Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  But Flaubert is not convinced.

  A small, female retailbot wins a bout of rough and tumble with an experienced trapper? (Yes, the department knew Pink was a trapper. The newsbranes may not mention it, but detectives saw the collection of pinky fingers in Mr. Spenser’s closet. They found the weapons he kept in his trunk and the tripod he used for his cinematic endeavors.) And what of the open windows and the bullets in the wall? And why did Plath meticulously clean the scene but leave her spilled parts behind? Did she want to get caught? Was it she who left a scrubbing brush in the toilet? Why clean the toilet if you’re a bot and you don’t leave DNA in your feces, or even create rectal feces at all?

  “A heartbeat did this,” said the old detective after a cursory look at the scene, but nobody wanted to hear it.

  “Plath,” said Lieutenant Byron, who has a penchant for economy in his speech. “That’s an order. From the top. Don’t fuck around.”

  Back at the office, Flaubert leans into his deskbrane and reviews the notes on some of his more promising leads. Crazy Timmy Jones left the group home where the judge had him committed after his release from the ding-dong. He is known to frequent the undergrounds and sample the designer drugs that could have inspired him into a limb-slicing rage. Then there’s Little Joffrey Birkmeyer, the cardsharp, but his is more the lounge scene, not so much the kids with their politics and their bots. A rival musician claims Mr. Spenser sampled his music without paying a royalty. He could be responsible. And so could that drip-addled couple, Alan and Jenny Something-or-Other, a pair of CIs who live in the El Royale. They’re late on some payments to their dealer, but the fact that no money was taken from the scene should absolve them of a motive.

  And then there’s Eliot Lazar, the young lover whose C-900 girlfriend disappeared eight weeks ago. Narcotics has a file on him. There’s a spot off Alvarado where he buys his street grade and a girl on Beachwood Canyon who used to sell him his sweet. No one in the department saw any need to arrest the poor lad over his habit. Hadn’t he suffered enough, watching his father and sister burn to a crisp when he was fourteen years old? The explosion left him with a mechanical arm that causes him excruciating pain. That’s why the drip, Eliot told the arresting officer in New Hampshire, but Flaubert suspects it runs deeper than that. Didn’t Eliot imply as much the last time they met? The pain of helplessness in the face of tragedy. The need to dull his emotions. The want of a habit to escape from too much longing for the family then the lover he lost.

  It’s bad if it’s Lazar, thinks the old detective. It’s bad because I let him go. Twice. I didn’t have him pegged as the violent type. My gut was off, my sixth sense, my trained detective’s eye. I was thinking too much about Lorca, the bigger game, and I couldn’t sniff out the killer in front of me. Of course he wasn’t a killer at that point, was he, and maybe still not now. I’ll have to dig a little deeper to see.

  A drop of water lands on Flaubert’s shoulder. He looks up at the pool collecting on the ceiling tile above his head. Will that ever get fixed? He used to complain about it to maintenance, but he eventually gave up and learned to accept the damage—to admire it for its persistence. It has grown from a little water stain to a minor leak to a catastrophe waiting to happen. Will I be here, Flaubert wonders, among the living when it finally expresses itself as a burst pipe drowning the building in a flood of water? Or will the cough kill me first thus making my concern about the pipe irrelevant?

  “Jean-Michel,” Ochoa calls from the door. “Your botlover’s here.”

  The old detective dons his hat and coat. Through the hall, he passes a gang of rogue bots chained together as they’re led to a holding cell. He passes the interrogation booths with their muffled screams, checks a still-empty mouse trap, and tips his hat to a streetbot who blows Flaubert a kiss. Outside in the parking lot, he sees the young man waiting in the rain with a gaudy pair of sunglasses covering his face.

  “Good evening, Eliot. Good to see you again.”

  “You found my car?” The young man cuts to the chase.

