Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A Novel

by Judd Trichter

  “I hope you die,” says the digger. “I hope you rot from cancer and die.”

  Caruso sings. Eliot aims from his position. He lines up the sights. His arm outstretched. His hand shakes. He moves in closer for a better shot.

  The DJ looks at the monitor to make sure his masterpiece is in frame. Caruso sings. The girl curses and pulls against the cuffs.

  Plant your feet, says the gun. Point and squeeze.

  The saw buzzes. “Help me!”

  Now, says the gun.

  The DJ touches the spinning blade to her breast. The teeth of the saw splatter oil across the room. The girl screams.

  What are you waiting for, asks the gun.

  Oil flies from her chest.

  Shoot, says the gun. Goddamnit, shoot!

  With the blade in the fold of the digger’s chest, Pink sees a peculiar shadow stretching up the wall before him. He turns to the monitor and notes a third actor in his film, a specter in a black hoodie, extending a shaking gun toward his head.

  Damnit, I told you to shoot!

  Pink hurls the saw at Eliot who ducks and fires at the same time. The saw misses and flies out the window. The digger twists and flops. Eliot fires again, but he’s late. The DJ leaps from the bed and wrestles him for the gun. Their feet slip on the oil-wet plastic; the two men slam to the carpeted floor.

  Outside, the spinning saw blade cuts into the brick exterior of the building. Inside, it pulls the cord taut beside the wrestlers’ heads. Pink bangs Eliot’s hand against the floor, and the gun falls from his grip. Eliot crawls for it, but the DJ pulls him back. The digger struggles against her restraints stretching out her wrist as Eliot feels the blunt force of knuckles smashing the back of his head. His face collides with the floor. Blood clouds his vision. His weak hand grabs for the gun, but the DJ finds it first. He turns Eliot over and shoves the nozzle into his mouth, pushing Iris’s finger to the back of Eliot’s throat.

  “Who are you?” he asks, blood and oil splashed in his made-up face. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Eliot chokes on the finger, gagging as Pink yanks up his shirt to find a heartbeat’s navel.

  “Too bad,” says the DJ. “I coulda got something for your parts.”

  He cocks the hammer on the gun. A loaded chamber clicks into place. It has betrayed me, Eliot thinks. The machine left me for a new master. All it took was a moment’s hesitation, and now the machine has pledged its support for my enemy.

  And just as the DJ is about to squeeze the trigger and blow Eliot’s brains across the plastic-coated floor, a small, hard object pitches through the air and nails him in the back of the head.

  Pink turns to see what hit him.

  He sees the legless digger had yanked free a hand, unscrewed her other fist, then hurled it at his head. Having hit its intended target, the little fist now rolls on the floor like an unexploded grenade.

  The DJ laughs at her impotence. He calls her a cunt as he withdraws the gun from Eliot’s mouth and aims it across the bed.

  “Your face is too ugly to sell anyway,” he tells her. “It looks cheap.”

  He lines up the sight and closes one eye to aim.

  But in the moment Pink pauses to watch the digger squirm, to enjoy another display of her suffering, Eliot grabs for the taut cord of the radial saw and yanks it with everything he has. Before Pink can fire a round, that same saw that he used for his cruel dissection crashes through the upper sash of the window, flies across the room, and slices unencumbered through his extended arm. The limb thuds roughly to the floor, its hand still clutching the weapon. The saw races beneath the bed and hits the table with the phonograph, knocking the needle from the disk, on bringing Caruso’s aria to an end.

  Pink looks at the record player. He looks to where the gun should be. He sees his severed arm on the floor. Blood spurts from his shoulder. Now it’s his turn to scream.

  Eliot grabs him by the hair and slams his head to the floor. His rage gets the better of him. He straddles the DJ’s chest and pounds him with his metal fist, raining violence on the eyes, nose, and teeth of his adversary.

  “Where is she?” he asks, the finger falling from his mouth. “Where’s Iris?”

  Pink tries to block the punches but can’t defend himself with only one arm.

  “Help me!” he cries. “Help! Somebody!”

  Free of her restraint, the digger reaches to the floor and grabs her detached hand. She screws it on as Eliot smashes the bones in Pink’s face.

