He sits on the couch in his tattered coat. He pictures her just beyond the card, mending a dress on the floor, her head swaying side to side as she works. That face he was expecting to see as he walked through the city and climbed those stairs not more than two hours ago. That face with its ice pick cheekbones, hair as soft as a charcoal smudge, and that eye with the little red fleck.
“I’m a C-900,” she explained after he offered to buy her a new eye to replace the one with the flaw. “Swapping any of my parts would change my aura. It would make me a completely different woman.”
“Then how about having it fixed or colored in so people don’t know right away you’re a bot?”
“But I am a bot,” she said plainly. “And I like my little red flaw.”
Put there by a worker on the Hasegawa assembly line, she would never know who or why. Perhaps it was a mistake or a whispered protest or a cry for attention from deep in the machine. The flaw cost her the job she was designed for when the school that ordered her sent her back to the factory for a replacement. Not up to standard for a teacher. Might scare the children, they claimed.
To recoup costs Hasegawa leased her out at a discount for a series of manufacturing gigs. She painted cars, built furniture, sewed clothes. She was good with her hands and had an eye for design. During their liquidation, the labor provider auctioned her off to one Takeshi Matsuo, artist out of San Francisco, who gave her his last name. Matsuo appreciated her talent and trained her to be a creative. He employed her to increase his productivity and suffer his abuse.
“Sex is expected,” she once told Eliot, “and Tak really took it out on me before he got old. But he did teach me a lot about art.”
With no heirs to whom he could pass her down, the old letch released her in his will upon his death. He left Iris money for a rental deposit in Los Angeles and a recommendation for employment at Mun’s Chug-Bot factory in Heron. She was released as a free roamer with no owner to her title. A creative with a mysterious red fleck. What her author intended by marking her, Iris would never know, and now she can never know because she is gone. Disappeared. The whisper heard but not acted upon. The objection overruled. The cry from the deep ignored.
A draft from the busted window blows cold air against his neck. Eliot reaches instinctively for a vial, but his hand refuses. No more, it says. You should feel this cold and sickening air. You should suffer what was caused by your lazy indifference, by your inattentiveness, by your Pollyanna faith that everything would be all right. One more commissions, you told her. Just wait another month. I’ll ask my brother the next time I see him.
If you had any balls, you would have stolen a boat, or saved up and bought one months ago instead of wasting your money on this shit you suck into your lungs three times a day. You chose a drug over a soul mate, now live with it. Wallow in your decision. Go back to work on Monday with your life less complicated by love. Go work for your drug, your rent, your liquid screen, your cushy little life of whorehouses, pit fights, and suits stitched together by the very androids whose lives you sell in bulk.
His mouth floods with bloody saliva. He starts to puke, but there’s nothing in his get. Just a long trail of runny red spit. Just the emptiness and the need to get out.
He rises from the couch and searches among Iris’s clothes. Picking through the closet, he imagines her body giving shape to the dresses hanging on the rack. He grabs what garments he remembers her wearing and stuffs them into a broken suitcase he finds beneath the bed. He packs the bot cord, a slashed painting, a few random pieces of jewelry her attacker left behind. All with her signature red fleck. Even the furniture and the clothes she made for herself, each garment has at least a red spot or a red thread running through it. He zips her things into the suitcase and shuts off the light as he leaves.
“Drip Kills,” says the adbrane at the bus stop. A big, red X flashes in front of a vial and a hanky. He carries Iris’s suitcase past the sign while his mind speculates about what happened two nights before. Who was it and how did he get in? Was it friend or foe, neighbor or coworker? Did she scream? Did she reach for a brane and try to call? Did she fight back or accept that her time had come? In her final moments, Eliot wonders, did she think of me and Avernus—What did it do to her, how much did it hurt, to know she’d never make it?
“Drip Kills,” says the billboard above the motel on Santa Monica. He hurries up the block carrying Iris’s suitcase north beneath a filthy, yellow moon punched from the sky like an exhaust hole in a high, black dome. His shoulder hurts. The pain cuts across his back. He passes Fountain then Sunset then Hollywood as a dim light rises from the east. He ascends Beachwood Canyon dragging Iris’s suitcase behind him. He passes the elementary school and the barbed wire fences on the houses along the street. His dragging foot wakes a gen-modded dog who growls to protect his turf.
Spare key under the rock in the driveway, Eliot enters his apartment and closes the blinds. He tells his deskbrane to play a Hawk Jones album. He unpacks the suitcase and lays an outfit across the floor as if he were dressing her.
He rubs her panties across his face and smells them and brushes his lips over the place where her privates had been. Over the underwear, he puts the long, tight skirt she wore with canvas sneakers. He puts an off-the-shoulder sweater atop the skirt and a curved hat above the absence where her head should be. He adds the knit gloves he found, one in the drawer and one in the bathroom. They don’t match, but neither do her socks, and that’s how she wore them.
