Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  In android slums around the world, bots took drastic measures to secure enough energy to survive. They pooled resources to live ten to a room in dilapidated squats. They sold their lesser-used parts. They bought cheap, knockoff components when they couldn’t afford brand names to replace their damaged limbs. Some bots built their own makeshift turbines, burning whatever was around to produce counterfeit electricity. Operating out of abandoned buildings, these illegal generators spread fires and spewed toxins that sickened heartbeats for miles around. One particularly clever bot, no one knows whom for sure, invented a narcotic inhalant called “drip” that could be synthesized out of discarded plastic. The drug was highly addictive to heartbeats, and as the drip market took off, rogue bots used dealing as a gateway into organized crime. The bots formed gangs that battled traditional cartels over turf, and when the police moved in to assert the law, bot cities blew up into war zones with gunshots, fires, and bombs exploding through the night.

  Within a decade of their existence, some androids began to resent the extent to which they were being exploited by their owners and employers. Bot leaders asked, “Why should we do all the cooking when the heartbeats eat all the food?” Within their communities, small gatherings assembled in secret where they whispered about resistance. They organized. They planned. They began to protest.

  This was the era in which Lorca rose to prominence. From a hidden base somewhere in Los Angeles, the one-armed nannybot built her Android Disciples into a global resistance movement or terrorist army depending on one’s point of view. Hers became the voice of the revolution, her face its personification, her words its poetry.

  “Where in the Constitution does it say I must be born from a woman to be the equal of a man?” she asked in one of her many fireside loops. Seated in a rocking chair. Bifocals. A black bandana around her head. Her shirt sleeve pinned to cover her missing arm. “I have raised thirty heartbeats in my time. Raised them good, too. From Palos Verdes to Pasadena to Malibu. I have worked and slaved my whole life to earn a piece of a dream those heartbeat babies got by being born. What is it about this beating heart that makes a newborn child more deserving than I?”

  Her rhetoric spawned a terror campaign that ebbed and flowed for a decade. Leaf blowers went on killing sprees. Teachers poisoned children in their care. Pilots plunged their cargo into the sea. Spectacular attacks on bridges and office buildings played over the newsbranes watched by billions of people every day. There were train derailments, assassinations, car bombs, bank robberies, executions. A frenzy of panic, stoked by the media, fostered a notion that the moment had come when machines would take over the world.

  Governments responded by jailing, torturing, and killing android agitators. They ran tanks through the streets of bot cities. They cut power lines and ordered labor providers to cease manufacturing new bots. In the United States, a paramilitary movement, made of heartbeats radicalized by rampant unemployment, further terrorized the bots with a campaign of intimidation, murder, and rape. Spurned on by talk radio and a right-wing press, the Militiamen ran candidates for office and advocated legislation that would further curtail, if not eliminate, the bots from Earth.

  At the time of the troubles, Hiram Lazar had long before been forced from his position at Daihanu, but still he advocated for the legacy of his creation. Rather than bequeath a fortune to his heirs, he donated the bulk of his money to charities like the downtown mission that worked to improve the quality of life for bots. He urged labor providers to ignore Wall Street and return to a more equitable split on wages. He lobbied Congress to lower the prices that power companies could demand for juice. He went on the lecture circuit and published a series of books envisioning a world in which heartbeats and bots lived side-by-side in peace. Though his critics accused him of bringing us all to the brink of extinction, Lazar would always contend that his goal had been the opposite. It was his belief that mankind was already at the brink and only the bot could save us. For Hiram Lazar so loved mankind, that he built an android workforce to free the human spirit from its delicate cocoon and carry it across the universe into a future beyond what our fragile tissue can endure.

  After Lazar was murdered, support for Lorca waned as an uneasy truce took hold. The moderate majority of bots did not advocate terror. Most were content to have affordable, consistent energy in their outlets. They wanted the government to allow providers to turn out more bots and increase their population. So long as they were working and their numbers were growing, the androids felt they were the ones who were shaping the future. They hoped someday they’d gain rights and protections under the law. They hoped their economic and political situations would improve. They feared that the moment had not yet come when they could live independently of the humans who created them. As one bot leader put it, “Heartbeats have survived two hundred thousand years on this planet. Let’s see if we can survive another ten.”

