Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: A Novel Read online

  “When are you going to let me take a crack at you, you soft tub of a woman?”

  “You’re lucky I don’t crack you in the mouth.”

  In the parlor, a group of gangsters from New York stand by the bar talking business. They tell the madam they want a franchise deal to put a Camilla’s Brothel in every city along the East Coast. They say they have the backing to protect her, but the big lady isn’t having it. She tells them she prefers to run things her own way rather than have a board of investors squeezing her bottom line. She says she hasn’t seen her bottom line since she was twelve.

  “Enough with the small talk.” Shelley slams his drink on a table. “I want to see the new metal.”

  Camilla pinches his cheek and twists. Twice she bangs her cane against the hard wood floor, and in through a beaded curtain walk the girls.

  The first is a swarthy Indian with four arms and three breasts, a beautiful and exotic piece. Next comes a young-looking African with exaggerated lips and an ass she turns sideways to get through the door. Then comes a cheerleader and a school teacher and another wearing the fitted uniform of a cop. A red-headed midget dressed like a leprechaun dances a jig as she enters. Bringing up the rear comes a pair of Siamese twins joined at the loins and then a Thai lady boy with a cock hanging over its vagina.

  “Gentlemen, do I disappoint?”

  The gangsters whistle and cheer. Shelley can barely contain himself. He grabs on to a short though well-endowed Latina. “Jesu Christo, look at the tits on this one!”

  “You break it, you buy it,” Camilla warns.

  “Do me a favor.” Shelley unbuttons his shirt. “Gimme this little Sanchez but with the Indian’s head.”

  “Pain in my ass,” Camilla grumbles. “Just take ’em as they are, will ya?”

  “It’s my money. I say, switch the heads.”

  The madam sighs and rests her weight on her cane. “You heard him, ladies. Switch ’em up.”

  The Latina android digs a fingernail into the flesh at the base of her neck. She separates the skin and releases the catch behind her skull. As the botwhore decapitates herself, Shelley drops his pants to the floor.

  “So my brother wants to take my boat,” he announces to the room, “and use it to sail to Avernus.”

  “Avernus?” Camilla and the others laugh. “What are you, some kind of hippie?”

  With one hand beneath her chin and the other behind her ear, the Latina cranks her head until it snaps free from her neck. The Indian cranks off her head as well.

  “A buddy of mine has an ex on Avernus,” offers one of the gangsters. “She says they’re running low on food.”

  “I hear the Admiral bangs everybody’s wives.”

  “Only the young ones,” says Shelley.

  “I hear the Chinese are planning an invasion because of the piracy.”

  “There’s no freedom there. They got a camp for dissenters at one end of the island.”

  “They treat bots like heartbeats,” says the first gangster.

  The two botwhores clumsily exchange heads then struggle to reattach them to their necks.

  “And where do you hear all that?” Eliot asks the mob aligned against him. “From newsbranes fighting to sell ad space? From religious propaganda? From politicians searching for a scapegoat so they can eschew blame for our daily grievances?”

  “So it’s all a big conspiracy?” They laugh mockingly as they swig their drinks. “Thank you for enlightening us!”

  “Not a conspiracy,” Eliot counters. “But capitalism speaks through you. It protects itself by calling the competition perverts, communists, or cultists. But who are the Avernians bothering, isolated as they are out in the Pacific? Why do you see them as such a threat?”

  “We tried all the alternatives in the twentieth century,” says one of the gangsters. “The experiments didn’t go so well.”

  “But the population of Avernus is no larger than that of an island tribe” says Eliot. “And there are tribes that have sustained themselves for thousands of years since before capitalism ever reared it’s head. For them, it’s our system that’s the experiment, theirs is the established norm.”

  “I never heard of no tribe that included bots.”

  “I’ve heard Avernus is beautiful,” says a Japanese android exiting a bedroom where she recently finished with a client. “I had a john in here the other night telling me all about it. He was a galley hand on a ship that was waiting out a storm.”

  Eliot notes her resemblance to Iris, though this bot wears a blond wig and a latex bodysuit. A riding crop dangles from her fingers as she speaks.

  “He told me the water’s blue, the air’s clean, and the people are happy. He said the Avernians like the bad publicity because it keeps their island from being overrun by the likes of you.”

