by Jade Bitters
Or at least, her copies were, the ones that were produced in factories overseas and sold to rich families or companies or as novelties, the copies that wouldn’t be her because they hadn’t been the one he’d fallen in love with at first sight.
“This...this isn’t a box. This is a package, and it’s for Juliet. Her inner light...it all makes sense now, a terrible, beautiful sense. Oh, Juliet...how fucked up is it that I’m glad I at least got to know the truth, before I had to leave? Maybe it’s because I’ve got nothing to lose, because you’re my light, and you’ve been taken away. Oh, my love, you were never really mine, were you?” he asked, brushing her cheek. “Whatever you are, you’re not on, and yet...you still look like you did the first night we met, with your cheeks blushing as pink as your lips.”
Romeo couldn’t figure out how she could look so beautiful even when effectively dead. “It must be dye, or some LEDs running even now. At least Thisbia’s going to get what it wants: I’m going to leave, forever. That’s my ultimate gift to them. But Juliet...why do you have to look so beautiful, even broken? The darkness wants to keep you in its embrace almost as much as I do. Almost. I won’t let that happen, though, and I’ll stay by you, to the end,” said Romeo, taking her cold hand in his, feeling it warm at his touch. “I won’t leave you, Juliet. Here, I’ll stay, even with the Trojan horses you call coworkers, forever. I’ll stay by your side forever. I’ll forget about everything that’s gone wrong because of the one thing that was right in my life. This is my final look, my final touch, my final breath, and...its all for you, Juliet. My final kiss, and it’s going to be yours.”
“This is it for us, isn’t it, Juliet?” asked Romeo to a girl that would never heard his voice again. He looked over her face, the face he’d never thought was anything less than perfect...because that’s how she’d been designed. Romeo pressed a hand against the back of Juliet’s head. What was she made of? Why did he only feel real around a girl that wasn’t real at all? He pressed his lips to hers, and she didn’t wake up. Of course: she never would. This wasn’t a fairy tale where a kiss from a prince woke up the princess and where a kiss from a princess turned a frog into a prince. This was real life, and this was a tragedy.
Romeo turned away from the girl he thought he loved...the robot he still had feelings for, feelings that angered and confused him. “Come on, files. Let’s get me arrested. I’m going down with this ship. To Juliet.” He clicked on the file that The Hacker had given him, turning on his Wi-Fi at the same time.
But he didn’t connect to the Thisbia internet connection: instead, a new connection popped up, a connection that he hadn’t seen before but which sent a chill down his spine: “ROMEO4G”.
Romeo felt himself stop breathing, or at least, stop feeling the need to breathe, and for the first time, he woke up and realized he was the same as Juliet, that maybe, just maybe, they’d been made for each other: as competing products.
He blinked and saw an array of windows overlaid on his eyes, the way he had when testing out a pair of virtual reality glasses, except the images were being projected from inside his head. The windows, in shades of black and green with bright green text like that of a standard terminal, with the title of the windows reading, “MontaGUI”, had streams of code running faster than he should’ve been able to read, faster than any human could read, but that’s how Romeo realized he was only as human as Juliet was.
Their entire attraction made sense now. How ironic was it that the two people who felt like they were made for each other were made to compete with each other? They would’ve never been able to be together, even if she hadn’t been shut off. They’d always be property, the same way a company owned a server or a laptop bay.
This is how it ends. So quickly. . At least...I had one last kiss. At least I had 01101000 01100101 01110010. As he shut off, the last thing he saw was her and then, a screen of blue, then black and green, and finally, an absence of anything at all as the worm ate him from the inside out.
“I’m too old for this,” said Lawrence as he walked backstage and saw Barry. “Who are you? And what are you doing here?”
“I’m a friend of a friend of ours,” promised Barry.
“That’s good,” said Lawrence, too tired to be cynical. “So who’s on stage right now? Someone’s laptop is on and I can see it from the other side of the curtains. They’re not that thick, you know...or maybe the laptop’s just really bright. Are they doing a rehearsal?”
