Letters to the Cyborgs

by Judyth Baker

“Oh, my original brain furnishings were inferior,” I told him. “But I was able to choose a major personality from the past –I chose Abraham Lincoln – which was imprinted on my new, injected brain cells.”

  “Where did the new brain cells come from?”

  “They were tested for superior thought processing. Tested for longevity. Tested for…”

  “But where did they come from?” Antoine persisted.

  “From the State,” I answered, proudly. “They were State approved implants. State grown. State selected. Superior! Everyone in United California got them. They were better than New York’s. They were better than –”

  “Good God,” Antoine said. “How do you know that?”

  “Because we’re all the same in United California, that’s how,” I replied. “We’re united. We get more done. Everyone in the Middle West admires our brains.”

  “You’re hopeless,” Antoine said.

  “No, I’m Abraham Lincoln, Model 244,” I corrected him. “I have the most updates for any Advocate in the State. I have the fastest – and the most – calculating circuits of any Advocate.”

  “But you don’t have as many as a Prosecutor, do you?”

  “Of course not. The State is almost always right,” I assured him. “Only when the Prosecutor orders us to defend a client, do we get activated.”

  “Activated?”

  “I spend most of my time in a Tank. Dreaming. I’ve experienced many lives in the Tank, brought up from all the movies and plays ever made. I’m in them, it’s real, except it’s not. It’s a very good life.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Antoine said. “No pain, I suppose?”

  “Only if we select for the full experience,” I told him.

  “So what happens when prosecutors no longer need Advocates anymore?”

  “That’s already happening,” I said, a trifle uneasy at my own words. “The brain scanners are almost perfect, now. When Prosecutors no longer need us, we will be refitted for a new profession.”

  “What will you become, then?”

  “I want to breed mythological characters. Unicorns. Satyrs. Genies in a bottle. Maybe have some pets.”

  “You’re unusual, indeed, to have a soft a spot in that metal heart of yours, wanting to breed animals.”

  “I get laughed at, about it, sometimes,” I admitted, drinking the last of the Scotch. “But I find the Greek gods and their legends fascinating. I’m not alone. Some of us think it would be good to have Pan, piping on his pipes, to entertain us. Or to enjoy the sensual favors of a Europa, while we inhabit the body of a bull.”

  “So you’re one of those who think that switching your brains into the bodies of animals is okay?”

  “We just like to talk,” I said, feeling wary. “Why shouldn’t we create whatever we want, out of flesh, and use it as we please? After all, you Ferals bred cattle and hogs and birds, and ate them. You still eat fish.”

  “We don’t get into their heads,” Antoine said. “Have another drink.”

  I realized what he was doing to me and put a stop to it. “It’s your turn to do some confessing,” I told him. “In two days, you’ll be either a prision lifer, or you’ll be executed. It’s time you started telling me why we shouldn’t just incinerate you.”

  “Why did your scans think I was after her money?” Antoine said, lighting a new cigarette.

  “We found that you resented her order of the New Mud Pack. It’s expensive. She ordered a dozen packages of it. That would cost you a fortune.”

  “So you thought I’d murder her over a dozen packages of mud?” Antoine released a bitter laugh. “Do you realize that my wife had an obsession with mud packs?”

  “It seems she had taken some of your own funds to make the order, without telling you.”

  “She did, the avaricious old bag! No…” Antoine shook his head. “She’s not avaricious. And hardly an old bag. But she’s a wee bit selfish.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re in love with her, but I don’t detect any hate, either,” I told him.

  “Well, you’re wrong,” he replied. “I hate her.”

  Then he told me the whole story.

  “We were married long before you came along,” he began. “All was well, until she began to get a few wrinkles. And all the advanced science that we had wasn’t going to be able get rid of all of them.”

  “Agnes – her real name is Henrietta,” Antoine said. “Let it be on the record. Yes, she was beautiful. And she wanted to stay that way. Sadly, we were confined to the Ghetto and she could no longer avail herself of the clinics that had taken such good care of her face. That’s when she started using mud packs.”

  Now that he had started talking, Antoine was on a roll, and I was loathe to interrupt.