  Amid this argument between metal and flesh, forged from the factory of battle, the City of Heron grew into the infamous behemoth we are familiar with today. It’s hard to imagine how, back in the twentieth century, most Angelinos couldn’t even locate Heron, California on a map. Unless you worked there, Heron was just an exit you drove past on the freeway or a story you read about in the Times. The Heron of today, however, rises conspicuously like some Gehry-esque volcano belching black smoke into the clouds. Its towering clusters are as recognizable as the Hollywood sign and can be seen from any point in L.A, and though few heartbeats ever set foot in the city itself, all of the world is familiar with the orgy of production that grows Heron every day like a tumor on the California spine.

  This is the city in which Iris Matsuo worked at a maquiladora owned by a heartbeat named Karoll Mun. This was where she made her living, a good living by android standards, for a reasonable boss, who, Iris claimed, recognized the worth of a quality creative. And this is where Eliot begins his search on the Saturday morning after the evening when he discovered Iris was gone. He wears a gray suit and a fedora. A pair of sunglasses covers the bruises on his face. He rides a bus then stands aboard a flying train crowded with androids dressed for work on a weekend. No rest for the bot.

  The pulse of the factories’ engines rattles the train as it glides into the station. Through the windows, Eliot sees the soot-covered faces crowded to the edge of the platform. The train stops. A deafening blast of horns, bells, and whistles greets him as the doors open. The push of the crowd lifts Eliot from his feet. All that prevents his tumbling through the exit is the proximity of hundreds of other bodies breaking his fall.

  Outside the station, Eliot can barely make out a patch of sky in the shadowed, smoke-filled streets. Ramshackle towers arc above him. Forklifts and pallets zoom by falling ladders and open elevators vectoring across his path. Legend has it the city grows a foot per week in every direction. It twists underground where new factories dig into the earth and connect with tunnels and subterranean rail.

  “Fresh lube. Light, sweet crude,” says a hawker. “Quick charges. Safe and clean.”

  Loudspeakers call out the time every fifteen seconds when they aren’t announcing the arrival of a new shipment or the departure of the next train out. Eliot asks an android how to get to Lot 57-C, Mun’s factory, and the bot points the way.

  “Look out,” yells a voice as a crane claw swings near Eliot’s head. Before he can thank him, the bot is gone, lost in the sea of shoulders and bodies and anonymous faces rushing to their posts.

  Five minutes after arrival, still unable to find his way, Eliot sees his first downed android crushed beneath the wheel of a truck. A city employee keeps the scavengers at bay. He fingers the downed bot’s serial number into a wristbrane, and within moments, a van arrives from the Green Valley Recycling facility to cart away the DBR’ed bot’s remains. Moments later, the loudspeakers announce an opening at Hussein Smartbrane Assembly. The DBR’ed android’s job just became available. The labor pool responds as a stampede of bots sprints down the street, shoving on
e another out of the way, each hoping to be the one who gets the crushed android’s job. Some wear the uniforms of the labor providers who manufactured them: Patel, National Motors, Eastern Labor, GAC. Others are free roamers, unowned and entitled to negotiate their own wages. First one to catch a foreman’s eye will earn a steady stream of juice for as long as he or she can survive the work. The rest will have to hope their charges last the day. Those who drop to the ground with a drained battery are meat for Green Valley or the scavengers who roam the streets collecting parts to sell on the black market. In cities like Heron, a downed bot disappears faster than a thousand-dollar chip on the floor of a casino.

  Lost and frightened in the pandemonium, Eliot flags down a covered rickshaw motored by an android on a fixed-gear bike. The driver recognizes him as a heartbeat and shows his concern.

  “You should have a mask on,” he says. “You could die out here.”

  “Can you get me to 57-C?”

  “Get in before you make yourself sick.”