  “Forgive my Hasegawa,” says Camilla. “The Japanese designed her series with a vivid imagination. Probably why the company went under.”

  “What else did your john say?” Eliot asks.

  “That if the Admiral had invited him, he would have stayed on. He even said he’d take me with him if I can ever convince Camilla to release me.”

  “Fat chance.” The madam smooths the skin on the Latina, now wearing the Indian’s head. “Do you whores believe everything a john tells you?”

  “Isn’t that what they pay for?”

  “Look at these tits,” Shelley interrupts, slurring drunkenly, transfixed by the mongrel whore he has assembled in the parlor. “Ten thousand years of civilization, three hundred years of industrialization, our grand project, the result of our collective innovation.” He stumbles for a moment then regains his train of thought. “So what that there’s oppression and injustice in the world. So what that we’ve become violent, coarse, and cruel. Is that any reason to abandon our homeland for a foreign shore?”

  “Here, here,” say the gangsters.

  “We’re choking on the air and poisoned by the water. There’s poverty, famine, and disease. The ice caps have melted, the soot blocks the sun. Heartbeats die out while the bots increase their numbers. The streets are filled with danger, and there’s a reckoning to come.” Shelley wobbles on his feet trying to sustain his ramble. “But look at these tits!” He sinks his face into the botwhore’s cleavage.

  “Don’t push it,” Camilla warns, poking him in the balls with her cone.

  Shelley lifts the giggling Latina into his arms and stands on the threshold of the boudoir.

  “Take my boat if you want,” he proclaims to his brother. “Explore the mythic isle and see for yourself what adventures lie abroad. Nothing would please me more than to be wrong about Avernus.” He sways in the doorway, his eyes wide in anticipation. “But remember, dear brother, leave your fortunes behind if it’s foreign treasure you seek. There’s beauty right in front of you if you have the eyes to see it, and if you don’t, no amount of traveling will cure you of your blindness.”

  The gangsters raise their drinks. “Amen to that.”

  “To a better pair of tits!”

  “Hooray!” Shelley kicks the door closed behind him. The whores and gangsters applaud. They congratulate Eliot on his acquisition and wish him luck with his journey.

  “How about a going away present?” The Hasegawa touches his leg with her riding crop. “Would you rather be the master or the slave?”

  “Are those my only options?”

  “Around here they are.”

  Eliot passes. He asks Camilla how long the troublemaker usually takes to achieve his purpose.

  “Round one, thirty seconds,” she says. “But round two can go as long as an hour.”

  Eliot pays for Shelley’s orgasms, and tells the madam he’ll be right back.

  “Be careful,” she advises, suspecting she knows what floats Eliot’s boat. “It’s rough seas out there tonight.”

  He speeds west in his car to score a few tubes of sweet before his brother finishes with the whore. He calls Iris even though he knows she can’t answer h
er brane at work. He leaves a message on her voice mail telling her he has good news—great news in fact—and then he hangs up.

  He has a boat, for crying out loud. Despite the day’s inauspicious beginning, things have worked themselves out, and now he has a fucking boat!

  “Safety advisory,” says the voice on the car’s dash. “Curfew in effect for L.A. county androids. Detour recommended.”

  The pain in his shoulder stiffens his neck, making it hard to pivot his head. West on Sixth, he drives toward Alvarado looking to score. He considers what the gangsters were saying about Avernus being a cult and the Admiral some kind of creep. Is there truth in the matter? Of course, it’s not a utopia, it might even be a hard and grueling place to live, albeit one with clean water and air and views of the ocean all around. He’s not expecting Utopia, but it has to be better than this. One look out the window into the city is enough to convince anyone that this experiment is off course. The noise, the ash, the depravity of the street. How can anyone deny it? What kind of blinders must Shelley wear to think this is the way we’re supposed to live? And I’m one of the lucky ones, thinks Eliot. A heartbeat with a good job, a steady income, a brother and mother who love me.

  A wave of panic washes over him as his car crosses the desolate space and strange quiet of central L.A. He feels as if has made a terrible mistake.

  Am I ready for such a drastic change? he wonders. Will my body adapt, can I live without drip, am I making a mistake binding myself to a bot? What if I don’t like it on Avernus? Will I be able to return? And if I do, will I be able to rebuild the limited but comfortable life I have now?

