It didn’t seem likely. In fact, considering your general reluctance to leave the flat without me as a security blanket, it occurred to me that coming to the High Street Complex – which was likely always the busiest place in town – was probably a total waste of time. – A completely and utterly stupid idea.
Cursing the delayed nature of my common sense, I just kept walking straight, my head snapping one way and then the other to get a look at every vaguely female shape I passed.
I couldn’t lose you, I just couldn’t. But, tearing me up inside even more than the thought of not seeing you again, was the idea of something having happened to you. You were the sweetest, kindest thing I had ever met, and the thoughts in my head of you meeting with an accident – or, even worse, something not accidental – were so unbearable that I thought they might incapacitate me, that I might fall to the floor overwhelmed by it.
If someone had hurt you; God, if anyone had made you feel scared, had damaged that perfect bubble in which you lived in any way… I’d rip their still-beating heart out and show it to them. I’d... I’d… I’d make them suffer pain they had never known, make them watch what they loved destroyed in front of them.
Loved…? I knew this psychosis in my head seemed familiar.
And, in that moment, there you were... looking up into a shop window at virtual mannequins strutting out their perpetual fashion show, that look somewhere between fear and fascination - a look I had come to know so well - etched across your face. Then maybe you felt me, I liked to think you felt me, because you turned suddenly to look straight at me, even though I was stood maybe twenty metres away with others between and around us.
We ran straight into each other’s arms, like we were in some cheesy movie. I’d never had a movie moment outside of CyberV – unless you count my ‘sad loser’ movie moments.
“I got lost, Tim,” you said, bursting into tears. “I got so lost.”
“It’s alright, my darling,” I said, stroking you and kissing the side of your head, my tactile self finally found. “I’m here now, it’s all okay.” And, quietly into your ear, for you and no one else. “I’m here, my love.”
****
That night, well I’m sure you know what happened that night…
Do I have to?
Okay, but you know I’ll turn all red.
It was… a little awkward at first. You didn’t really know what to do and I didn’t know much better. But maybe that’s what made it feel so special – it was a little bit like we were inventing it for ourselves, finding our own way, as it were.
And there’s something about lots of skin touching, it released something that existed just beyond either of our control. More than that, it took us over a little bit, guiding lips and fingers to where they needed to be, making them eager for more, more, more! You know, wanting to get further behind that barrier.
Then we were inside and around each other and still we wanted further, we wanted more. I felt you change as I went in, sublimate a little – that's a good word – changing shape to become a kind of casing around me. And still I wanted more… wanted to kiss, to touch every centimetre of you.
As we got further into it, as the feeling rose higher, my arousal was so strong that it washed through me in little waves of nausea. Nothing strong, or even that unpleasant, but it was kind of like my body saying, ‘I really can’t get much more turned on than this without something having to give’, if you know what I mean? Kind of, ‘orgasm soon, or do yourself some damage’.
Then suddenly you let out a scream. It wasn’t piercing, it wasn’t pained or even that involuntary-sounding. But it was beautiful. Somehow it meant that I was yours and that you were mine.
And, even more importantly, it meant that I hadn’t come first.
****
I awoke a little before eight on Saturday morning and was a little disappointed not to find you beside me – not just because I’d been hoping for seconds. You weren’t anywhere else in the flat, either. I looked out of the lounge window and down at the park; it was raining fairly heavily, so the picnic was out. Then I spotted you, just in view over to the right a little. You were wearing your dorky pink cardigan-
…Dorky, but cute; that’s what I meant to say.
Where was I…? Oh yeah, I knew it was you because of the cardigan. And there you sat, cross-legged on the soaking wet grass before the huge oak that I always thought seemed like it stood sentry over the park, protecting it... or something.
I threw on a coat and brought another one along for you, and hurried round and into the park. The weather was truly awful, the rain falling in sheets so that, even before I reached you, my own coat had been rendered rather pointless.
“Just my luck to get the defective model,” I joked as I reached you. It was actually a horrifically insensitive thing to say, but probably still trumped my cringingly-needy alternative opening line of, ‘Okay, no more sex, just come in before you catch your death of cold.’ Either way, you seemed not to hear me over the noise of the weather.
I wrapped your coat as tightly as I could around you, but you kept looking up at the tree until I spoke again. “Are you alright, Mina, what’s wrong?”
You turned to me then, your face a cascade of so many water droplets that one was hardly distinguishable from any other. You had pulled your hair back, but the previous night’s activities and the rain had succeeded in making a tangled mess of it nonetheless; your ears were red-rimmed and stood out so as to make me notice – not for the first time – what funny little things they were. I guess no one’s ears look like they belong on their head if it comes down to it, but yours have always had this elongated quality that makes them look almost elven.
Those deep, brown eyes of yours looked seriously up at me for a long time and you shivered once or twice just before you finally spoke, opening your left hand to reveal an acorn in you palm.
“How does this turn into that?” you asked, gesturing towards the gigantic tree.
