Beyond Binary

by Brit Mandelo

  Get away. Where to, and for how long? To do what? I could barely look the thing in the face, and I was taking it on a vacation? I knew I didn’t want it in my apartment. That was the first place they’d look, and besides, I didn’t want it touching anything I owned. Having it in the car was bad enough.

  I could get out of town, head south, find a little motel off the beaten path. I could spend a couple days away, get my head together. But if I was going to lie low for the weekend, I’d need some supplies. And cash.

  When I came out of the convenience store, she was chatting up a middle-aged guy in the parking lot, standing next to his Subaru and giggling. He gave me a quick glance, and I heard him say something insinuating about “a me sandwich on you bread.” Shit.

  “Time to go, Sis.”

  She gave him a parting smile, but dutifully got back in the car. The guy watched her go, looking like a million dollars had fallen out of the sky into his lap and then vaporized. “Your sister says she likes to party,” he ventured hopefully. “Do you like to party?”

  “No.” I left some rubber in the parking lot.

  ∞

  It’s an existential problem. It’s as if one soul had been split off at the libido and placed in two bodies. It’s like—I have no idea what it’s like. I have no idea what it’s like to exist only for purely physical, sexual pleasure.

  ∞

  Taking a stolen bot across state lines, I thought as the “Indiana Welcomes You” billboard appeared ahead. Got to be some kind of felony. But then, I wasn’t sure it was entirely legal to create an automated sex worker who was the spitting image of one of your employees, either. Especially without that employee’s knowledge and consent. So Jones might not even have called the cops. Anyway, if I were looking for a disgruntled employee with a stolen bot, I wouldn’t look for them in La Porte.

  If I were looking for anything other than fishing lures and maybe used truck parts, I wouldn’t look for it in La Porte, but they did have motels. It was full dark by the time I pulled into the La Porte Country Inn and Cabins.

  “I’m such a light sleeper,” I told the bored innkeeper. She barely looked up from her game show. “Could you give me whatever’s farthest from the road?” Off season there were plenty of rooms, even on Friday night. I got the keys to a cabin with a kitchenette in exchange for most of the cash I had with me.

  I parked the car out of sight of the road and ushered my doppelganger inside. Then I carried in the supplies and shut the door. It was a beige room with beige carpet, beige curtains, and a beige bedspread on the king-sized bed.

  “What do they call you?” I asked.

  “Narcisse,” she said.

  Cute.

  “And what should I call you?” She made even this innocent question sound like an invitation to unimagined delights.

  “Ma’am,” I said flatly.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said, her voice instantly rising half an octave to make her sound like an uncertain schoolgirl. I sighed.

  She kicked off her shoes and lolled on the bed. Its presence seemed to embolden her to kick up the charm a notch; she was practically purring. Time for a distraction.

  “What can you do besides play chess?” I asked the bot.

  “Besides the obvious?” My double arched her eyebrow.

  “Do you have any idea how tiresome the sexual banter gets after a while?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “Yes. So stop it. Now, what else. Besides that.”

  “I can do an initial psychiatric intake—”

  “A counseling bot?”

  “Just enough to sound like a shrink.”

  “The white coat fantasy?”

  “Precisely. I also have extensive knowledge of eighteenth and nineteenth century English literature.”

  “Terrific.”

  “And I can do Swedish and shiatsu massage. You look like you could use some.”

  I stretched my neck, tilting my head from side to side. Tight as piano wire. “Grand theft sex bot is tense work.”

  The bot came and sat behind me on the bed and began to knead my taut shoulder muscles. It was the touch of a stranger, and I felt relieved—but would I have recognized my own touch anyway? Can’t give yourself a back rub.

  “Narcisse,” I said, “do you notice anything funny about you and me? Any similarities?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean get up. Look.” The closet doors were mirrored; I pointed at our reflection in them. It was a lot easier to look at her reflection in a mirror; somehow she looked less uncanny.

  “Oh,” she said, her voice a bit uncertain. “We’re very similar.”

