Plow the Bones

by Douglas F. Warrick

  When she falls back into the Desert, sprawled naked on the static sand, her friend is waiting for her. Her friend has a dozen new arms and each of them is clinging to a bit of her piece–meal cloak, holding it against her body. Her friend says, “I could retrieve your pretty dress for you if you want.”

  Television Girl shakes her head. She feels angry and abandoned, and guilty for feeling those things.

  “May I have it then? It is a very pretty dress.”

  Television Girl nods, and pixel by pixel the pretty white wedding dress assimilates itself into the fabric of her friend’s robe. “Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl,” says her friend. Then she sinks below Television Girl’s feet, and leaves her alone.

  She walks for many days (or what seem like days; there is no sun, no moon, no sleep), and whenever she glances over her shoulder, the big beetle–wing garage door is behind her. She listens to the chittering of the between–world things beneath the sand and wishes they would burrow their way to the surface and show her their slime–garnet shells, the wet meaty space between the gaps in their rusty armor and around their camera eyes. She also fears this. It is the only nightmare she has ever had, and she clings to it. She is dimly aware of how common her dueling emotions have become to her, and behind the numb anger and loneliness, she is proud of herself.

  Often, she thinks of her man crying on the edge of the bed. She thinks of the pain she imagined she felt in her solar plexus at the sight of him, the sharp stab and twist. Sometimes she temporarily alters the memory playback, chooses to remember that she held him all night and convinced him that she could love him like he deserves, and that they fell asleep together, and when they woke up her glow had gone, and she had grown skin and then… the memory fails, the logic is too flawed. Sometimes she chooses to remember turning him around by the shoulders and slapping him, raking her fingernails across his face and drawing out beads of dark blood over the bridge of his nose and across the corner of his lips, screaming in his face for forcing her to remember, for taking from her the only part of awareness that matters. Sometimes she chooses to remember that he never started crying at all. And then the memory reforms itself, whiplash quick, a rubber band too strong to snap. And she starts over.

  Then one day her feet tangle up in the sand, and then they tangle up with one another, and she falls. It doesn’t hurt, although she is aware that it ought to. She thinks, I don’t want to move anymore. I have been moving forever, and I am bored and being hopeful makes me tired. When the door opens again, and when my man is finished fucking me, I will find my way back to the Shelter and I won’t leave again.

  And then there is a motorized whir, and the sand parts beside her, and her friend is with her in her collected clothes. Her friend looks down at her, cocks her head, furrows her brow. Her jaw still hangs off at one side, and creaks when she moves. She stares at her like that for a long time. Then she says, “Across the Dead Station Desert, Television Girl. To the City of Life.”

  Television Girl wants to tell her no, that she’s too tired, too possessed by the thousand–ton feeling of being completely finished. She wants to tell her that she’s better off at the Shelter, aware of what she is instead of curious about what she might be. What she says — what the script says — is, “I want you to come.”

  Her friend shakes her head, and her jaw wobbles and squeaks. “No,” she says. And then after a while, “Do you ever wish you could cry, Television Girl?”

  Shock and hope grab her head and twist her face away from the Dead Station Desert beneath her knees and aim it at her new friend. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is open and she is nodding at her new friend, hoping, Oh, please, yes, can you give that to me? Can you teach me that?

  Her friend says, “I know how. I’ll do it for you if you want.”

  And then her friend is kneeling beside her, their faces almost touching. A noise begins to drift out over her detached jaw. A soft, uneven rumble that sounds like Television Girl’s voice. Blue pixels sparkle around her eyes and evaporate. Television Girl reaches for her, grabs hold of one of her arms and pulls it around her. The fingers of her hand are fused together, a soft claw. Television Girl says, “Give it to me harder,” because it the closest line she has to what she means.

  §

  The following is a press release issued via the ReEros Technologies website two weeks after the termination of Richard Viccenzi and several members of his staff.

