Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

by Judd Trichter

  “Mr. Blumenthal,” says Eliot, “with all due respect, you can get top-of-the-line eyes, brand-new, for a fraction of what we’re offering.”

  “As can you,” says the shylock.

  “But she’s a C-900,” says Eliot. “She won’t be the same if we mismatch her metal. I know you came upon the eyes honestly, but the previous owner stole them from a bot named Iris Matsuo. I would hope that you, as a fellow android, would have a desire that justice be served and the eyes be restored to their rightful owner.”

  “Justice?” Blumenthal puffs his cigar. “I don’t know that what you describe would be justice. I do, however, agree that the amount of twenty thousand ingots is sufficient, and that if the eyes belonged to me, I would gladly and without negotiation accept your offer.”

  “It’s my understanding,” says Shelley, “that Mr. Davydenko himself belongs to you, and as the bot belongs to you, so do all of his parts, which gives you legal authority to make decisions on his behalf.”

  Blumenthal nods, acknowledging the clever feature of the law that allows one android to own another. “And though I agree I am not legally bound to consult with Mr. Davydenko, I still see it as a moral obligation to do so. Even to one’s chattel,” says the loan shark, “one must act with consistency and honor. I fear to think what would become of my reputation were I to demand something back that I had already given as a gift.”

  Eliot fidgets in his chair. There isn’t much time, and he doesn’t want this to drag. “Name your price,” he says to Slugger directly. “Whatever it is, I’m willing to pay.”

  “Easy,” Shelley warns his brother, but Eliot ignores him.

  “Mr. Davydenko, you’re not a C-900. You’ll be the same bot but with different eyes, perhaps eyes that suit you better. Perhaps eyes that give you an even greater advantage in the pit than those that belonged not to a fighter but to a creative.”

  Shelley pulls at his brother’s shirt, but Eliot knocks his hand away.

  “Name your price,” he says again. “You’ll have enough to buy your freedom and become a free roamer if you want. But most important, you will be restoring those eyes to a bot who needs them far more than you. Who cannot exist without them. You will be giving to another the very gift of life. How can you have it in your conscience to say no to such an offer?”

  The mirrored lenses on the fighter’s face hide any change in position that might be revealed by his expression.

  “She was a toy maker,” Eliot continues. “She loved children. She wanted to be a teacher so she could see the world through a child’s eyes.”

  Blumenthal puts a calming hand behind his fighter’s neck. “Do you understand what’s happening?” he asks his bot. “This heartbeat has attached a special value to something that on the open market is of modest worth. And it just so happens that the thing he values is something you own but do not need. A replaceable part for you, but not for him. Now, he has laid bare, unwisely as I’m sure he’d admit, that he is willing to give everything he has for these C-900 eyes. And he has a considerable sum.”

  The shylock lowers his voice to express words meant only for the bot.

  “You’ve had them for what?” he asks. “A month? You couldn’t possibly be that attached.”

  Slugger Davydenko says nothing. There’s no indication that he has even understood the offer much less considered it. Then again, the Russian bot is not designed to engage in negotiations. He wasn’t built to conduct business across a desk. He was built to break femurs and crush skulls, to tear limbs and raze houses, to cause quick and painful death. He was built to maim, to burn, to rape, to intimidate and exterminate an arbitrarily assigned enemy, in desert, mountain, or urban terrain. Or in a pit if need be.

  Blumenthal taps his cigar in an ashtray. “If I were you I’d take the deal,” he tells his fighter.

  Slugger looks toward the door then stands from his chair. Without so much as a word, he leaves the office to resume his workout and prepare for his scheduled evening of violence. He offers no counter proposal or explanation for his departure from the meeting. He leaves no room for further talks.

  “There you have it.” Blumenthal shrugs. “I hope you recognize I made a valiant effort.” He relights his cigar and turns his attention to Shelley. “Now let’s talk about that piece you’re going to loop about me in Revealed!”

  Shelley holds his tongue until he and his brother are alone in the car. He lights a joint, takes a hit, and quickly puts it out.