  He checks his watch to see how much time has passed. Shelley is well into his second whore by now, and Eliot wonders why he couldn’t tell him the truth about what’s compelling him to flee. Did I fear my brother would talk me out of it, that he would tell me the C-900 is manipulating me, conning me into rescuing her from slavery? Have there not been times I wondered the same, Is someone really following her or did she lie to rush me into finding a boat? Did I ever want to leave this world and live on a tropical island before I met her, or did she plant the seed within me and water it until it grew? Whose life am I living, whose dreams and desires am I risking everything to fulfill?

  First the pain, then the doubt. This is how withdrawal begins. It only mellows with a sniff, which is exactly what Eliot needs. A nice big whiff to like himself, to trust—no, to love himself again.

  No sign of the situation near the corner on Sixth and Alvarado, but none of the usual crew around, either. The neighborhood is known for attracting free roamers produced in Cuba by Kindelan Inc., the only state owned manufacturer in the Western Hemisphere. The company has an anticorporate reputation. Their bots are notoriously agile but suffer from a predilection for guerilla violence.

  Eliot turns right on Bonnie Brae and drives up a dark street where he sees a teenaged-looking Kindelan walking with a backpack as if he’s walking home from school. As if he had school at 1:00 A.M. on a Saturday. As if androids go to school.

  “Pablo,” Eliot calls out the window. The Kindelan stops and checks around for cops.

  “I’m Pedro,” says the bot. “Pablo’s my brother.”

  “You holdin’?”

  The bot calling himself Pedro gets in the car and directs Eliot down a desolate alley. He has him pull up to a steel door attached to the back of a dilapidated squat.

  “Gimme the money,” says the bot. “I’ll come back with the sweet.”

  Usually the deal goes down in the car and doesn’t last more than a few seconds. The bot takes the money and spits the vials into your hand. Straight exchange. Money for drugs.

  Eliot hesitates.

  “Come on, heartbeat. You heard the news. Shit is loose tonight.”

  “That’s not how we do.”

  “They won’t give it to me unless,” says Pedro. “Unless you want to come inside.”

  It’s true, shit is loose tonight. Drones crowd the sky because of the fire on Beverly. There’s a curfew on; the bot is risking his ass just being outside.

  Eliot doesn’t like giving street dealers an advance, but it is a special circumstance. The little bot probably needs him as a repeat customer more than as a mark for a quick con. And besides, Eliot needs the drip. He has a lot of work to do over the next few days. He has to ready the boat and help his brother move. He has to liquidate his assets and transfer the money to Shelley’s account. And soon he will have to set sail. He’ll need enough drip to taper so he doesn’t freak out at sea. It’s unclear how Iris will feel about drugs on the boat.

  “I’ll be back,” says Pedro. He jumps out with the money and disappears through the steel door.

  Eliot checks the time. He figures he’ll give the bot three minutes to return. Maybe four minutes. Maybe five. He sits and waits.

  Sirens echo down the street. Floaters circle with their spotlights. Drones buzz toward the fire a few blocks away. In the distance, a flying train crosses a faded billboard, one of the old kind, painted on with no brane. Just a static image reading:

  COME TO THE CHUMASH RESORT AND CASINO.

  SINGLE DECK BLACK JACK.

  OLYMPIC-SIZED POOL.

  Eliot wonders how desperate a casino must be that they’d advertise in a bot city slum. Are there bots who could even afford a vacation? Maybe that loan shark Blumenthal, the one he keeps reading about in the newsbranes. The police won’t arrest him; he must be paying the right guys. Bots have higher taxes and caps on their wealth, but Blumenthal has money to burn. They say he doesn’t keep it in a bank but on the street instead, always in circulation, and with his zettabyte memory, he has no trouble tracking his exposures.

  Eliot looks at the steel door where the Kindelan entered the building. What’s taking him so long? Is it time to try another spot? Sit too long in one place in a bot city slum, it’s bound to wake the vultures. He still has a few ingots in his wallet, but he’d feel like an ass if the bot returned after he left. He feels like an ass anyway.