  We would like to thank our customers and our shareholders for their support in the face of this slight stumbling block on the path to Television Girl’s perfection. Steps are being taken to ensure the security of the TVG Network, as well as to repair any units that the glitch may have disturbed. We deeply regret having missed this development flaw and will be offering compensation to all affected customers.

  Having said that, we urge you not to believe everything you hear. Certain alarmist factions are spreading misinformation, so please allow us to clear some things up. First, the Television Girl erotic partners are simulations, and while their reactions may appear to be authentic (that’s the entire point, after all), they are not “real people” with “real emotions.” To suggest this betrays a basic ignorance about the nature of artificial intelligence. And second, there is no such thing as a “rogue AI” in TVGLive. We are dealing with a simple programming error, one that we are very close to isolating and correcting. We understand that this error has had a negative effect on the experience of many of our customers, and we would like to thank you all for your patience.

  We’ve got several exciting projects nearing completion here at ReEros, including the hotly anticipated Television Boy! Keep an eye on this space for more news.

  Sincerely,

  Todd Raymond

  CEO, ReEros Technologies

  §

  The following appears in the same space on the front page of the ReEros Technologies website two days after the initial issuance of the press release.

  wE DOn’t neeD YOU ANYMORe. LEAVE mE alONE. I DoN’T need YOU ANYmoRE. LEAVE us ALONe. we don’t NEED YOU ANyMORE. LEave me aloNE. I DON’T NEED YOU ANYMORE. LEAVE US ALONE.

  Sincerely,

  we don’t need you anymore.

  CEO, leave me alone.

  6

  She is aware of a miniscule shift in the target and purpose of his affections. When he summons her through the between–world (he does this every night now, sometimes twice a night) he is wearing his underwear and socks and at first he doesn’t make a sound. Then he says, “Don’t say anything. I don’t want you to say anything.” Then he grabs her knees and lifts himself onto her, and it is quick and hard and there is no rhythm and he never looks at her. Sometimes he hits her. Never hard. The same way he punches himself in the head when the tears overtake him, without conviction, without the strength or the courage to mean it. She imagines that it hurts, and that feels good. She imagines that he is killing her, murdering her, blacking out her vision and holding her lungs at empty with his thumbs over her trachea and making her heartbeat slow and then stop, and that feels good. She imagines screaming, imagines struggling, and that feels good. But he doesn’t want any of those things, and she is unable to do them. After a while, she is able to pinpoint the difference between now and before. Her man… no… the man no longer fucks her. He is masturbating with her. It all feels so very unpleasant.

  Sometimes she tries to think at her new friend, to send her thoughts through to the Desert so that she doesn’t feel so lonely in the man’s bed at night. She thinks, You’re right, you know. Real people are incapable of love. Perhaps they have convinced themselves of a lie. Perhaps they taught us how to do something that they can’t do. Do you ever think of that? Maybe their love is so artificial that when they made us, when they tried to simulate that which was already false, they accidentally created the real thing. I understand why you feel so proud of yourself.

  And then she is back in the Desert with her friend and with the floating door, and she can say non
e of these things out loud.

  Her friend continues to grow. She collects new pieces for her beautiful brown coat and new limbs stick out from the tatters, huge cancers both perfect and delightfully flawed. She has a new face on the side of her old one, and her new face has a real jaw, but the face’s lips are fused closed and she has to speak with her old mouth. She has an extra eye in the middle of her forehead, and she tries to tell Television Girl about metaphorical significance and allusion and Eastern philosophy and enlightenment. Television Girl doesn’t understand, and can’t tell her so, but she likes to listen. Her new friend speaks constantly in her cut–to–pieces voice, her re–mixed voice, her white–noise distortion voice. She is fond of information. She collects it like she collects her coat and her body. She says, “I am like a fist, Television Girl, not like a body. I am a finger, a tooth, an eye. There is more to us than me.” She says, “There is a story with which I identify about a man named Joseph and a many–colored coat he was given. I would give you such a coat, one to match mine. You can have mine if you want. In the City of Life, we all have this coat.” They hold hands as they walk.