  “Weeks ago, as it turns out. Call it a bureaucratic snafu.” Flaubert leads him through the lot. He chooses not to comment on the young man’s pink socks and shirt though he recognizes it’s not the typical uniform of a salesman working for a labor provider. “Your car was abandoned after a drive-by in Inglewood. Assailants in black bandanas. Bots no doubt. Android Disciples we assume. The anti-gang unit wanted to hold the car as evidence, but there was never a case. Instead”—he coughs into his fist—“your car became a part of our undercover fleet. I worry it may have served some recreational purposes as well, what with all these budget cuts no one can afford his own vehicle anymore. Would you hold it against a patrolman if he may have taken his wife out for dinner courtesy of yours?”

  “Does it run?” Eliot asks.

  “See for yourself.” Flaubert hands over a set of keys cut by the department’s lockbot.

  Eliot ignores the bullet holes that syncopate the driver’s side doors. He jumps in and starts the engine. The window is open, and Flaubert leans in as Eliot adjusts the seat.

  “Are those bruises on your face?” the old detective asks.

  “Bar fight,” says Eliot.

  “Which bar?”

  “You looking for a place to drink?”

  “Might I ask while I have you here”—the old detective notices the split knuckles on Eliot’s hand resting on the steering wheel—“have you had any luck finding that friend of yours who went missing?”

  “No.” Eliot impatiently checks his watch. “Not yet.”

  “I only ask,” says the detective, “because there’s this trapper fellow who fell afoul of a radial saw last night. Turns out he has quite the inventory. Forensics is looking now—I thought if you give me the serial number of that bot you’re looking for … Well. You never know. Maybe some of her parts will turn up in his closet.”

  Eliot adjusts the rearview mirror, then the side mirror, then the rearview mirror again. “I don’t have her serial number on me,” he says, “but I’ll call you with it when I get home.”

  “Please do,” says the old detective. He backs away and tips his hat as the window rolls up. He stands in the rain and watches the car speed from the lot in a hurry.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Standard

  Eliot cranes his neck out the window to see if there’s a drone following his car. There isn’t. Not yet anyway, none that he can see. He feels it nonetheless, the unsettling sensation of being watched.

  He puts the car on autodrive so he can dig a vial from his pocket. He checks the rearview and wonders how the old detective fingered him. The hoodie should have been enough to hide his face unless the drones were able to follow him from the El Royale all the way back to his apartment. But so quickly? With all the budget cuts and the depleted tax base and a police department in disarray? Half the cams don’t work, and there isn’t the manpower to sift through the footage. No way they could put together a case in so short a time. If Flaubert actually had something, there’d be an arrest already and not that chickenshit move he pulled in the parking lot. Probably called me in to rattle my cage, thinks Eliot, force me into a mistake. He’s throwing noodles against the wall to see if anything sticks. Keep your head right, Eliot tells himself. Don’t be a sticky noodle.

  The car crawls forward in the rush-hour traffic. Eliot throws the radio on. Three windbags on NPR discuss the epidemic of bot crime in the wake of last night’s murder. A female liberal with a shrill voice blames it on corporate greed.

  “Mass pollution. Food and water contamination. Income inequality. This is the result of our free market approach. It’s supposed to create a stronger economy, but blue collar heartbeats can’t compete for jobs. Instead, they turn to crime and bigotry, which leads to the kind of retaliations we saw last night in Los Angeles. If government doesn’t create an economy that provides opportunity for androids and heartbeats alike, we are headed for a massive crisis.”

  “Androids
need to be kept in their place,” says the conservative on the panel, “and rogue bots should be dealt with as quickly and harshly as possible. That’s the role of government, not meddling in the private sector. As for unemployed heartbeats, they shouldn’t have to compete with androids for work, they should be creating opportunities for themselves. With all the cheap labor available, with all this access to capital, the only reason a heartbeat can’t make a living is because he’s too lazy or entitled to take advantage of the market.”

  Says the academic, “But the crisis is already here. It’s now. No longer can we survive without the bot. We have lost the skills needed to run a modern society and ceded them to the machines. Who on this panel knows how to build an engine or a brane or even a machine for vacuuming the floor? My God—even if we did want to exterminate the androids, what a brutal and horrible thing! We would have to build new bots to destroy the bots we already built. And this of course would begin a cycle from which we can never escape. No, I say the time is already here to embrace revolution, to tear down the current ideology and break with…”

  No, no, no, you have it all wrong, Eliot wants to scream. No android killed an innocent heartbeat last night in Hollywood. You have no idea what happened, and even if you did know, you’d probably draw the same stupid conclusions.