  “Try fucking identical.” We couldn’t actually be identical—unless Jones had done more than scan security footage. I wouldn’t have put it past him. “Narcisse. Take off your clothes. Everything.”

  “Sure.” She giggled as if glad to be on more familiar ground, and was naked in a few seconds.

  I breathed out air I didn’t know I’d been holding in. Her moles and dimples and imperfections, though skillfully done, didn’t match mine. So I would probably let Jones keep his balls. Probably.

  “Do you like the way I look?” She spun and faced me, artfully jiggling things I have no idea how to jiggle. “You could take off your clothes, too, you know.”

  I felt suddenly exhausted by the psychic weight of all this weirdness. I flopped down on the bed.

  “Or I could just give you a foot rub.” Her naked thigh brushed my toes and raised gooseflesh all over me.

  “Can you make me some tea? Oh, and how about putting some clothes back on?” She took the minimalist approach to following my last order, donning a pair of panties that resembled an eye patch, and then began to rattle things in the kitchenette.

  “Lipton’s okay?”

  “Fine.” I had a ridiculous thought. “Why don’t you quote me some Yeats while you’re at it?”

  “I made my song a coat,” she replied, and I grinned. “Covered with embroideries, out of old mythologies, from heel to throat.” Ding of a microwave. “But the fools caught it, wore it in the world’s eyes as though they’d wrought it. Song, let them take it, for there’s more enterprise”—sound of water pouring into a mug—“in walking naked.”

  “Bill, you high-class bugger, you surprise me,” I said under my breath. Louder, I said, “Do your other clients like you to recite poetry to them?”

  “I couldn’t kiss and tell.”

  Right. Deactivated between sessions, she actually couldn’t—her short-term memory was wiped clean each time. “Well,” I asked, “what else have you got?”

  “Whatever you want,” she said. I rolled my eyes. She was made for sex, so I was just going to have to get used to everything coming out like a double entendre. Or a single entendre. Or just a dirty limerick.

  “Here’s your tea.”

  It was hot and steeped perfectly. I propped myself up with pillows to drink it, and Narcisse sat primly in a chair—primly except for her lack of attire, which made a mockery of the primness. They’d given her more than a smattering of my postures and tics, all gleaned from three years’ worth of front office security tapes. I do sit primly.

  No taping was allowed in the playrooms, a necessary precaution against blackmail. Small comfort; at least there weren’t any sex tapes featuring my silicone twin floating around.

  “You’re tired and tense,” Narcisse said. “A hot shower might perk you up.”

  “Are all sex bots this pushy?” I asked. But it did sound good. “You stay out of the bathroom. Understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Her tone was mocking, but I knew she would obey. I mean, I was pretty sure she’d obey. Damn these later, more complicated models. The first-generation models were limited to the basic commands: faster, slower, harder, softer, and more.

  She did obey while I let the near-scalding water pummel me for almost twenty minutes. I heard noises as I turned off the water. Instantly suspicious, I wrapped
a towel around me and opened the bathroom door a crack.

  Narcisse had opted to start the party by herself. Enthusiastically. My stomach lurched. It wasn’t disgust I felt, but a kind of vertigo, a queasy sense of dislocation, and in back of that, loss.

  Bots have acute hearing and sight, so I knew she’d heard the water shut off, had noticed the door open half an inch. The show was entirely for my benefit.

  “You aren’t Narcisse,” I muttered, “just the reflection.”

  I could deactivate her, leaving her a dead marionette. I could melt off her face over the burner of the stove, revealing the titanium alloy substructure underneath. I could even instruct her to wade out to the middle of the lake, thirty feet deep, and stay there.

  Instead, I crawled into the bed with that bit of my lost self. “Show me what makes you feel good,” I said.

  ∞

  She did. Categorically. Encyclopedically. Even limited by the number and type of bodies we had, and with no special equipment, it was fairly exhaustive. And exhausting. Outside it got dark, then got light again, a couple times. When I thought of it, I ate; when I needed to, I slept.