“There is a laptop there,” said Barry. “That’s where my friend is, the one who you know.”
“And who would that be?” asked Lawrence.
“Romeo,” said Barry.
A chill ran down Lawrence’s spine. “Romeo’s here? How long has been on that stage?”
“About half an hour,” said Barry.
“Come with me,” ordered Lawrence. “We need to stop him.”
“I can’t,” said Barry. “I promised him I’d stay away. He said he’d beat the shit out of me if I went near him, if I saw what he was going to do.”
“Then stay here,” said Lawrence. “I can go alone...although I don’t think I like what I’m going to fine. Scratch that: I definitely won’t like it, whatever it is.”
“I was on my phone...but I swear, I heard something going on, like a fight,” said Barry.
Lawrence walked between the curtains. “Romeo? Oh shit,” he said, looking at the floor. “Blood stains. Not again. Not here.” He passed the thicker black curtains dividing the front of the sage from the back. “Romeo? Romeo!” he cried out, running to the boy who had collapsed onto the stage. “He’s...he’s not turning on. Why? And who else was here?”
A rustling caused Lawrence to turn: Juliet, in her box, ready to be displayed, was rebooting on her own, her eyes flickering open as the light returned to them. She saw all white, and then, as her eyes adjusted to the light, after spending so much time in darkness, she saw that she was on stage...but there was a spotlight on her. “Lawrence, where’s Romeo?” she asked. “I followed your directions...and then, everything changed. I had the weirdest dream: I was in the code. I could control it all, and...Where’s my boyfriend?” she asked, looking at Lawrence, who was hunched over someone. Her stomach lurched when she saw who it was.
Off the stage, Lawrence heard something. “Someone’s coming, and everything’s been ruined,” said Lawrence. “We need to get you out of here. Romeo...Romeo’s gone. I’ll take you away from the city, anywhere else, but I don’t have time to explain right now. Security’s coming. We need to get out of here, Juliet, I can’t stay here any longer.”
“Just go,” ordered Juliet, looking at the barista. She had so many questions but there was nothing she could ask that she could get an answer for in mere seconds. “I’m staying.” She looked at Romeo...and then at the only true source of light on the stage: a laptop, open on a podium. She walked over to it and opened the USB drive.
“What...what is this? It’s the last file Romeo would have opened,” she said out loud, trying to use the rubber duck method of problem solving that Miranda had forced her to try, as she opened the file in the default editor. “It’s...a worm. It’s my program, but a crude version, one that can’t be controlled...it just. It deletes everything. Every last copy of a file, all associated files, and all possible associated files, with extreme prejudice. How did someone get it? And...why would it kill Romeo?” She looked back at the boy, and realized there was another source of light on the stage...and it was coming from under his shirt.
Juliet walked over to Romeo’s body and undid the plain white Oxford shirt, revealing his chest, which had a beating heart. Literally: a red array of LEDs, in the shape of a heart, was beating. “Romeo...what are you? And what am I? Why did that bracelet shut me off? I remember the dream so clearly...and usually, I don’t dream, but in that dream, I was able to look inside myself, and there was this place, this...I guess it was like a door. And I opened the door and inside there were these memories, these memories that I didn�
��t remember having, memories of being opened up by people I knew, of being tested, of being in different bodies but with my same mind,” said Julie, tears forming streams down her face as the beating lights flickered and strobed and finally shut off, one by one randomly, until there was absolutely no light coming from Romeo at all.
“Wake up, please, wake up,” begged Juliet. “You have to. Please. I remember I tried to wake up, and I couldn’t, so I know it’s hard...I had to connect to a WiFi hot spot, which sounds stupid, but Romeo, it’s like I was the code and the coder at the same time, and I kept trying to connect and I couldn’t, until a few minutes ago...and then, when I finally made my way out of my own head, you were here but...you’ve deleted yourself. I loved you for your software, not your hardware, and without your software...you’re just a shell, a husk, a handsome corpse.” Juliet looked up at the bright lights. Why was she on a stage? She finally turned towards the door she’d walked out of, half expecting it to be gone, to have closed up like something out of a fantasy novel, but there it was. It was a sleek door and inside was tissue paper...but along the door was writing.