  “Do you know they mass produce pussies in France?” he asks. “You fuck one, you’ve fucked ten million. There’s no Goddamn difference.”

  Eliot checks the mirrors and the drones in the sky. He puts the visor down to cover his face.

  “Aw, Hell, Eliot, buy her some good eyes. Put a red fleck in ’em if that’s what’s you need.”

  “Eyes are important. Window to the soul and all that.”

  “There is no soul.” Shelley shakes his head in frustration. “It’s just a balance of parts and experiences. Soul,” he repeats the word with disdain.

  Eliot notices a blue car behind them and wonders, is it Flaubert or the Indian from the casino? Are the Militiamen after me now or is it someone else? The blue car turns down a side street, and Eliot looks forward again up the road.

  “Quit while you’re ahead,” says Shelley. “Make do with what you got, and stay alive. For Chrissake, what’s more important than staying alive?”

  The pain burns across Eliot’s shoulder as he watches the road through the window. He remembers the conversation he had with the old detective about Orpheus. Eliot reviewed the story in Ovid sometime after. He read of Orpheus’s turning back at the last moment and losing his fiancée the moment before she was to return to Earth.

  Why did Orpheus look back? he wonders. Was he trying to sneak a peak and hoping the gods wouldn’t notice? They’re gods, for crying out loud, nothing escapes them. Was it a stamina issue, i.e. he tired and forgot himself? Or was he so in love, as Ovid indicates, that he couldn’t resist? Why then, after her second death, when he begged Charon to take him back to the underworld, did Orpheus quit after “seven days huddled along the banks of Styx?”

  Perhaps the great poet secretly wanted to send her back to the underworld because he preferred to long for her than to live with her. Maybe he knew that losing her would inspire him to compose the great song he sung on that plain atop the hill which was “endowed with green but had no shade.”

  And then there’s the part the old detective left out. After Orpheus was murdered, when his limbs were scattered by the Thracian women and his soul was driven out:

  The Shade of Orpheus

  Descends beneath the earth. The poet knows

  Each place that he had visited before;

  And searching through the fields of pious souls,

  He finds Eurydice. And there they walk

  Together now: at times they are side by side;

  At times she walks ahead with him behind;

  At other times it’s Orpheus who leads—

  But without any need to fear should he

  Turn round to see his own Eurydice.

  So Orpheus lived a few years apart but in death was reunited with his love. According to the rules of the universe set by the myth, Orpheus could have just killed himself at any time and reunited with her immediately. He chose not to. Instead, he decided to write poems then see his love again when his work, his life, was done.

  But these ain’t my options, thinks Eliot. This ain’t ancient Greece, it’s modern-day Los Angeles, and there is no afterworld where souls reunite and hold hands into eternity. And I’m no fucking lyric poet.

  “What time is Slugger’s fight?” he asks his brother.

  THIRTY-TWO

  A Confession

  The old detective coughs as he passes a chain of androids strapped together, pressed closely, some crying, others complaining they’ll be late for work.

  “I’m runnin’ low on juice, man.”

 
; “Please, I’m gonna get fired.”

  Patrol is widening the net. They’re breaking down doors, rounding up every bot on the street, bringing in any rogue with a warrant or a ticket or a scowl.

  Flaubert enters the observation room. He sees Lieutenant Byron and the captain sitting in the dark watching an interview through the one-way mirror.

  “Look,” says Byron, his terseness more pronounced than usual. “Plath.”

  Beyond the glass, a young officer questions an android with a black bandana on her head and a pinky finger missing from her hand. She seems to find her situation amusing.

  “She’s confessed to the Spenser murder,” says the captain. “She knows details we didn’t release. There’s a matching finger with her serial number in the evidence room.”

  “I always maintained she was at the scene,” says Flaubert. “That doesn’t make her the killer.”

  “You think the newsbranes will buy that?”

  “Does the press do our investigating?”

  The lieutenant knocks a chair across the room. “Don’t try me today, Detective. Your stock isn’t on the rise around here.”

  Flaubert coughs and wipes his mouth with a handkerchief. It’s the hardest part of every investigation: fighting the guys on your own team.