It took a moment for me to realise that the question wasn’t in some way rhetorical. “Um, sunshine... rain, minerals from the ground. But mostly just lots of time.”
“Just time...” you kind of repeated to yourself.
I shuffled closer to you, squatted lower so my arse started getting wet. I thought about placing a comforting hand on your knee, but the awkwardness of the moment had let my touching phobia back in.
“What’s the matter, Mina?” I pushed. “Tell me what’s upset you and maybe I can make it better. My mother always said that a problem shared is a problem halved.”
“Making love to you last night was amazing,” you said suddenly.
Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn’t that. Not that it wasn’t incredibly welcome, of course – indeed, I’d have been pretty over the moon with ‘passable’. But it didn’t explain why my feet were doing an Atlantis inside my shoes. I was also a little disturbed by talk of sex coming straight after mention of my mother.
You glanced back up at the tree for a moment, then to me again as you continued. “I felt... I felt how I was supposed to feel. I felt like a person... like a woman. I... understood.”
“Understood what?”
“It’s like you said, about hunger. Sex is like that. It’s so good because human beings need it to... what’s the word...? Procreate. And it was so good, so wonderful, and I felt so much last night, so many things that I could never find the words to describe.”
“But this is all good, isn’t it?”
“No it’s not, it’s really... f-fucking not good!” You swore; you never swore! “Because I’m not human.”
“You a-” I tried to make the obvious – yet sincere – platitude, but you cut me off before I could do so.
“-I can’t have babies, I can’t make life, so why was having sex so amazing for me?”
“Plenty of women can’t have babies without some sort of medical help, or surrogacy, or something,” I argued.
“But that’s just unfortunate, that�
��s just bad luck. But I was made this way, as is every cyborg, not just the companion models. The males can’t make anyone pregnant and the females can’t get pregnant. That’s the way it is.
“Even the tree can make life; it has a purpose, it can carry itself on. It can’t even think and yet it knows what it is.”
I tried my best to keep up, I so very much wanted to understand what you were going through, but for such a bright and emotional person I had never been particularly empathetic. It was just... I couldn’t really pinpoint what was getting to you. Was it that sex was good or that you couldn’t have babies? I was pretty sure that CyberG would have taken into account the maternal instinct when they designed companions. Why prevent you from having babies only to leave the desire behind? If nothing else, it wasn’t a good way to win yourself satisfied customers if all these guys (and possibly gals, commerce isn’t judgemental when there are euros at stake) found themselves with miserable, broody partners.
Then again, was any of this actually something that CyberG could control? Part of how the companion worked was that you had to develop a personality of your own. I really knew nothing about these things, but it seemed quite possible to me that broodiness wouldn’t only be a result of having a functioning womb and a monthly period and all that. I tried to remember what TV programmes we had been watching with babies in.
“What are you doing?” you asked, pulling me from my thoughts and causing me to realise that I had been staring off into the distance for an amount of time that could have been anything.
“Performing an internal monologue, apparently,” I replied.
“Oh... what?”
“Don’t you ever get that?” I said, helplessly carrying on despite my better judgement. “Just chatting away to yourself in your head like you’re at the centre of your own movie, or something.” God, could I look any more insensitive? Never mind your emotional crisis, dear, I’ve got to wax irrelevant.
Suddenly you threw your sopping wet arms around my neck. “I’m sorry,” you sobbed into my ear, only barely audible above the howl of the wind and the hiss of the rain, “I made our happy time sad.”
It was such a beautiful way to say it. For all my wordiness, I swear you are so much better a wordsmith than I could ever be.
“I love you, Mina,” I said into your freakishly-shaped ear. “That means if you’re happy, I’m happy... and if you’re sad, I’m sad...
“...
“...
“And okay that was irrelevant and didn’t make a great deal of sense, but I’m new at this stuff, just like you are.”
And then you said one more thing, rising to your feet straight afterwards so that I had no chance either to protest or to ask you why before the whole conversation seemed to be caught up with the wind and the moment removed from us to be deposited again at the edge of the nearest area of high pressure.
“I don’t know what I am.”
* * *
Chapter 10
Okay, we’ll move the story on a way now. In fact, we’re going to move it on the best part of three years. I know I’m missing out on a lot of stuff and that I’m hardly keeping to my promise to tell you ‘everything’, but the way that I ramble on we’ll be here until X-mas if I don’t cut to the chase a little. Well, cut to the events that would lead us to our proverbial chase, at any rate.
It was January and I was about a month from my thirty-sixth birthday. You, aging at about one and a half to two times what we would call ‘normal,’ were now maybe a little into the second half of your twenties. And you had aged really well. Most of the time aging is harder on women’s looks than it is on men’s; what is seen as making us men attractive often develops more as we head towards middle age, whereas so many women, even by their mid or late twenties, lose something with the lines and shape of their face that they never get back. Cosmetic surgery can fix that unsightly facial feature or make an older woman seem not so old, but (it’s always seemed to me) it can’t recapture true youthfulness.