Juliet read the text and like her dead lover, read it over and over trying to convince herself that what she was reading wasn’t true, even though it all made sense now. The reason that she’d been attracted to the one boy different than any other she’d met...was because they weren’t like anyone else but each other. They weren’t humans and because they weren’t, they had always felt like outsiders, until they’d found each other.
The guard wearing black sunglasses walked backstage with Elissa. “Lead the way, honey. Where were they?”
“There’s someone coming. I have to hurry. A USB drive, meant to destroy...and I am meant to be destroyed,” she said out loud, hoping someone could hear her. That’s when she realized she just had to press a small red button on the podium to turn on the mic. She did and heard her voice booming in the convention center hall: this isn’t how she expected to be on a stage with a mic. She’d imagined herself presenting an application after a hackathon, or delivering a commencement speech, but it had all been a lie, hadn’t it? “Is this what I was made for? To be kept a goddamn box? Good luck remaking me: you can play God and make me, and I can play God and destroy everything you’ve made in turn. What’re you going to do without my repos? What’re you going to do when the last copy of my program is destroyed?” Juliet clicked the file and watched as the Wi-Fi connected to a network previously not listed: “JulietTEST”.
Juliet knew exactly what the program was going to do. After all, she’d written what it was based on, effectively its source engine, and as she walked back to Romeo, she smiled as she felt her body shutting down. The dedicated CPUs that controlled her legs started to weaken until she had to taken a knee and then, drag herself over to Romeo with her arms, and as she took him into her arms, she pulled him close so she could kiss his lips one last time as her arms shut down and were perfectly locked around the only man she could ever love, because he, like her, was no man. As her body shut down all but the main CPU dedicated to her memory, she made one final memory, a memory she know nobody would be able to read after the worm had destroyed the last of her files.
Her memories were deleted in folders, in order from largest to smallest. The largest, the fake memories log, was deleted, filled with memories of her time as a student, which hadn’t happened, of parties and a family which weren’t real, of applying to work at Thisbia, and there were memories in there that the programmers hadn’t even implemented, memories of her time as a sorority girl or as an intern at NASA.
The next log was the one that was made of real memories, including the ones that had been suppressed, like the memories of Lawrence when she’d initially been built and the torn look on his face that was half happy that she was real, and half sad that she’d be a product. The memories of Miranda looking at her with a clipboard, the memories of Lawrence and William talking to her about various subjects like humanities to see if she was able to pass as human, those were all memories that she only experienced as they flashed in front of her eyes as she was deleted.
And finally, the smallest memory she had was just a small black and white video, of her holding her forbidden beloved, just moments before her life had flashed before her lives and faded into the darkness she’d soon be entering, as her Romeo had entered it too soon.
The last thing Juliet saw before shutting down was Romeo and then, just like Romeo, a blue screen, a black screen, and then no screen.
“This is where they were fighting,” said Elissa, leading a crowd of security guards to the stage. “But I don’t know where they go.”
“Don’t worry, I believe you,” said the chief security guard. “There’s a trail of blood. That’s evidence enough. Find your employer, make sure he’s safe.” Elissa nodded.
“This is ridiculous,” the chief said to himself, looking around. Two stupid interns were in a pile on the stage, probably making out and staying still in hopes he wouldn’t notice. Fucking interns. He walked over and tried to rouse the girl but her arms were locked tight around the boy...and she couldn’t be woken up. He recognized the girl as a Thisbia intern and the lapel pin on the boy’s hoodie identified him as a Pyrymyn employee. “Well, this day’s just going so well. A VIP’s been hurt, and the girl is dead...but warm, so she must’ve just died, but that doesn’t explain the apparent rigor mortis. One of you, go find Escalus, and the others, get the Thisbia execs, and fuck it, get the Pyrymyn execs in here too. And look for some goddamn clues. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, but we need to see some security tapes, check the entry logs, the whole nine yards.”