  “Does she know anything about Ochoa?” he asks.

  “She hasn’t said.”

  “About Lazar?”

  “We haven’t asked.”

  The old detective approaches the intercom and presses the button that allows him to speak into the interrogator’s earpiece.

  “Ask her if there was anyone else at the apartment besides her and the deceased.”

  The interrogator asks and Plath shakes her head with a smirk directed toward the mirror.

  “Ask her why she left her pinky finger at the scene.”

  The interrogator asks about the pinky.

  “I couldn’t find it,” says Plath.

  “Ask her why she cleaned the scene.”

  “I guess I’m just a tidy person.”

  “Ask her where she got the gun.”

  “Under the mattress.”

  “Ask how much she took from Pink’s wallet?”

  The interrogator looks back over his shoulder.

  “Go on,” says Flaubert.

  The interrogator asks.

  “I’m not the type to leave money around,” says Plath.

  “Do you remember how much you took?”

  Plath smiles and bats her eyelashes. “All of it,” she says, leaning lasciviously across the desk.

  Flaubert turns to his superiors in the room. “The gun was stolen by somebody matching Lazar’s description. The victim’s wallet was found full of his evening’s pay. A few hundred ingots, as you can see in the report. Her finger was left in the open pinned to a board on the wall of the closet. It would have been easy for her to find.”

  The captain takes off his glasses and lays them on the table so he can rub his eyes. Flaubert argues that they should stop treating her like the culprit in the Spenser murder and start treating her like a suspect in the disappearance of his partner.

  Byron rages to his feet. “You’re not in charge here, Detective.”

  “Neither are you,” says the captain.

  The lieutenant shrinks back to his desk like a student who blurted out the wrong answer to an easy question. The captain nods, indicating he’ll allow Flaubert to proceed. The old detective speaks again though the intercom. “Ask if she knows Eliot Lazar.”

  “Who’s that?” says Plath. “Never heard that name before in my life.”

  “Ask about Ochoa.”

  “A detective?” says the girl. “I don’t know. What’s he look like?”

  “Big guy,” says the interrogator. “Mexican. He wears a patch over one eye.”

  “Oh, the one-eyed pig!” Plath covers her mouth as she laughs. “Sure, I know him. I found him sleeping in a garage in Century City.”

  “Oh, shit,” says Byron. “Oh, steaming pile of shit.”

  Flaubert feels the bits of glass stuck in the lining of his lungs, his arteries, his heart. He feels it all slipping away. Not only his partner, not only his work, but something larger. Everything he has worked for, everything he has believed in is loosening from his grip.

  “He was a real fat, one-eyed son of a bitch,” says Plath. “Stunk like an ape and bled like a pig when I stuck him.”

  The interrogator asks Plath what she means.

  “You didn’t see the loop?” she asks, smiling. “It’s entertaining as all Hell. I sent it to the newsbranes before I got here, but I guess they haven’t run it yet.”

  Flaubert sees the lightness in the digger’s face.

  “It’s a real good loop,” says Plath. “You can see the moment he shits himself before he dies.”

  That equanimity in her eyes, that brainwashed assurance that she’s bound for Heaven, awakes Flaubert to the emergency of the situation. Absent the student, the mentor’s instincts return. He asks his superiors, “Was she searched when she came in?”

  “She wasn’t a suspect,” says the lieutenant. “She came in on her own.”

  “Did she limp?” Flaubert asks. “Were her limbs scanned for explosives?”

  “I don’t think so,” Byron admits.

  Flaubert speaks into the intercom. “Get out of there,” he tells the interrogator. “Get out right now.”

  The young officer presses the earpiece with his finger as he stands from the table. The lieutenant and the captain run for the exit. Flaubert drops to the floor and pulls a desk over his head.

  “Praised be Lorca,” says the android Plath. “Holy Mother sends her regards.”

  The room contains the initial explosion that coats a layer of blood and oil over the mirror. The secondary blast, however, produces a burning blizzard of shrapnel that tears through the room and the concrete walls and every living thing in its path.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The Girl

  Evening.