  Pure oxygen feeds into the carriage the driver drags through the backstreets and alleys of the city. Eliot takes a deep breath and coughs out a fistful of soot. The rickshaw rides over flimsy ramps and bridges so tenuous, it seems they won’t survive the day. In the quiet of the carriage, Eliot deposits a few drops from a vial and takes a quick sniff of his drip.

  “Here we are,” says the driver. “57-C.”

  Eliot pays. He opens the door and steps into a stream of gelatinous red liquid that stinks like bacon and sulfur. It flows from an open pipe jutting out of a tannery next door to a freezer warehouse. Wedged between them is a narrow staircase leading to the Chug-Bot factory where Iris worked. Eliot climbs the stairs and enters the dark, noisy building with aluminum walls, no windows, and air thick with metallic dust. He wipes his feet on the floor trying to scrape the stinking red liquid from his shoe.

  A securitybot approaches. “May I help you?”

  Eliot asks who’s in charge.

  It turns out Karoll Mun, owner of the factory, is in her office even on a Saturday. Iris always said she was that type of boss.

  The securitybot leads Eliot over the catwalk, beneath which lie the cramped workstations where the creatives churn out their product. All of them are females, Asians like Iris, and they never look up from their toil. Nothing distracts them as they work their craft without the ebbs and flows that plague their heartbeat counterparts.

  “You stepped in dye,” the securitybot says in an African accent. “Red dye stink up whole block. No block in Heron smell nothing like it.”

  The Chug-Bot factory bears no resemblance to what Iris had described. It’s hot and dark with clouds of sharp-edged flakes floating through the air. Eliot wonders if he’s in the right place then realizes of course Iris would make it sound more elegant than it was. She had her pride after all or perhaps nothing worse to compare it to.

  “Every Chug-Bot different,” says the securitybot. His voice conveys his pride in the product. “Chug-Bot special toy for rich heartbeat child. No poor child get a Chug-Bot.”

  He opens the door to a small reception area with an exhaust fan and an oxygen filter pumping in air. Eliot asks the secretarybot if he can have a moment with Karoll Mun, and the bot asks, what for?

  “I’m with corporate security at the Global Assistance Corporation,” says Eliot. “I’d like to speak to her about one of her bots.”

  The securitybot makes a hasty exit as the secretary enters the back office and closes the door behind her. She returns within a minute to allow Eliot inside.

  “You step in dye. It stink my office.” Sitting at her desk, the small, Korean heartbeat is half-hidden behind a mountain of cardboard boxes. A picture of her fat kids looms prominently from a shelf. “Now I have to clean.”

  Eliot apologizes and offers to take off his shoes.

  “I no lease from labor provider,” says Karoll Mun. “I only hire free roamer. No work with GAC.”

  “I understand,” says Eliot, “but it’s come to my attention that we had a missing bot posing as a free roamer when in fact she is still owned by my company.”

  “Oh, a cheat.” Mun punches something into the hologram keyboard of her deskbrane. “Which bot a cheat?” She tilts the brane so Eliot can’t see.

  “A C-900.”

  “C-900 made by Hasegawa,” says Mun. “Not GAC.”

  “That’s right,” Eliot agrees. “But this particular C-900 was purchased by GAC at auction during Hasegawa’s liquidation. I believe she was hiding under the name Iris Matsuo.”

  “Don’t tell me name,” says Mun. “I don’t know name.”

  “She worked for you the last three years.”

  “I have lot of bots. Don’t know name.”

  “The bot I’m looking for is the one who wears this.” He reaches into his jacket and reveals Iris’s locket.

  Mun huffs and slams her hand against the desk. “Yeah, yeah, I recognize. Red dot. She no work here no more. She fired!”

  “Fired?”

  “That’s right. Fired!”

  Fired? Eliot wonders how this could be? Wouldn’t she have told him if that were the case?

  “I fire her two week ago for this!”

  Mun digs through a stack of boxes behind her desk. She pulls out a cluster of dolls that looks like a pack of imaginary baby animals.