  He turns off the radio and sniffs the rag. He tells his car’s stereo to play “Una Furtiva Lagrima” with Enrico Caruso singing.

  “Would you like to buy the song,” asks the car’s computer, “or download it illegally?”

  “Steal it.”

  “The whole opera or just the song?”

  “Just the song.”

  “Shall I recommend other songs you might…”

  “Play the fucking song.”

  The car’s computer pauses long enough for Eliot to feel that pang of guilt one feels after cursing at a machine.

  “Now playing ‘Una Furtiva Lagrima,’” says the computer, “from the opera L’Elisir d’Amore by Gaetano Donizetti.”

  It’s the song from last night’s dance with Plath and Pink. It’s been stuck in Eliot’s head all day. He turns up the volume and gets into that drip again. He requires it to dull the fear that he’s running out of time. Time to save Iris, time to save himself, time before the inevitable war between machines and men.

  The drug sinks its fingers into Eliot’s brain and redirects the neural pathways like some great urban planner disconnecting the roads and reattaching them to better the traffic flow. Suddenly, his car glides unencumbered. The song plays, and Eliot imagines himself on the ledge again outside the DJ’s apartment. But this time it’s not the digger on the bed getting sawed to pieces, it’s Iris. This time he feels no reluctance because of moral ambiguity. He holds the gun with a steady hand. Aims and fires and hits his target. He frees Iris from the restraints and helps her with her limbs. They walk out the building and drive to Shelley’s boat. The sun sets on the ocean horizon as they set sail for Avernus.

  If it’s right and honorable to save Iris from an unwarranted attack then it was right to save the digger as well. If the world sees it differently, then it’s the world that’s fucked, not me. It’s the cop and the trapper and the newsbranes. It’s the talking heads on the radio. It should be they who are under investigation, they who are on the run, not me. I’ve done nothing wrong, Eliot decides. I have nothing to feel guilty about.

  So why do I feel so damn guilty?

  Workers roll up the red carpet as the paparazzi pack their gear in front of the Standard Hotel. Eliot hands his keys to the valet and approaches the will call.

  “One for Sweeney,” he tells the bot working the desk.

  “First name?”

  “Carlyle. I should be on Jillian Rose’s list.”

  She hands him a lanyard to wear around his neck. “Right this way, Mr. Sweeney.”

  An aqua-colored path leads Eliot into a ballroom decorated to resemble an underwater chasm cut into the ocean floor. It’s dark and crowded. A brane on the ceiling reveals a moon and sky of stars refracted through pulsating currents of water. A three-dimensional image of a nurse shark swims to Eliot’s face and taunts him until he shoos it away. There’s fake coral and a wooden shipwreck at the back of the stage. There’s an ambient noise that resembles the moaning ecstasy of copulating whales.

  Along the catwalk, eyeless modelbots walk in long frocks of woven hybrid textiles with reflecting scales like a mermaid’s skin. A school of hologram fish scatters as a modelbot steps to the edge of the stage, stops, and turns. She wears emeralds for eyes, and her face, like those of all the modelbots, is too obscured for Eliot to discern her identity.

  “Hello, fabulous!” Jillian Rose kisses him on both cheeks. “Did you just get here?”

  Eliot slides into his Carlyle Sweeney voice and asks which of the models is Iris.

  “Iris?” Jillian Rose asks with a puzzled look.

  “Yoshiko,” he corrects himself quickly.

  Following a line of air bubbles, Jillian Rose leads Eliot behind the brane at the back of the stage to where the models are being dressed. Their handlers wear black. They are mostly heartbeats—short, fat, and ugly compared to the eyeless wonders. They push and shove the models from the stage, pull and yank and whisper harshly for them to, “Go. Now. Twenty steps and turn. Careful with the footing. Make the dress move.” Though blind, the models perfectly execute their walks, never bump into one another, and never fall over the edge. When you tell a bot there are twenty steps, she doesn’t take twenty-one. Not by accident anyway. Not unless she wants to.