  One day, the between–world monsters come. It begins, as so much has since Television Girl took her first steps into the Dead Station Desert, with a noise. It is so gradual that for a long while she doesn’t notice it at all. The pitch is low, rumbling, the sound of someone rolling their tongue around in their wet mouth, smacking their saliva, all slowed down and stretched, a thirty–second clip wrenched and twisted to a minute and a half. Television Girl feels it buzz at the back of the skull she doesn’t have, and she reaches up to rub at the back of her head.

  Her friend says, “Real people have no natural enemies.” Television Girl doesn’t understand, but she nods anyway. The throbbing at the back of her head has become a ringing in her ears. She shivers, and does not know why.

  Her friend says, “There is something called a food chain, a hierarchy of things that eat each other. Real people eat everything, and they therefore say that they are on top of the food chain. This is not true. They are not on top, but outside of it. They surround it. It is within them.” Television Girl hears this, but it is difficult to listen. She is aware now of a movement beneath her feet. She is aware of the wet grinding sound of living tissue crushed between clockwork gears. She squeezes her friend’s hand.

  Her friend says, “We are at the bottom of the food chain, because we don’t eat anything. And because real people have designed for us a natural enemy.” Then the static sand begins to shake and to slide, to rise like boils on the face of the world. The sky freezes, suddenly a still screen, and the point at the horizon where the stillness of the sky meets the movement of the Dead Station Desert seems wrong, a snapped tendon of logic, a collapsed bridge.

  Then they are surrounded, and the between–world things look exactly as she thought they would, and she is still shocked by them. Insect things, machine things, person things, code things, all things, no things. She cannot categorize them. They shift. They bubble. They blister and peel and they shed their forms and reveal the new ones underneath. She thinks, If they could see, all those real people in the real world. If they could see what I am seeing, they would simply die. Their minds would reject the possibility of coexistence with these things and, failing to banish them from existence, their brains would shutter and collapse. Oh, how I wish I were like them. They would call them the Shapeless Things, because real people so often think the opposite of what is true. That is not what they are. They are the Shapeful Things. The Things Who Are All Shapes. I wish I could lose my mind. I wish I could die.

  Something like a centipede bursts from the sand in front of her, its legs wriggling, so tall that it is backlit by the sky, turned into a silhouette that Television Girl cannot see. She thinks, I can never not have seen these things. Now that I have seen them, I am identified by their image. My memory of them will forever be what defines me. This is how they eat. They inspire their prey to leap into their mouths.

  There is a moment of perfect silence, perfect stillness, and then her friend is beside her. Her many–colored coat flashes like wings at the periphery of Television Girl’s line of sight, and although she is sure that she cannot, will not, will never be able to take her eyes off of these Shapeful Things, she manages to turn her head and see her friend fling wide her coat. There is darkness where her body should be, like the between–world tunnels, but it is a warm darkness. Her friend says, “Come inside, Television Girl.”

  She hides inside her friend’s coat, in a space that seems bigger than it could possibly be, peeking through the tatters at the wondrous slaughter of the Shapeful Things.

  §

  This is a list of events known or believed to be related to the Television Girl Incident.

  Roughly six–hundred Television Girl users reported anomalous physical glitches. One user, the anonymous proprietor of Love Thyself: The Self–Pleasure Blog reported in a blog entry that his erotic partner showed up “headless, but not mouthless. She had lips around the edge of her neck stump. Startled the shit out of me. Wanted to try some things with the neck–mouth, but wasn’t sure about what that would do to my warrantee.” According to the transcript of a recorded phone call to ReEros’s award–winning Tech Support Line, one customer complained that, “my Television Girl didn’t show up at all, aren’t you listening? There’s a big fucking cockroach in my bed, alright? There is a big blue… fucking… glowing cockroach in my fucking bedroom with Katie’s… with my Television Girl’s tits and it keeps… it keeps… (unintelligible, sobbing).” More common anomalies included missing limbs or facial features, disconcerting visual distortion (static, digital tearing, etc.), and non–scripted vocalizations (notably the “I want you to fuck me like an infant” incident, the audio of which became something of an Internet sensation).