  Main event at the Brewery.

  Slugger Davydenko, Russian android, most feared fighter in the city, takes on eight bots at once in a battle royale. All of them top-of-the-line metal. Whoever survives gets the belt. His owner gets the purse. Losers go to the scrap heap unless some parts are worth recycling.

  Eliot sits in press row. Wears a coat and Shelley’s credentials in his fedora. Holds a camera and takes a few loops. Dead, captured, or escaped, this thing ends tonight. One way or another, it all comes to a head tonight.

  Right from the bell, the other bots attack the champ. Slugger’s the one to beat. Get him out quick and they each stand a chance. Wind up against him one-on-one and you can forget it. Too strong. Too tough. Too fucking nuts.

  Eliot wants the bots to kill him without damaging his eyes. Then he could make an offer directly to Blumenthal. He’d have everything then. Stick the eyes in Iris’s head and hit the switch. She’d know nothing of the last few months. The night with Pink would be the last thing she remembered, but she’d be herself again. She’d be whole. She’d be Iris.

  Ten seconds in, Slugger Davydenko dents an android’s head with the back of his hand. A minute later, he punches through a bot’s chest and pulls out the poor bastard’s engine. Rips out the cords and wires. Tears off the limbs and twists the bot’s head 180 degrees.

  The audience howls. Eliot turns away. Getting the eyes off this freak isn’t going to be easy. One of the fighters has buzz saws for hands, and even he’s no match. Buzz saws, for Chrissake, but Slugger grabs his elbows and uses the blades against him. He splits the fucker in half.

  “It’s like it’s routine for him,” he tells Shelley through his earpiece. “It’s like he’s doing his laundry.”

  “He’s probably done more killing than laundry.” Shelley sits in his car outside the Brewery. He and his brother communicate through new branes purchased that day so they can’t be traced. “He’ll be weaker after the fight, after he’s injured and low on juice. You�
��ll have to hit him before his autorepair heals his wounds.”

  In the pit, Slugger gets it down to two bots and himself. Then it’s down to one. Then it’s over. The battle lasted all of eight minutes.

  “Still looks pretty strong to me.”

  The crowd thins. The lights come on. A maintenance team cleans the stands. The newsmen exit to the bar down the street to file on their workbranes and put tonight’s drinks on tomorrow’s checks.

  Eliot walks to the basement and waits along the hallway wall. He hides his face behind his brother’s loop-cam as Slugger passes with the championship belt slung over his shoulder. There’s a wound on his chest, an opening where the oil drips out. Eliot snaps a loop as the tired fighter closes the locker room door.

  “Got eyes on him?” Shelley asks.

  “Locker room.”

  Blumenthal’s voice precedes his entrance. Eliot turns away and pretends to check his brane. With his coterie of bodyguards, the shylock cavaliers into the dressing room while Eliot spies through the door left slightly ajar.

  “Good performance tonight.” Blumenthal pats his fighter on the cheek. He hands over a few ingots, and Slugger thanks him in Russian. “And as promised.” The shylock hands the wounded bot a shopping bag with a toy store logo. “Heal up and recharge. I want you in the gym Monday morning.”

  Eliot exits into the rain and trots across the street to where Shelley waits in his car. He hands over the loop-cam as he gets in.

  “He’s wearing jeans and a black hoodie. Should be out in a minute.”

  He pulls Shelley’s Glock from the glove compartment and loads it with bullets designed to penetrate Kevlock skin.

  “Hit him close,” says Shelley. “No more than five feet away, or it’ll just piss him off.”

  Eliot pockets a plastic bag in which he plans to put the eyes once he pulls them out of Slugger’s head. He watches as the fighter exits the Brewery alone. Mirrored sunglasses conceal the bruises on his face.

  “Aim for his engine,” says Shelley. “Try to do it as the train pulls in.”

  Autograph hounds approach the android for his signature. A cub reporter holds a recording device toward his mouth but the Russian kindly shakes his head. He carries a backpack over his shoulders and the toy store shopping bag in his bandaged hand. He limps down the street toward the station for the flying train.