  “Her beauty had been slowly fading. Five kids will do that to you. Now trapped in this house,” he waved a desultory finger at the beautiful room and its paintings, “she was able to hide her deteriorating state for quite a while from all our friends. But I? I got to see what she became, every night, before the lights went off….”

  I raised a curious eyebrow. Doing that with the face of Abraham Lincoln meant it was quite noticeable.

  “Off came the girdle!” Antoine said, using his fingers to count. “Next, off came the hairpiece. Off went the makeup, the dainty shoes, the jewelry, the dentures, the fake eyelashes, the contact lenses–“

  “You’re running out of fingers.”

  “On went a mass of shiny curlers. Then…” It took effort for him to say it, I could tell, “On went the mud pack. Have you ever tried to sleep with a woman wearing a mud pack?”

  “I’m a Cyborg,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, yeah, of course. Anyway, I counted the days she did this. Forty-seven days in a row, she did this to me! This hideous, foul, black, sticky stuff. It cost a fortune. And was guaranteed to eradicate every wrinkle. She plastered it on her face, night after night! Do you understand?”

  He was glaring at me, all the little red veins in his old, red nose about to burst. I nodded, mostly in self-defense.

  “Then came night number Forty-Eight. I realized I was sleeping with a toothless, flabby, metal-headed, mud-slathered woman. She was the very parody of a Cyborg or a robot. It was now unbearable for me, but her feelings would have been hurt beyond repair if I’d slept in another room. I was in a predicament. I had insomnia, and any time I did finally fall asleep, I had nightmares that she was a Cyborg, with a mud face! So I’d sit awake as long as I could, just watching her… have another drink.”

  He brought out a cherry-colored cordial, and I succumbed to its allure … some woozy part of me wondered if I’d be disciplined for this. Cyborgs didn’t drink, unless they were imbued with certain inalienable rights, were experts at debating themselves out of trouble, and had once lived in a log cabin. “Keep on talking,” I mumbled. I reminded myself that I had never lived in a log cabin … that was just my alter ego, whispering in my ear, as I sipped on the cordial…

  “I didn’t know how I could bear night number Forty-Nine,” Antoine said, with a snort of disgust. “Somehow, I got through it. I watched her as she lay there sleeping, gently snoring. It was really quite ludicrous. She snored ever so softly. The pile of mud on her face would crackle and shiver whenever she stirred a muscle. She was careful not to turn to one side or the other, but even so, there were towels piled up on both sides of her to protect the sheets. Her face seemed to transform into a massive chocolate muffin, ready to eat. But I digress.”

  Lighting a marijuana cigarette, Antoine laughed. It was a creepy sound. It sounded irrational. An Air Quality alarm shrieked: Antoine took three quick drags of the forbidden contraband (because it added extra CO2 to the air) and then snuffed it.

  “By morning, the layers of mud were criss-crossed on her face like a nasty old map. She’d get up, hold her head over the wastebasket, and start picking off the pieces. That took her half an hour, every morning. To watch it was to lose every possible interest in sex.
Then, she’d gently wash her face. Cream it. Powder it. Put on her eyelashes. Insert her dentures. Put on the hairpiece after removing her curlers. And all the rest. But even then, she was never satisfied. You know that little mirror?”

  “The one that Agnes gave me. Hey, do you have any more cordial?”

  “Her name was actually Henrietta!” he corrected me, as he poured me another shot. “That’s all you should have, pal,” he cautioned. “If you fall over, you could put a hole in my antique carpet.”

  “Tell me more, ‘bout Henrietta. More,” I urged him.

  “She’d take that little hand mirror and stand in front of the window. She’d be looking for wrinkles. ‘Natural light shows them up best,’ she’d tell me. She’d spend the next half hour peering at every quarter-inch of her face. She was particularly concerned about the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. ‘If I blink less often,’ she told me, ‘maybe they won’t get any deeper.’ I told her it would dry out her contact lenses if she did that, but she wouldn’t listen to me. I became particularly disgusted when she started measuring the length of all her various wrinkles with a set of calipers. She wrote down the measurements on a face chart. Sometimes she’d make me measure them. I got to hate that hand mirror.”

  “That was terrific cordial,” I commented, daring to lick the last drop from the bottom of the shot glass.