  “A C-900. Red fleck in her eye. Where is she?”

  “Help! Help me!”

  “Normandie Boulevard.” Eliot slams Pink’s head into the pool of oil and blood. “You were at her house. You attacked her in her house!”

  The DJ quiets as his life drips onto the plastic-coated floor.

  “Where is she? Where are her parts?”

  He stops defending himself. His face softens into a wide-mouthed sob. Eliot pauses his assault. Naked on the bed, the digger reattaches a leg as best she can. She clicks it into the oil-drenched socket of her hip.

  “Where is she?” Eliot asks again.

  The blood is everywhere. It’s on his clothes and skin. Eliot feels it clumped in his eyelashes and his hair. He searches frantically for Iris’s finger and finds it beside the corpse.

  “Is he dead?”

  The digger asks. “You killed him, right?”

  Eliot looks at the bot on the bed. Her parts and wires spill out of her smart metal flesh. Her legs are on crooked and oil streams from her chest.

  “He’s dead, right?” She asks a about the man with whom she was making love twenty minutes ago.

  Pink’s eyes stare blankly at the ceiling. The symmetry is gone from his half-crushed face. The pool of blood expands, widening to cover more floor. The walls are splattered, the bed is soaked, the light shines brightly on the scene.

  “You were never here,” Eliot tells her.

  “Oh, I was here.” She pulls on her skirt.

  “You never saw me.”

  “I know.” She tests her damaged legs. “You’re invisible.”

  “Get out,” Eliot tells her. “Get out of here now.”

  On mauled and crippled limbs, the digger lurches from the bedroom. She grabs her clothes and falls out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her and leaving Eliot alone in the quiet slop of the massacre.

  Minutes pass. Eliot remains on his knees in the aftermath of his crime. The sound of the city bleeds through the window as the phonograph rotates with its needle off the disk.

  Keep your head, he tells himself. Even if the neighbors heard something, it took two days for the cops to respond to a disturbance at Iris’s. No reason it won’t take just as long here. Be methodical. Stay calm and you have a chance. Don’t do anything rash, anything or stupid, and you might even get away with it.

  Blood soaks through his jeans. Oil on the walls. He listens for a siren or a knock on the door. But nothing comes. No one comes. No one yet.

  He rinses off Iris’s finger in the kitchen and puts it back in his mouth. He finds a pair of rubber gloves in a cabinet beneath the sink. He finds rags and garbage bags. He finds a mop and fills a bucket with water and ammonia.

  Eliot pries the pistol from Pink’s hand and wipes it clean before returning it to the holster. He puts the gun and holster on the desk. He uses a sponge to scrub beneath Pink’s fingernails and remove any DNA that might have collected there during the fight. He wraps Pink’s severed arm in a towel. He wraps the body in the plastic coating from the floor and hauls it onto the bed. He removes the memory card from the camera and smashes it on the floor. He puts the pieces into two separate bags. He smashes the camera and throws its pieces into two bags as well. He takes out his wallet, his keys, Iris’s locket, his pocketbrane and sets them all on the desk. He places Iris’s finger beside the holstered gun. He takes off his bloodstained clothes and stands naked in his socks and rubber gloves, then puts his shoes back on. He separates his clothes into the two bags.


  Eliot wears the gloves and shoes in the shower as he washes. He scrubs the blood from his skin and washes it out of his hair. He picks his hair out of the drain and flushes it down the toilet. He looks at his cuts and bruises and covers the worst of them with adhesives he finds behind the reflective brane above the sink. He towels off and throws the towel in a bag.

  Damn. That milk shake he drank earlier wants out.

  He sits on the bilet and can’t believe what comes out of him. He flushes twice and cleans the seat with ammonia. He pours ammonia in the toilet and scrubs it clean with a brush he leaves in the bowl.

  He mops the floor in the bedroom leaving everything wet with blood or oil on top of the bed. He mops the bathroom, rinses the mop in the tub, then breaks off the stick. He throws the head of the mop in one garbage bag and the stick in the other.