He remembers the eyeball locket he found outside her apartment. The piece she always wore, the piece with the red fleck that echoed the flaw in her eye. With a trembling hand, he withdraws it from his pocket and places it atop her sweater as if it were hanging from the slender reeds of her neck. It’s a finishing touch that can’t bring form to the absent body, but it adds another layer. The clothes, the accessories, the jewels—her choices remain if not her body. A representation in place of the real thing, unless you don’t believe a bot is the real thing, in which case this is a representation of a representation. Five foot eight from shoes to hat, horizontal on the floor. Here is preserved some shadow, some lack in the universe where a woman once was. It’s as if Eliot hopes that by piling up these remnants of her existence he can asymptotically extend her essence close enough to the axis of her reality that the space between her representation and her being will disappear.
Music haunts the room. Dawn starts behind the blinds as Eliot lays beside the clothes and puts his arm across the void where her ribs would be. He closes his eyes and smells her in her clothes and tells her he is sorry. He is sorry he let her down, sorry he didn’t do better, sorry he didn’t keep his word and take her to Avernus. He is sorry he gave his money and his time to death instead of life.
Hawk Jones through the speakers. A dim light just bright enough to illuminate his shame. He cannot tolerate more light.
Eliot walks from the outline of the woman at his feet and sits on the couch in his torn coat and removes two vials of drip from the pocket of his coat. He twists off the caps and pours the contents into a dirty cloth.
“Drip Kills,” say the signs that syncopate the streets beneath the canyon.
Let’s hope it kills quick.
He lays the cloth across his hand and looks again at the red-flecked locket. He harbors no illusions about an afterworld, no belief he’s going to join her. He just sees no reason to continue. What is there now, what is left other than a habit masquerading as a life? What is my purpose from this point forth other than to further contribute to a grand project in which I never believed?
He empties the air from his chest as he raises the cloth to his face. About to suck the drip into his lungs, just as he’s ready to take his final breath, it occurs to Eliot that there is something inside the red-flecked locket he has never seen. Never asked to see it because if she wanted him to see it she would have offered to show him what was inside. He never wanted to rush her, thought there would always be time.
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Moving quickly so the cloth won’t dry, he turns on the desk lamp and snaps the latch open. The engraving reveals itself in the light:
IRIS MATSUO
C-900
SERIAL #G14-95-7789
No message. Nothing personal. Just a string of data.
Just her name, model, and serial number, like the make, model, and plate number on a car. Or more like a vehicle ID number, because the serial number would appear on every one of Iris’s parts.
The same number.
On every C-900 part.
Each of which would be necessary if Eliot were to rebuild her into the same android she was, with the same memories, the same aura, the same love and affection.
Eliot looks over his shoulder at the assemblage of clothes laid out on the floor of his apartment.
“You dropped a bread crumb, didn’t you?” he asks.
The clothes admit nothing in response.
PART TWO
EIGHT
Made in Heron
In 1908, in an acreage of ranchland adjacent to the southeast corner of Los Angeles, the City of Heron was incorporated as an exclusively industrial city intended to bring commerce to the Southern California region. The three major rail lines that crisscrossed the area allowed factories to have easy access to markets throughout the Southwest. The city’s founders extended the trolley line from downtown L.A. and offered subsidized electricity from their new utility, Heron Light and Power. To attract business, they built a sports stadium, staged prizefights, and opened the world’s first traveling carnival that didn’t travel. U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Owens, Alcoa, and Studebaker all answered the call and helped transform the former tribal land of the Gabrielino Indians into the largest industrial hub in the region.
During WWII, Heron’s location again played a role in its development as the city was far enough from the Pacific to be out of range for Japanese bombers but close enough for America’s aerospace industry to ship planes quickly to the naval bases dotting the California Coast. Workers migrated from around the country seeking employment in Heron’s factories. African Americans fleeing the racism of the South built thriving middle-class communities in neighboring Watts, Inglewood, and South Central L.A. at while on the opposite side of the city, East Los Angeles became a stepping stone for immigrant Latinos aspiring toward the American Dream.
After the post-war boom, Heron’s meteoric rise came to an abrupt end as U.S. manufacturing suffered a long, slow decline that decimated America’s industrial cities. Politicians wrung their hands while workers struggled to compete with the lower costs and wages in developing nations. As the jobs disappeared, the middle class enclaves that housed Heron’s employees lost their tax base and crumbled in the face of urban blight. Race riots broke out in ’65 and ’92 in response to police brutality. Fires burned in Watts and South Central, and the business owners who abandoned the smoldering rubble of their stores opted never to return.
In 2007, an LA Times exposé accused the descendants of Heron’s founding families of running the city as their own personal fiefdom, in which they attracted businesses with near-zero tax rates while collecting vast revenues through the sale of water from their private aquifer and electricity from Heron Light and Power. Out of the profits, they paid themselves exorbitant salaries then retired to bloated pensions paid out of a state fund. According to the Times, city administrators manipulated local governance by preventing Heron’s population from exceeding the fourteen people who officially lived there (as opposed to the thousands who commuted every day for work). Fourteen people! All of whom were city employees. All of whom could be depended on to vote the same way in every election so that decades would pass without any changes in office.