  “She’d pull that hand-mirror out, everywhere we went, when no one was looking. But I was looking!”

  “I’m sure you were,” I agreed, modestly holding the empty shot glass in front of his face. Ignoring my silent plea, he continued.

  “I suppose what really got to me, on Night Forty-Nine, is her comment that she had noticed how wrinkled my face was getting.” Antoine snuffed out his joint and leaned back in the big chair, closing his eyes. “You have no idea how something like that can get to you.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “Shut up! … At first, I laughed, and when she said it to me again, later that day, I smiled. After all, men get wrinkles, and they’re not supposed to be sensitive about it. Besides, I had a whole head of hair, more than most men have at my age. But it was getting to me. I mean, she was always inviting me to try her blasted mud packs. She had decided to make a wrinkle chart of my face, too. After all, these were such special mud packs, guaranteed to blah, blah, blah – and she wanted to prove it to me, since the damned things cost so much.”

  “I suppose you believed that resistance was futile?” I put in.

  “You’re married, aren’t you?” he asked me. “To a female?”

  “I’m in a relationship with a girl,” I told him. “My very own girl. I constructed her from executed leftovers, and gave her the brain of a horse. She’s a little stupid, but we get along quite well.”

  “You got sick of mating with girls that had the same brain as you did. Didn’t you?”

  I was startled. He was right. I had found my previous Cyborg girlfriends as incredibly boring as they found me. We, of course, were allowed to have sex toys, just so long as they weren’t humans (under the new anti-slavery acts, that was considered unfair exploitation). I suppose this is when we realized that we had no real use for humans, except as a reservoir for genetic variability, and even that excuse to keep them around was really a lesson in obsolescence. Sometimes Janet bit me, kicked me, or whinnied through her human mouth, but that just made her all the more interesting. I knew she loved me, for all that.

  “I was married,” the old man cringed, “and I had been happily married, but now it was over. It had gone too far, this mud fetish of hers. And it was spreading. She was getting our most wealthy friends interested in trying out the mud packs. Imagine! Other husbands, trapped as I was trapped! This simply couldn’t go on!”

  “I want more cordial.”

  He poured me some more, and continued.

  “I was running scared by now. I could imagine a host of angry husbands, ready and willing to string me up, if the same thing happened to them! It got to where I couldn’t even look in a mirror. I got to seeing my wrinkles as enemies, damn it. How much can a man take? When I contemplated another thirty years – we poor humans are still living to be 130 or so, despite all you’ve done to us recently – the thought of another thirty years made me absolutely disconsolate. I couldn’t bear the thought of Night Number Fifty, so soon to come. Let alone years and years of this… I wanted a sweet, steady woman in my old age. I wanted Henrietta, the way she used to be, before she got scared of getting old.”

  He took a photograph from a nearby desk and showed it to me.

  “She was pretty,” I agreed.

  “On Night Number Fifty, she peered at my face, then shoved her mirror into my hand. “Darling,” she said, “Just look at yourself! You’re looking worse. And at such a crucial time, too! My cousin is coming over for a visit, and frankly, you look simply wretched. I want you to use a Mud Pack. It’s important!”

  In a softer voice, Antoine said, “I was a little shocked, but a great calm and purpose began to come over me. There was nothing wrong with my face. It wasn’t getting worse. Okay, maybe there were a few new wrinkles, but look what I’d been going through, these last forty-nine nights! It was enough to turn my hair gray. In fact,” Antoine said, sadly, “I think that’s when my hair did start turning gray. It happened suddenly. Almost overnight. It meant I was suffering from some incipient chromosomal damage. And I realized that it was Henrietta’s fault.”

  “You’re rich enough to get all the synthetic implants you could ever want,” I told him. “You’ve been so nice to me, with this cordial and all, that I’ll pay for it myself,” I said in a moment of drunken generosity.

  “I’m allergic to them. Besides, that’s not the point. I could be executed in two days, remember?”

  “Oh… yeah.”