  He puts on a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts he finds in the DJ’s drawer. He grabs a leather jacket and a pair of jeans from the closet; he has to roll them up so they’ll fit. He takes his wallet, keys, and phone from the desk and puts them in the pockets of the jeans. He grabs the locket and Iris’s finger as well. He throws the gun and holster into the backpack. He washes the desk with ammonia. He wipes down the closet, the windows, and everything in the apartment he might have touched with a bare hand.

  Eliot slaps one of Pink’s baseball caps over his head, covers his face with a pair of sunglasses, and takes a pair of sneakers from the shoe rack. He walks to the living room and takes off his shoes and the wet socks he had worn in the shower. He puts on Pink’s sneakers without letting his feet touch the ground. He throws his wet shoes and socks into two separate bags. He slings the backpack with Pink’s laptop over his shoulders and carries the garbage bags out the door. He still wears the rubber gloves.

  Eliot chooses the stairwell over the elevator. He waits by the backdoor of the building until a surveillance drone passes overhead. In an alley a few blocks away, he tosses a garbage bag into a dumpster. He walks to another alley and dumps the second bag. He takes the gun from the backpack and pops the remaining bullets from the cylinder. One by one, he wipes them clean with Pink’s shirt then kicks them into a storm drain. He wipes the gun clean then kicks that into the drain as well. He throws the holster in behind it. He takes off the rubber gloves and puts them in the backpack and walks up Vine.

  On an empty bus rambling through the city, Eliot opens Pink’s laptop and turns it on. He ignores the pictures and volumes of music and loops. He zips past the calendars and the gaming apps and finds a spreadsheet in a folder marked “sales.” He takes Iris’s locket from his pocket and types in the serial number.

  The information card is laid out on a grid with the prices in a separate column:

  Gender: F

  Model: C-900

  Buyers:

  The son of a bitch listed the buyers.

  Clothes—Aardvark Clothing

  Jewels—Pound’s Antiques

  Pocketbrane—CS Electrics

  It’s all there.

  Arms—Uchenna

  Head,—Jillian Rose Models

  Legs—Tucson Metal Solutions

  Torso—Chief Shunu

  Eyes—Blumenthal Promotions

  Loop—

  Loop?

  Eliot stops.

  There’s another passenger on the bus, a bald heartbeat lost in his newsbrane, staring at it through Coke-bottle glasses when he isn’t dozing off into sleep. The bus rolls north on Vine, noisy and loud through a crumbling tunnel beneath the street.

  Don’t watch the loop, thinks Eliot. No need to see her like that. Remember her from the time you spent together, the nights at the Hotel Café, the drives on Mulholland, the evenings beneath the Hollywood Sign. Remember Iris in her apartment, working on her projects, her head swaying from side-to-side, dreaming about the world through a child’s eyes.

  Eliot clicks on the loop.

  The screen shows Iris in her apartment, scared and hog-tied in her own bed. “Una Furtiva Lagrima” plays over the image of her terrified face. Her one brown eye with that little red fleck.

  “Please don’t,” she cries softly to the camera. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Eliot reaches into his pocket and squeezes her pinky finger. He watches her face on the screen as the camera zooms to a close up of her eye.

  “Please,” she pleads for mercy.

  Eliot lowers the volume but listens as the bus emerges from the tunnel.

  A machete blade crosses her face before it whistles out of frame.

  “No!” she screams, and Eliot slams the laptop shut.

  PART THREE

  FIFTEEN

  The Hunt

  The story hasn’t broken yet in the morning when Eliot reads the newsfeed in the reflective brane above his sink. His face is a mess. Lip swollen, cut knuckles, a shiner half shuts his eye.

  Too wound up, Eliot hasn’t slept a wink. He spent the night combing the Web for info on the buyers listed on Pink’s laptop. He has a list and a plan. All morning, he has been waiting for the day to begin, for people to get to their offices so he can start making calls. The door is open now. Finding out what happened is no longer the juice; getting Iris’s parts is. He has to grab them before they’re sold a second time, before they’re chopped into smaller and smaller components, if they haven’t already been. He has to get every piece in one place, solder her together, and get his ass out of Dodge before the law catches up.