Spending day in and day out with you, I could see how you had changed, how the lines of your face had straightened, and how the curves had become more angular. But at the same time, and with the right outfit on and your hair made up a certain way, I’d have put money on you being able to pass for eighteen if you had wanted to.
So, what else had changed in our lives? We had moved, for one thing. Yes, globe-trotting wanderers that we were, we had moved about forty or fifty metres from our old flat down to a house on Cordery Road. The view wasn’t quite as good, as a portion of it was now blocked by the great oak tree, but we had more space and a moderately sized garden of our own. Well, your own, as it was you who did ninety-five percent of the work in it, obsessed as you were – and still are – with growing things.
I had changed jobs, too. Well, kind of. I still worked for Cyberlife Systems, but now as a self-employed contractor helping to create a database that would feature in the new generation of CyMedia Home Systems due to be released in time for the following X-mas.
But otherwise, most stuff was the same, I guess. We were happy and we were in love. I know I had paid for you in the first place, that you had not come to be with me because we had chanced to meet at some party or used the same gym, or something, hitting it off over coffee and ending up feeling like two souls pulled inexorably together across the vastness of the ether.
I may be a bit of a romantic, but I’m not a cretin. You loved me because I was a pretty good guy, but you also loved me because that was the way you had been made. I loved you because you were loveable and because, unlike the other four and a half billion women in the world, you were there and wanted to be with me. Alright, our love was maybe a little more contrived than most, but I couldn’t really see why that made it any less valid or any less real.
Love is love, isn’t it? And every time we went for a walk alongside the river, holding hands and sharing secret smiles, I still felt like the luckiest man in the world; how I had come to feel that way didn’t matter one jot.
And it was on one of those walks on a mild, but rainy Sunday afternoon in January that we would meet the man who would be such a big part of the changes that were just about to take over our life together. I can’t say that I haven’t wondered what would have happened if we had never met Rupert Gardner, whether our lives would have been easier and just carried on as they were until we reached the same point that we have now... just, you know, a bit later on. I suppose you can say better than me whether you would have endured the same personal trials, undergone the same torments and pursued a similar personal quest if that man had never come into our lives.
I think you probably would have. But as much as I think I resented him at first, I have to admit that, without the framework that he gave us, you may not have made it through. We may not have made it. Then again, who knows? Maybe that man never brought us anything but pain and heartache and, ultimately, a sense of failure. I just don’t know.
****
We had been out walking for a good hour or so, my feet were getting tired and I was looking forward to getting home and curling up on the sofa together for a little while before we had to think about getting dinner. The days were still woefully short and the heavy cloud cover had made the afternoon start to feel like evening already. I think almost everyone is pretty fed up of winter by that time of year, ready for the lighter evenings and the more outdoor lifestyle, but the thing which I’ve always loved about winter is getting in from the cold and appreciating home’s comforts – so much more so since you had been there to appreciate them with me.
We were meandering alongside the Exe down at the quay, the rain fell in extra-fine droplets and every time a gust of wind blew it into your face you would close your eyes and take a deep breath, sometimes sticking your tongue out a little to taste it. You caught me watching you and, far from self-conscious about it, gifted me a completely unguarded smile and went back to your tasting.
It would be easy to say that you were like a child, bu
t more and more I’ve come to hate that term. To me it seems to suggest that children are the only beings who should take great joy from, and find wonder in, simple things. If that were true, then the definition of an adult would be ‘joyless, without wonder and annoyed by pretty much everything’.
I didn’t see it coming, but suddenly your lips were on mine and your tongue was in my mouth briefly, just long enough to quickly brush across the tip of my own tongue. You came away beaming, your eyes searching my face. “Can you taste it?” you asked, but didn’t wait for answer, instead grabbing my hand to lead me away in the wrong direction for home.
“Aren’t we going home?” I asked, with just a hint of implied complaint.
“I don’t want to yet,” you replied, and I had to let it go because – though I would certainly never have called you an unhappy or maudlin person – you were very, very rarely as effervescent as this, and I just had to see where it was going.
Suddenly the rain was gone and only the slightest hint of it still danced in the wind around and about us. The sky above lightened a little – though there was no chance of the clouds actually clearing – and evening started to turn back towards afternoon again.
“I had a dream last night,” you said after a minute or so of silence.
“You’ve been dreaming a lot recently,” I replied, not so much with any significance attached to it, just a statement as an alternative to an ‘Uh-huh’, or a nod, or no reply at all. But it was true, you had been. You had hardly dreamed at all in most of your first two years with me. I’d heard once that we all dream every night, so the dreams that we remember are... well, just that. CyberG hadn’t mentioned the subject of dreams at all, so I had no idea if this was the case with you.
“Yeah, I have,” you said a little distantly. “Don’t know why... Anyway, in this dream... Sorry, did you want to hear about my dream?”
I laughed. “Always.”
“Okay, in this dream these aliens came to Earth.”
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