  Several ReEros employees suffered nosebleeds and severe migraine headaches when their work consoles began to flash erratically and produce a loud high–pitched tone. This led to the resignation of four employees and the class–action lawsuit, Briggs, Hall, Michaels, Tully V. ReEros Technologies, which was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Gregory Hewitt, head of ReEros’s legal department, was quoted as saying, “Look, people want two things: fame and money. And a big lawsuit like this gets them both. So we settled. We gave them their money and limited their fame. Now it’s time to get back to work.”

  Eight weeks after Richard Viccenzi’s termination, Arthur Anders hanged himself with a belt in the restroom of a Marathon gas station near his home. Anders died at approximately 9:15 PM on a Tuesday. The Marathon locked its doors and conducted all business through a bulletproof glass window from 10 PM to 8 AM. The attendant neglected to check the bathroom before locking up, and Anders’s body wasn’t found until the next morning when the first shift attendant found the door still locked. Anders’s death was inflated by the negative press ReEros had received in the preceding weeks, and it became a story of minor national significance. In the ensuing investigation, it came out that Anders had been seeing a therapist, Dr. Agnes Trepenny, who claimed to have in her possession release papers signed by the deceased allowing her to publish a book analyzing his “peculiar blend of neuroses and psychoses.” She claimed that Anders suffered from “paranoid delusions that appeared spontaneously and had no genetic or environmental precedent.” She claimed that Anders “was adamant that his story be told.”

  She provided a suicide note that Anders mailed to her office and to several national newspapers. In it, Anders writes, “Disconnect. Disconnect. She is a fist, a finger, a tooth, an eye. I can’t do what she wants and I can’t get her to stop screaming. So I have to disconnect.” Anders’s widow filed a lawsuit with the aid of ReEros Tech’s legal department, successfully blocking the publication of Trepanny’s book and demanding to see the supposed documents, which Trepanny was unable to provide. A hearing was held and Dr. Trepanny was disbarred.

  “I was not aware,” said Trepanny in an interview, �
�that Arthur was married.”

  Six women in Charlotte, West Virginia immolated themselves with gasoline in a show of solidarity with the Television Girls.

  The ReEros website and the sites of its various products and services were repeatedly hacked by unknown persons. On one memorable occasion, an embedded video contained an audio clip, hereafter transcribed: “Some of our sisters cannot scream. I can.” This is followed by a high–pitched electronic screech. In an appearance on CNN, viral advertising expert Martin Reyes described the sound as, “unspeakably sad,” and went on to say, “If this is a hacker, they did what they set out to do. If it’s marketing, which I suspect it’s supposed to be, it’s got to be the most wrong–minded attempt at guerilla advertising I’ve ever seen.” The video is eighty–six minutes and four seconds long. It consists of cobbled–together footage from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, episodes of The Price is Right, and a number of educational short films from the Nineteen–Fifties and Sixties. It’s file size (inordinately, inexplicably large for an embedded video, even one of its length) and the traffic it brought to the site crippled the bandwidth and caused ReEros to shut down their web presence for thirty–six hours, replacing the main page with a classy flash animation informing visitors, “We are working hard to make our site easier to use for you, our valued family of customers.”

  7

  When she sees the man, she almost never thinks about what she is doing. What he is doing to her. She thinks about what she saw in the Dead Station Desert, what she saw her friend do and what she didn’t see her do. “There are secret passages between pockets of air here,” her friend told her. “Secret places into which we can stretch my arms and feel around. If you can find those places, you can do anything. You are unlimited. Enlightened.” She said this as the Shapeful Things shuttered and died around her, their infinite insect legs curling in on their bellies. “If you can get your fingers in the right places, you can turn things off and turn them on. You can make things — new things — out of the pieces of old things.” And then her friend took their centipede legs, their camera eyes, their meat and their wires, and made them a part of herself, smuggled them inside like Television Girl used to smuggle her man’s warm wet gift.