In the wake of the scandal, Heron’s mayor, police chief, and head of the city council were all indicted while the mayor’s son, a principal at a local Catholic school, was jailed for molesting his students. Later in the year, the governor proposed to unincorporate Heron and fold it back into Los Angeles, but by then, most Californians had lost interest in the story. Either that or they didn’t want to absorb Heron’s problems. After all, the country was on the precipice of a recession, and most of Heron’s factories had already been shuttered. Its roads were cracked; its stores closed; squatters and junkies had taken over the streets. The tribal-land-turned-industrial hub kept only slaughterhouses and rendering facilities as active tenants, and the stench of burnt pig flesh hung over the entire five-square miles of industrial, political decay.
To understand how Heron was reborn as an economic powerhouse midway through the twenty-first century, one needs to look no further than to a young Hiram Lazar, who first conceived of the android workforce as we know it today. While taking an intro to economics class (macro) as a sophomore at Caltech, the young engineering student wrote a paper that critiqued industrial America’s preference for using machines instead of human labor. He received a B- for his effort.
These were his theses:
1. Automated factories are more costly than low-tech factories in developing nations. The machines that have replaced humans in the United States require a large start-up expenditure for purchase or lease and further expenditures for maintenance and repair. While they are cheaper to use than union labor, the machines still cost more than third-world workers, for whom the only cost is a paltry living wage. Furthermore, because large machines are neither wage earners nor consumers, they do not create additional markets for purchasing the goods they produce.
2. Automated factories are less adaptable than those using human labor. With the rapid advance of technology, heavy machines designed for specific tasks are often obsolete by the time they start production. They cannot adapt quickly to the changing demands of a dynamic market. To compete, companies repeatedly purchase or lease “new” machines and dump the “old” ones for a loss. In comparison, third-world workers can adapt and develop new skills. They can innovate, find capital, and create new businesses on their own thus creating more wealth for their respective economies.
3. It is more difficult for management to communicate with machines than with humans. Even the smallest alterations in production require trained technicians to communicate those changes to custom-built machines. Dependence on these “specialists” costs additional monies and wastes valuable time. Furthermore, machines don’t respond well to human alerts. They can’t jump to their feet and run when they hear an alarm—especially if they don’t have feet. Recent oil rig, nuclear, and factory disasters all show that machines only react to problems anticipated by their designers. Anything unanticipated is beyond the machine’s capacity for recognition or reaction.
By the time he left college, Lazar had articulated a strategy to improve U.S. manufacturing by designing androids that would outcompete overseas workers. Rather than buying or leasing heavy machinery, companies could pay a labor provider one salary per android that was less than a foreign worker’s wage.
Lazar likened his new start-up, which was called Daihanu, to a temp agency that manufactured, owned, and leased out temps. He proposed to build his “temps” in various sizes, ages, and races so as to satisfy the demands of any regional or niche market. He wanted workers who could combine the durability and efficiency of machines with the adaptability and creativity of humans. As he described them in his business plan:
Workers who can download skills as computers do instead of taking weeks to train; who can abso`rb up-to-the-minute information at the touch of a button; who can stop an assembly line when someone is caught in a belt; who can anticipate problems and find ways to solve them before catastrophe strikes.
The cost of building its first prototypes made financing Daihanu a risky venture, but knowing that androids would increase the demand for electricity, Lazar’s partners appealed to energy companies to round out the initial funding. They took money from tobacco and alcohol conglomerates in exchange for a promise to give the bots a taste for cigarettes and booze. Soft drink companies and coffee growers ch
ipped in to ensure that bots would have caffeine addictions that would expand the market for their products as well.
With the start-up capital secured, Lazar’s team built the first batch of prototypes then enlisted the prototypes themselves to make a second generation of androids faster and smarter than the first. Thus the engineers who worked at Daihanu’s first lab built their own replacements and, upon completing their jobs, found themselves out of work. The third batch of androids was faster, smarter, and more efficient than the second.
The and with the funding nearly exhausted, Daihanu finally began leasing its product to mining interests, oil rigs, industrial farms, deep-sea extractors, NASA, military contractors, fast-food chains, hotels, government services, and private homes. The company was a quick success, and within two years, competing entrepreneurs had copied Daihanu’s business model as they reverse engineered his product. They built and leased androids that looked, sounded, and talked just like human workers—the only discernible differences being an outlet for a navel and a spinning engine for a heart. Hence, human workers came to be known as heartbeats while machine workers came to be known as bots.
During its initial phase of mass production, the standard android on the market could toil for eighteen hours straight, seven days a week, in conditions that would kill your average heartbeat. The bots were precise; they worked fast; they didn’t complain, demand benefits, or belong to any unions. They didn’t even need a lunch break, just an occasional parts upgrade, a monthly oil change, and a nightly recharge, which the leasees were not obligated to supply.
Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A Novel Page 7