  I wasn’t horny or hot, but I was very, very curious. I did feel a shimmer of faint heat once or twice, but it was fleeting. That’s just how it is with me. Narcisse, however, was like a fine-tuned instrument of sensation. A light breath on her skin subtly affected her body in half a dozen ways.

  Finally I said, “Enough,” and curled up to sleep. That was Sunday afternoon.

  ∞

  On Monday morning, my first stop was Bill’s cubicle. Narcisse, blank and obedient, was right behind me.

  “Clarkson, that was bullshit about Baltimore. She’s your work.” It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t answer it.

  “She was fabricated and tested in Baltimore,” he said carefully, probably hoping I wouldn’t shake him again.

  “Any chance you can wipe her template?”

  He looked at me mournfully. “Not if I want to keep my job.” Right. Jones would have the final say.

  It was as if Bill had read my thoughts. “Don’t bother asking him. He’s pissed enough that you took her off-site, unauthorized—”

  “He’s pissed?”

  “Look, it stinks. I know it does. But it’s his call.”

  “You see, that is a weasel,” I told Narcisse as I left the cubicle and she fell into step behind me. “Now we go and meet the asshole.”

  “Weasel,” she said, in a careful, neutral voice. “Asshole.”

  “Carla.” Jones was waiting placidly in his office. “So glad you came back with my property. Saves me the trouble of having you arrested.”

  “Your property is wearing my face, Frank,” I said. His genial slickness was already getting to me. How had I managed to work here for three years?

  “I refer you to the waiver you signed during your first day on the job,” he said calmly.

  “You said that was for publicity photos, not sex bot templates!”

  He just smiled his sharklike smile. “It’s fair use, according to the terms of our agreement.”

  “Fair use to have those sweaty yokels drooling over me?”

  “Carla. If a client treats you with anything less than perfect respect, I’ll be happy to remove them personally from the premises.”

  “What about the ones diddling my evil twin in one of the back rooms?”

  “You can’t stop them from fantasizing about you. You and I both know that. It’s fantasy we provide here, whether it’s a fantasy about the latest movie star or the front office help. The great ‘what if’. ”

  “Jones, you’re full of it.” I pulled my security card off my lapel and threw it on his desk. “This should make it simple. If she doesn’t go, I’ll be happy to.”

  ∞

  Even after three years, the personal items I’d accumulated in my desk fit into one box with room to spare. Bill and Jones both stayed away. It was Narcisse who strolled in as I was putting on my coat, and I got a near-paralyzing sense of déjà vu.

  “Get lost, kid, you bother me.”

  I had reset her myself, so the events of the weekend were my memories only, recorded and preserved in my own head and no place else.

  “Bill says he’s sorry.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Coward. “Tell him I’m leaving, so I’m expecting the demand to fall off quite a bit for the newest product.”

  She nodded, either not understanding or not caring that the message was about her.

  “And tell Jones that he should model for the next one, so he can go and fuck himself.”

  I picked up the box and walked out the front door, the one the clients used after slaking whatever desire they imagined they’d brought in with them.

  If I hadn’t glanced back one last time just as I stepped onto the pavement outside, I would have missed Narcisse taking her place at the front desk, a bright and welcoming smile on her face.

  ∞

  Spoiling Veena

  Keyan Bowes

  The snow thuds down like brickbats.

  Instead of a soft and beautiful blanket, it lies on the grass in shards of ice. The party is ruined. It had sounded like such a good idea, snow in Delhi. Shalini should have known better than to trust Party Weather Inc. They haven’t been able to deliver. Shivering, she herds the children into the veranda, out of the way of the pounding white chips.

  “Let’s bring in the cake, shall we?” she says, as the clatter of the hail on the cars parked outside distracts the children.

  “Oh, can’t we go out in that, Aunty?” It’s a young boy called—Ajay, that’s it, Ajay Zaveri.

  “It’s too hard, Ajay,” replies Shalini. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.” Or your lawyer mother to sue me, she thinks. India is becoming just too much like America since cable and satellite TV. She has releases of liability signed by every custodial parent, and still she worries.

  “Maybe after the cake, Aunty, if it stops falling?” asks Preethi.