A guard came up to him holding a young man by the arm. “A Pyrymyn employee, we found him near the elevators.”
“Mr. Escalus is going to want to know about that,” said the chief guard, as another guard came up to him. He couldn’t shake the girl from the boy, so he turned on his flashlight and shone it at the boy’s face. He let out a low groan. Of course, it was the blacklisted Pyrymyn boy, Romeo.
“Sir, we caught this man too, one of the catering staffers, crying in a backroom, very suspicious. We’ve apprehended some documents from him, as he tried to elude us,” said the guard.
“Hold him too,” ordered the chief guard.
Alex walked onto the stage. “What’s going on here?”
“Why are the techies rioting down there?” asked William as he walked up to the guards, Miranda in tow.
“Some people on the exhibition floor are calling out ‘Romeo’, some are calling ‘Juliet’, and others more shouting ‘Paris’,” said Miranda with a sigh. “They’re all making their way up here now.”
“What’s going on?” asked Alex, still confused.
The chief guard sighed. “Paris was assaulted by Romeo. We can’t find him anywhere. And Romeo’s there, on the stage, dead...with the thing that was in the box. It feels warm though, as if it was just...breathing. As if it was just alive.”
“Figure out how this happened,” ordered Alex.
“Well, we caught this caterer, and one of the Pyrymyn employees at the scene as well,” said the chief guard. “They had things with them: documents and key cards to get into the Moscone Center.”
William approached the laptop and looked at the open file. “A worm? It’s...it’s mean to destroy all of Juliet’s files. This should be deployed onto the Pyrymyn servers, but instead...it’s destroyed her. Ours.”
“This is the beginning of the end, isn’t it?” said Miranda, shaking.
Ferdinand Caliban, of all people, walked onto the stage. When he’d received the invitation to the Thisbia event, he’d been so insulted he had to attend. “Come over here, Ferdinand, and see what’s happened to your pet project,” said Alex. “You seem rather eager to see your failure.”
“Cut the shit, Alex,” said Ferdinand harshly. “Arial quit today, served me divorce papers as well. What else do I have to go through today?”
“Look,” said Alex, mot
ioning at the two young androids holding hands, the last things they’d ever hold. “It’s right in front of your eyes.”
“Romeo!” shouted Ferdinand, walking over to the closest thing he’d ever had to a son. “You fool! You absolute imbecile! This isn’t how it’s supposed to end. You aren’t supposed to die.”
“Compose yourself, and let’s get this all sorted out,” ordered Alex. “We need to know what happened here. You don’t think I’m upset? In the mean time, get it together, man. Bring me the men responsible for this.”
Lawrence was brought over to Alex. “I was here when it happened, and that’s why I’m a suspect. Whatever you can say, Alex, I’ve already said and unsaid.”
“What do you know about this, Lawrence?” asked Alex.
“It’s a long story, but...Romeo and Juliet were going to leave, to go to Austin together. Apparently, nobody found it appropriate to let them know that they weren’t just rivals, but competing products. Juliet loved Romeo: I arranged for them to get out of San Francisco together, the day that Romeo assaulted Ty. His injuries are what caused him to get blacklisted, by Alex, who...apparently hadn’t been told Romeo was a robot,” said Lawrence facetiously. “Of course, to ensure things were covered up, Ty was told the truth by Pyrymyn, and thus, he didn’t press charges. After all, who could he have arrested? Robots aren’t people...but corporations are.”
“Juliet was upset because of Romeo leaving, not because of Ty’s injuries, and instead of letting her leave to be with Romeo, you decided it would be appropriate for her to be transferred away to some tropical island. Or, I guess, purchased by Paris. Whatever terminology floats your boat! So, she came to me, looking for a solution, any solution. She said she’d destroy Thisbia if she had to, so that she’d get blacklisted and could be with Romeo in Austin. So...I gave her back her bracelet, the one she’d given Romeo as a token of her affections,” explained Lawrence.