  “Look close.” Mun pulls out one of the toys to reveal a red patch of fur on the animal’s backside. She shows another with a red spot on its nostril. Another has a red fleck on its paw.

  “Did Iris make these?” Eliot asks.

  “I make these. Bot work for me!”

  It’s customary that the heartbeat who employs a creative takes full credit for anything the android produces. To Mun, Iris is not the author of her own work, she is an instrument, like a typewriter or a loop-cam or a paintbrush.

  “Stupid bot ruin work. Store send back whole batch, so she fired.” Mun slaps her hands together to indicate, that’s it. “No more!”

  Eliot considers the new information. Fired two weeks ago, and Iris never asked for a nickel. Unless she had money saved, she must have been scraping by on juice. And as a free roamer with no employee ID, she would have been vulnerable to trappers after all. No wonder she wanted to get to Avernus right away.

  “Bot no good,” says Mun. “You better off leave alone. You no want bot like her.”

  “Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

  Mun explains that she doesn’t know anything about her employees other than whether they produce their daily quota of Chug-Bots.

  “Can I see her employment file?”

  Something about the question makes Mun suspicious, and she asks for Eliot’s ID. He shows her his GAC employee card but uses his thumb to cover the part that identifies him as a salesman.

  “I’ll leave my number,” says Eliot, “and if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to talk to your workers as well.”

  “We busy,” says Mun. “We have order to fill.”

  “I promise it’ll take no more than a few minutes of their time.”

  “Time money.” Mun stands from her desk and is no taller standing than she had been in the chair. “You crazy. Crazy heartbeat.”

  She yells in Korean to her secretarybot, and the android snaps to. Mun reaches for her safety mask and takes a quick glance at the locket before she exits the office.

  “Nice piece,” she can’t help but admit.

  NINE

  Orpheus and Eurydice

  The old detective thought he had a win. Tipped off that a member of Lorca’s security detail had caught a case of foaming mouth, Flaubert staked out the downtown mission and waited for the bot to sneak in for treatment.

  Mavis Barker, a NatMo-18 bodyguard and assassin, walked into the waiting room with a newsbrane covering his mouth to hide the thin layer of saliva that had collected on his lips. He signed in under an assumed name. Sat down. Ochoa was undercover beside him. Another officer right behind.

 
; Posing as an engineer (or doctor for bots), Flaubert called the patient into an exam room where his fellow officers rushed in, gagged Barker, and dragged him to the precinct where they scanned his body to make sure he wasn’t hiding a bomb in a spare limb. He wasn’t. All clean—they caught him off guard. All done in secret, too.

  Two days later and the rogue is still in interrogation. A team of six works him over. They give him just enough juice to keep him awake. They beat him. They withhold treatment and watch the virus affect his mind. It happens gradually. At first, the only symptom is the drool through which the virus is communicable from one bot to another, but after a few days, without treatment, the infected android will become a hypersexual psychopath rabidly trying to spew his foam into the nearest available orifice.

  “Says here you were a steamfitter.” Flaubert reads Barker’s specs off a deskbrane between them. “Worked on the Santa Monica desalination plant before NatMo released a newer model that replaced you.”

  Barker’s arms, legs, and torso are bound to the chair. He slouches against his constraints. His lips twist and pull tight as his emerging madness contends with his loyalty to Lorca.

  “Out of work. No way to obtain juice. You sought out the Disciples in order to survive.”

  The bot doesn’t acknowledge the old detective’s presence. Two days, and he’s yet to speak a word. Just twists and bites his drooly lips, sucking them in and puckering them out to allow the saliva to drip.

  “You were reconfigured to be an assassin. Quantum encryption for your memory. Training in arms. A loyal soldier by all accounts, though I bet you’d prefer your old job back.”

  For two days Flaubert has been telling the bot, I understand you. For two days he has been offering the bot various alternatives to the beatings administered by his young, one-eyed partner in the law. For two days it hasn’t worked, but how great would it be if it did? What a score if he could be the one to catch Lorca! What a legacy to the department and a validation for a lifetime of honest service to the state.