  “Maybe,” Shalini says. The cake is meant to resemble the castle of the Snow Queen, from the Andersen fairy tale, but the confectioner has built the US Capitol. Shalini hopes the children won’t know the difference. She also alerts Jayesh that she needs reinforcements; her husband is hiding out in his study upstairs.

  “I’ll get on the phone,” he promises. “Hang on. Don’t let it spoil Veena’s day.”

  “Cool! The Capitol!” says Rizwan, “Just like Washington.”

  “It looks like Rashtrapati Bhawan,” says his twin, Ria, “but white-washed.”

  “It’s the Snow Queen’s palace,” says Shalini faintly. Now that the child mentions it, the dome is indeed reminiscent of the Indian President’s residence.

  “The Snow Queen can copy the Capitol,” says Preethi, politely coming to her hostess’s defense. “Maybe she got bored with towers and turrets and stuff and wanted a dome. It’s ice, right? It melts. She can have a different palace every year.”

  Shalini nods gratefully, then tucks the pallav of her sari out of the way and lights the dozen candles. The children crowd round.

  “Happy birthday to you

  Happy birthday to you

  Happy birthday dear Vik-rum

  Happy birthday to you.”

  Vikrum? Shalini looks at Veena, angelic in a snow-white taffeta dress that comes below her knee. She seems quite okay with what the children have sung, and blows out the candles in three tries. The single diamond, her parents’ birthday present, glitters at her throat. Sparkling holographic snowflakes in her headdress reflect the myriad tiny lights with which Shalini has decorated the house and garden. Sweet tendrils of dark hair escape to fall down cheeks that are pink with pleasure.

  The door-bell rings. Jayesh has pulled it off: Here is the Snow Queen, a whole hour early, to take over the party from her. The lady makes a magnificent entrance, swirling in through the front door in a scent of roses, greeting the birthday girl with an exquisitely wrapped present, and then magically making brightness
fall out of the air onto the other children. There are oohs and aahs. They are the latest thing in cool fireworks from China, perfectly suitable for a crowded room on a gray day.

  “Your majesty, can we go out? Before it melts?” asks one of the children. Shalini looks out to see that the ‘snow’ has stopped, and the ground is covered, inches deep, with ice chips.

  The Snow Queen smiles at the eager girl. “First let me try it out. It looks cold outside. Do you have a warm jacket? Also I need to check the paperwork.” Though it’s summer, the ‘snow’ still shows no sign of melting.

  Relieved, Shalini gives her copies of the releases, and waits while the lady takes a roll-call of the children to ascertain they are all listed. She isn’t sure why organizing children’s parties is so much more difficult than running a laboratory. Perhaps because they mean so much to Veena, perhaps because she herself is a bit shy—a trait she made sure Veena did not inherit.

  Certain now that everything is under control, she slips upstairs to tell Jayesh about the failed snowfall and the strange birthday song. And have a cup of tea. Or maybe a whiskey.

  ∞

  The Snow Queen is a pro; she is a schoolteacher who does this on weekends. She’s invented games, dared what Shalini wouldn’t and sent the children out into the garden in small groups, explained why ice floats, and kept them busy and happy. Eventually they all crowd round the large-screen TV for yet another dubbed-into-Hindi episode about the Celtic hero Cernunnos (now re-named Kanoon, the Hindi word for law) and his great wolfhound. The program’s into its fifth season and seems entirely likely to continue for another five at least. After the party, the Snow Queen has silvery crowns studded with glittering icy jewels for the departing girls; and for the boys, spheres that spurt magic fire when you press them.

  Shalini unwinds over another whiskey. Party Weather & Co calls to apologize, arrange a refund and explain that a virus corrupted their programs. Jayesh has built a real fire in the fireplace in the study, giving it a romantic smell of wood-smoke. The ice-storm chilled the surrounding air, so they can get away with it even in though it is not winter. Her mother, known to all as Mummy-ji, looks serene and silver-haired in the comfortable chair in the corner as she chats with her favorite son-in-law. Just look, thinks Shalini, it’s like a story-book.