  A pair of sunglasses covers the bruising on his face. He slants a derby over his head and takes the bus to work. He’s in a crowded elevator when he catches his first glimpse of the headline on a newsbrane he reads over a woman’s shoulder:

  MUSICIAN KILLED AT EL ROYALE

  SUSPECT AT LARGE

  There’s a loop of the raven-haired digger who went home with Pink. They even print her name:

  ALEXANDRA PLATH

  DM-6 SERIES ANDROID

  CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS

  Sally, the secretarybot, greets him as Eliot passes her desk.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lazar.”

  “Morning, Sally.”

  “Oh, and Mr. Lazar?”

  “Yes, Sally?”

  “Just got a call from Pete Maddox at Harris Farms. He wants to talk about an order for this year’s harvest.”

  “Thank you, Sally.”

  “Oh, and Mr. Lazar?”

  “Yes, Sally?”

  “Miss Santiago is in town and wants to know if you’re available for…”

  “Not today.”

  “Oh, and Mr. Lazar?”

  “Yes, Sally?”

  “A Detective Jean-Michel Flaubert called from the Rampart Division of the LAPD. He left his number.”

  “Thanks.”

  Flaubert? Shit. Why is he calling? Eliot walks the corridor to his office wondering if he’s a suspect already. Was I that sloppy, did I leave evidence behind, even after I spent all that time cleaning up? His shoulder stings as he takes off his jacket and hangs it on the back of his chair. He reminds himself it’s common for police to call GAC. They call security when they’ve tracked a runner or a stolen bot. They call legal when some rogue commits a crime. They call all the time, in fact, though it’s pretty rare for a homicide dick to ask for anyone in sales.

  Eliot turns on his deskbrane and takes a seat. Tucson Metal Solutions is listed on Pink’s laptop as the purchaser for Iris’s legs. A Web search uncovered no e-mail or phone number, but the address matched the location of the Green Valley Recycling plant in Arizona.

  Eliot clips on his earpiece and tries his contact at Green Valley. The brane rings twice before Andy Spiro’s sunburnt face appears on a screen.

  “Lazar. What’s with the glasses and the hat?”

  “One too many last night.”

  “Too many cocks in your ass?” Spiro smiles, pleased with his own joke.

  “I’m calling about a pair of legs scheduled for recycling. They didn’t show up in your catalog, but I got reason to
believe you have ’em.”

  Eliot relays Iris’s serial number and waits as Spiro enters it into his brane. “I got nothing. You sure it’s ours?”

  “Sold to Tucson Metal Solutions,” says Eliot. “Same address as your Arizona plant.”

  “Tucson Metal?” Spiro furrows his brow. “Maybe our labor provider contracted them out, but I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Who’s the provider at the plant?”

  “NatMo out of Detroit,” says Spiro. “You want their number?”

  “I got it. Thanks.”

  Eliot hangs up and calls Jaylon Dennis, a former coworker from Daihanu who, last Eliot heard, took a job at National Motors.

  “What’s up?” Jaylon’s half-open eyes had always looked peaceful, now they just look tired.

  “You have kids now, don’t you?” says Eliot.

  “What gives it away?”

  “You look like a corpse.”

  “And you look like a tranny hooker kicked your ass last night. What do you need?”

  “I need to talk to someone at Tucson Metal Solutions. I think NatMo might have subcontracted to them at the Green Valley plant in Arizona.”

  Jaylon rubs the bald spot at the back of his head. “I’m a little busy to be doing favors.”

  “I’ll send you a lead.”

  “What lead?”

  “An almond grower out of Fresno.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Eliot’s deskbrane carries live updates about the murder. Revealed! is stoking the flames. They’re turning Edmund “Pink” Spenser into a saint victimized by a deranged, black widow android, murdering princely young heartbeats under the orders of Lorca.

  At least the bot’s the suspect, thinks Eliot. Not me. But then why is Flaubert calling? What does the detective know and what the hell does he want with me?

  Eliot looks up the number for Jillian Rose Models, listed on Pink’s laptop as the purchaser of Iris’s head. He suspects this will be a harder get than the recycler. Once a modeling agency puts together a good-looking android, it tends to keep her in one piece to maximize the return.

  He turns off the video and blocks the caller ID on his brane. He dials and a bot answers the call.