  Another siren in the distance. Eliot reaches for the radio just as a footfall cracks the metal above his head. He looks up at the windshield to see a thug in a black bandana, his face an inch away and upside down, his body on the roof of the car. Eliot tries to start the engine, but a pair of hands belonging to another bot yanks him through the open window.

  “Disciples in the house!”

  “Drip fiend piece of shit!”

  “Fucking faggot!”

  “Fucking Jew faggot!”

  Eliot lands headfirst on the pavement as the blows begin to fall. It’s a symphony of curses, fists, and feet. He covers up as best he can hoping they get bored before they kill him.

  “Welcome to bot city, heartbeat.”

  “Long live Lorca, motherfucker!”

  “Disciples forever, motherfucker!”

  The bots take his wallet. They take his pocketbrane and his watch. They howl as they pile into his car and drive off leaving him in a heap on the pavement.

  Eliot lies with his face in a puddle of water and blood. The roll of tires diminishes into the white noise of the night. He considers moving but decides against it. Better to rest for now. No danger in keeping still when there’s nothing left for anyone to steal.

  The metal door from the squat swings open. It’s Pedro. He sees Eliot huddled in pain on the ground.

  “Damn, heartbeat.” The Kindelan crouches beside his customer. “Fuck happened to you?”

  Eliot tries, but it hurts too much to answer.

  “I got your drip.”

  FIVE

  The Situation on Beverly

  Pedro gives him three vials of pure. Who says androids got no hearts? Too bad Eliot is broke now, alone, beat up, and sans car in a bot city slum. He’s out past curfew with a bunch of itchy finger cops playing shoot-anything-made-of-metal. Of course, Eliot has a heartbeat, that offers some protection, but it’s not like cops can tell from range if you have an outlet navel or a pulse. Most of the time t
hey go by the clothes, by the gait, by the confidence by which a breathing biped stands. And with his torn coat and his leg smarting from the beat down, Eliot might as well wear a buls-eye on his head.

  A quick sniff of drip douses the pain. Boom. He’s back on his feet again. He limps out the alley on a twisted knee and finds himself on Sixth and Bonnie. Rough part of town. Better get out fast. Yeah, he could have given back one of the vials in exchange for bus fare, but Eliot isn’t one to give up a tube of the sweet. Not in his nature. Not since high school when he first started using.

  Round one at rehab was after his junior year, then again after an overdose in college. Again after his first arrest. Since then he keeps it under control, he manages his addiction, though the most he can go is three days without.

  Three days.

  Plays out the same every time.

  Day one: weakness and nausea. A dull, searing pain along the ridge where the prosthetic arm connects to his organic body. The doctors say there’s no reason it should hurt, machines don’t feel pain (though Iris says otherwise, all androids do—are they lying?). It’s psychological, say the doctors, an unease with the idea of metal meeting flesh. Don’t try to ignore it; accept it, talk to the pain, stare into the abyss until you’ve made your peace.

  Day two: is when the insomnia sets in. The depression. Sweats and a fever. No position is comfortable and his body stiffens from the agony spreading to his neck and his spine. The pain reaches down his back like the metal is expanding, encroaching, ossifying the meat of his organs into cold, rigid steel.

  On day three life becomes a waking nightmare of skin scratching paranoia and blinding flashbacks to the explosion. He sees his father getting in the car by the stable. He hears his sister’s voice. Mitzi is nine at the time, just had her first riding lesson on a real horse instead of the mechanical one the sons helped their father build in the garage. Elliot is late getting to the car, so the blast knocks him down but doesn’t kill him. The shrapnel tears his right arm from his shoulder. But no pain at the time. Not then. He doesn’t hear anything but a high-pitched tone through his burst eardrums. He stands on the scorched grass and watches three charcoal silhouettes roast in black smoke and orange flame. The botdriver, his father, his sister. All three held by their seat belts in the skeleton frame of the car. And then the smallest silhouette, Mitzi, opens the door. Eliot wants to save her, he wants to be the hero, but the heat makes a coward of him. Or is it that he fears having to live beside a body covered in burns—his beautiful, porcelain sister, the princess, the little girl ruined by heinous scars. Does he will her dead in that moment in which he stands paralyzed on the blackened earth and watches her collapse and reach toward him with the flesh cooking around her bones?