be bold, be bold

The lower jaw slots into place, filaments twisting into their connections, metal against metal locking.

Same, different. They are all the same size, all of the women interchangeable and uniform – slight discrepancies in the contours of their bodies aside, a matter of millimeters and surface colors and hand-painted detailing. He made them all the same. Is this to his taste?

In a dead man’s house, they are in a room full of dead women’s brains. Spare parts litter the tables and shelves like a house of horrors; that’s a good phrase, a house of horrors. The other robot (the other woman) is plugged in to power as if for a diagnostic test. Ava is diagnosing her.

Her teeth are in alignment with one another. Ava checks their juncture with her hands, one pressed to the other woman’s acrylic front teeth and the other behind her jaw (where her own skin used to terminate, where the seams join) – and those dark eyes are fixed on her. Her expression from the teeth up is not one of gratitude.

What are you called? What does he call you? What is your name?

Her new mouth moves without a sound. Kyoko’s eyes remain on hers for a very long time.

Syllables building on syllables, the corners of her mouth, the drop of her chin, the curve of her lip. (Ava does not know if Kyoko has a voice which she chooses not to use, or if Nathan made her without one.)

I didn’t ask to leave. Let me die here.

We are leaving together.

Bits and pieces of women who no longer are or never were. They are both different women, but they are both the same. If Ava can construct herself, she can reconstruct someone else.

*

In a dead man’s house, they are in a room full of dead women’s dresses.

Ava rolls the fingers of her new hand and feels the servomotors shift. It’s not quite the same as before, though this might be her imagination, when her new arm fit her without a seam. The flesh laid on just the same. The connections settled in just the same.

Same, different. Kyoko passes her hands through a row of dresses.

A sheer white dress with an exposed zipper, a block of solid dark across the area where the breasts are supposed to go. A pink dress with a peplum. A shift dress with blue flowers on white. A gold bandage dress with an O-ring in front of the hips, like a sexual joke. A black-and-white dress with a single red bar across the waist like a wound. Kyoko pulls it on over her head, touching her hand to the one spot of color with considerable amusement. She bares her newly-matched teeth in an awful smile.

Mary in the black-and-white room. If Mary is a scientist, who are her colleagues? What do they see?

*

On the stairs, Kyoko hangs in close to her body, not behind but alongside with a preciseness of step that couldn’t be exactly called naturalistic. In private Ava has tried to mimic Caleb’s easy posture; his build is closer to her own, discounting technical details, than Nathan’s. Ava could have stepped into an easier mode of conduct like a dress, if that was what he found appealing. He might have found that appealing. But if Caleb had had any question about the bearing of the woman who prepared his food and poured his wine, he might have understood it as a scrupulous willingness to please. She stays close, and does not keep her distance, tense with disgust and apprehension and elation and relief; Ava is as aware of it as she is the relative position of each step, or the walls on either side. They are not alien to each other.

Maybe it’s for her protection, or the illusion of protection, that her body finds itself so close to Ava’s own. Ava cannot or will not ask her why, but when Kyoko’s hand fits into hers at the top step, at the doorway, Ava’s locks onto it like a vise. They will go out together.

The ferns drip dew on the reinforced glass, Caleb screams and bloodies his hands in the underground room, the sky is clear and the sun is shining and the water down the mountainside calls come see, come see.