  Eliot stands ignored in the chaos of the backstage scene. He takes note of the thin brane that separates the world these bots live in and the underwater fantasy on the other side. On stage they are objects of desire, art in overpriced clothing, while behind the brane, they are blind, sexless, and dependent. Machines to be shifted around, assembled, reconfigured, maximized for profit then shoved into a corner to rejuice. Their smooth groins are revealed as they dress and undress between their turns on stage. Eliot averts his eyes. He feels like a medical student in an anatomy lab peeling back the blanket to see the cadaver’s genitals. Only the models don’t have genitals, which makes it all the more unsettling to look at them here in their disclosure. Unsettling because it reveals some possible branch of evolution in which sex organs will no longer exist. The bots won’t need them, and perhaps without them, the entire concept of gender will disappear. There will be no contact between bots as it relates to reproduction, only as it relates to violence or work. What will happen to play and love with this remove of the androids from their heartbeat ancestors? Will those values that Eliot’s father hoped to impart to the products he designed survive without their physical manifestations on the androids’ form?

  The handlers catch a masked modelbot as she leaves the stage. This particular one seems to walk a little slower than the rest. She seems dizzy and weak. Maybe her shoes don’t fit or she’s infected or just not that into the gig. Maybe it’s just that Eliot’s overdeveloped sense of compassion has reacted to some turmoil within her. His mother always warned him he was a sucker for the damsel in distress.

  The handlers pull off the modelbot’s dress and remove her mask, revealing the saddest face Eliot has ever seen on such a beautiful woman. More loneliness, misery, and defeat then he could ever imagine on a being possessed of such beauty.

  “There she is.” Jillian Rose surprises Eliot over his shoulder. “Yoshiko Yakamura.”

  The model steps out of her shoes as her handlers pull a dress over her head. They change her mask and shove her back on the runway like an unwilling racehorse forced into the gate.

  “Are you certain that’s the one you want?” Jillian Rose asks.

  “Oh, yes,” says Eliot. “That’s her.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Yoshiko

  After the show, the crowd mingles around the blue-lit pool on the rooftop beneath the yellow night sky. White tablecloths snap in the Santa Anas as a whistle of
drones circles overhead. Eliot lingers by the bar, wiping the ash off his frosted glass. He scans the clusters of men surrounding the eyeless modelbots who flirt in kind to their pointless advances. It’s an hour before Eliot spots Yoshiko standing alone by the corner edge of the roof as if she’s contemplating a jump. She wears a stark white gown with a low-cut opening at the back. No cluster of men surrounds her. The slouch of her disposition renders her unapproachable.

  Eliot grabs a glass of white wine off a server’s tray. He approaches carefully, not sure what awaits him once he speaks to her. Who is this bot with Iris’s parts, and what, if anything, will she remember of her previous life? What will be the same and what different, and what does he have to offer in order to get what he wants?

  Yoshiko turns from the ledge when she senses Eliot’s nearing. With her longer legs and high-heel shoes, she now stands well above him. The holes where her eyes should be look directly over his head.

  “I got you some wine,” he says as if talking to an old friend.

  “I prefer vodka,” she replies.

  “You didn’t used to. Hard liquor used to be too much for you.” He guides the glass into her hand. “A light chardonnay was always your favorite.”

  “Do I know you?” the bot asks.

  “Does my voice sound familiar?”

  She shakes her head.

  “It’s Eliot,” he tells her in a whisper. “Eliot Lazar.”

  Yoshiko juts her chin toward the city laid out ten stories beneath her. “I think you have me mistaken for someone else.”

  “I’m quite certain I don’t.”

  “I have no memory of you,” she says plainly. “If this is some line of bullshit you use on android women, it isn’t going to work on me.”

  She turns and flips her hair, a clear enough signal that she wants him to fuck off.

  “I’m sorry,” says Eliot. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”