  “Then she said, ‘Shirley hasn’t seen you for ages. I’d be so proud of you, if only you didn’t have so many wrinkles.’ I turned away, anger in my throat. Encouraged by my silence and self-control, Henrietta couldn’t forbear: she shoved the mirror in front of my face. And she kept saying, ‘Look at them! Look at the wrinkles on your neck; you look like a turkey! You don’t dare wait another night!’ I did my best to control myself. ‘I’m pleased with me just as I am, and you should be, too,’ I told her. I was so very calm, outwardly. But Henrietta, who should have been able to sense the volcano building up inside me, wasn’t finished. ‘I don’t want Shirley to think you’ve become an old man.’”

  “Cordial, please,” I insisted, tapping the empty shot glass against his hand.

  “Help yourself,” he replied. As I poured myself another drink (a bit sloppily) he continued his tale, to which, frankly, I knew the conclusion…

  “’Tonight,’ Henrietta declared to me, ‘I’ll give you a treatment with this wonderful Magic Mud myself. It’s the newest variety of Mud Packs, used by men as well! We’ll reduce those wrinkles to where Shirley will never notice.‘ She kissed me, but I was like a stone. Finally, very slowly and carefully, I announced to her that she would never, at any time, be allowed to place Magic Mud on my face. Know what she did?”

  “No. Don’t know.”

  “She laughed at me! Laughed! She said she’d sneak some on me tonight, while I was sleeping. I’d never know. The treatment would make all the difference! The nerve of her!”

  “The nerve of her!” I repeated dutifully, as I swallowed the last of my drink. My God, it was good.

  “Then she pulled out a package of Magic Mud and opened it. She scooped up a big finger full and started toward me! I told her she was out of her mind, as I backed up, trying to avoid the stuff. Finally, I was backed into a corner, and she smeared it on my chin! ‘See?’ she said, backing away as I stood there, shaking with fury. ‘It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.’ I left the house in a storm. I was determined not to spend Night Number Fifty under the same roof with her. Unfortunately, I forgot about the mud, and the security guards started laughing at the black smear on my ch
in. I peeled it off in disgust and went to a burger joint, where the best ratburgers were, but I found it was impossible to eat.”

  Suddenly, an enormous grandfather clock bonged out the time: Antoine had exactly 48 hours of freedom left.

  “I couldn’t take any more,” Antoine muttered, rubbing his head. “Next thing, she’d want me to wear her girdles, to hide my potbelly. I decided to murder her.”

  “She deserved it,” I said, in my alcohol mist. “She deserved it.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It would be accomplished quickly, and without a fuss. And Henrietta would have a permanent solution to her wrinkle problem. I would actually be doing her a favor.”

  “Definitely, a permanent solution,” I chimed in.

  “Not clever, but efficient. Did I tell you that Henrietta also plugs her nose with cotton wads, with straws in them, so the mud doesn’t clog her breathing? Can you imagine what she looked like?”

  “I prefer Janet,” I opined. “Even though she likes oats.”

  “I stayed away until I was sure she was asleep. Safely in bed and snoring away. She always gets to bed by eleven so she’ll be fresh and rested and have fewer wrinkles to show for it. Whereas I … I was accumulating wrinkles, night after sleepless night! Look at my face, Abe!”

  “Yes. Lots of wrinkles,” I agreed.

  “Anyway, it had been raining, and there was quite a bit of lightning. You know, weather control isn’t always perfect, even now. Despite all that stuff, once in a while we get a real thunderstorm. Our part of the Dome isn’t as well protected as the rest of it – we’re Ghetto – remember? So we had a lightning strike! That’s what happened on Night Number Fifty. The security guards were shivering with fright over the lightning, their befuddled brains filled with terror at the sight. As I said, they’re so dumbed-down.”

  “Dumb … Down?” I replied.

  “I’m talking to a drunken idiot!” Antoine groaned. “Nevertheless, I will continue. Seeing the poor condition of my security guards, and the fact that lightning had struck my security system, temporarily disarming it, I got the best idea of the night. I’d create the impression of a robbery! First, I called my lawyer and told him I had made a deal with a bootlegger to get some truly rare Scotch, and to expect a large transfer of funds by morning. Then, I entered this room – Henrietta of course slept upstairs – and opened our wall safe. I removed a bottle of rare Scotch, the contents of which I poured down the drain.”