s get together. Call me.”
I was finishing my dinner when the door rang. Suddenly I remembered (I’d been so agitated all day that I’d completely forgotten) that Elisa had told me that she was going to come by without fail to pick up some books for her school’s library. Elisa worked as a volunteer at a neighborhood school in the afternoons, where she taught adult immigrants, victims of poverty, etc. She was a secular nun or something like that, which I never understood fully. She belonged to a very progressive religious community, although she was subject to certain rules, among them celibacy. At fifty-something she was still a very attractive woman, starting to go gray, tall, with an excellent figure, very energetic and able to undertake any project. So, fifteen years ago, when I met her, I had enough reasons to fall in love with her, a state that lasted almost five years without any sort of reciprocation, or perhaps precisely because of that. In the end, Elisa said she didn’t need sex to live contentedly, and in fact she devoted herself completely to her social work. Only when I understood that no matter how much I wanted it she wasn’t going to change her interests (that is to say, to prefer me), I started to pull away, although we talk on the phone often and I offered her books for her school whenever I cleaned up my house, as I was doing now, making room for Deirdre.
“Do you want a drink? A cup of tea? A beer? Whisky?” I began to joke, because I knew she was a teetotaler.
“A glass of water, please,” she told me, and she began to leaf through the books I was donating, and just at that moment I realized that beside those, on the table, was the informational brochure from the Kapek Corp.
I think I blushed. How could I explain to this woman that I had so admired for her ideas, her commitment, her strength, her assurance, which I had also so detested because she seemed to be above common human emotions like the desire to have a partner, that I had decided to live with a gynoid? “This means that you wish the company of someone who completely lacks freedom, free will,” she would tell me, “and that is because you want your partner to obey you in everything and not cause you any problems, a position that I fear echoes unfortunate past periods of patriarchal domination.” (Elisa was a feminist like me.) “Or perhaps the question lies in the fact that you feel so unsure of yourself and you hold yourself in such low esteem that you don’t consider it possible to have a good relationship with a human woman,” and when I would respond that the question was, precisely, that my past human relationships had gone wrong for very different reasons, she would add: “
But the solution is not in looking for a slave, but in reflecting on the cause of the malfunctioning relationships between real people. And in any event,” she would surely conclude, for I had already heard her say so on other occasions, “the goal of life is not to have a partner at any cost. We’re still not free of that historical baggage by which we suppose that a person who lives alone, without a stable sexual relationship, is somehow lesser than other people. And on top of that, we want to not just have a partner, but instead to find the ideal person, as if this existed and weren’t an illusion that society has imposed upon us with the candy of romanticism. In short, if the right person appears, great; if not, what happens? I, for example, have decided not to live as part of a relationship, following a period in my life during which, with better or worse fortune, I did do so. When we accept all that, we’ll be freer and we’ll feel better.”
“Is something wrong, Emma? You seem distracted,” I heard Elisa say to me, in reality and not in my imagination.
“No, nothing, I’m just tired, sorry,” I lied, feeling like a coward in doing so.
“No, it’s you who must excuse me. I’ll go now. You should have said something, and many thanks for the books.” Always so kind, and fortunately without having seen the Kapek brochure, Elisa took her donated books and left.
I remained alone, exhausted by everything that had happened during the day, by the conversations and my thoughts, so I told myself that the best thing to do would be to take a shower, go to bed, and not worry about this business any further during the three months of waiting that remained until Deirdre’s arrival.
It was warm, although we were at the beginning of March, the afternoon I went to get Deirdre. I had dressed with greater care than usual, and I’d taken a tranquilizer, though not a strong one since I had to drive. In fact, I’d thought of going in the aerobus that stopped near the chalet where Kapek had its offices, but it didn’t seem to offer the right image for the return trip, when I came back with Deirdre.
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