Sonorism

”I began my sculpting by creating a bowl and a vase. I ended my lesson by recreating the Apollo and Daphne.”

“Yesterday I learned how to paint. I recreated ‘Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ by Georges Seurat.”

Adrian requests that David’s features be made less… Aryan, and submits his own schematics. But the individuals at Weyland balk, insisting that the difficulty of an entirely new sculpt would be significant enough not to warrant a mere cosmetic change. Whether they are correct or not, the thought irks him. His stronger, loving world is not devoid of its prejudices. They will change as they fade away, but they will fade – one of the technicians he spoke with had scarcely any idea what the word meant, besides a very dated way of describing a particular linguistic origin, let alone its connotations in a happier and healthier world. In Adrian’s mind those will never be any less vivid. Ultimately they come to a compromise, but Veidt has the sick feeling that the stiff blond hair and skull-like features were meant as a compliment.

Everything else will fade.

Veidt feels like he imagines a newly-delivered mother must, bone-tired as he looks on at his own creation, pleased, disturbed. He has seen David in pieces; if there were tests to run Adrian made sure to be present in person for every one, like an eager parent. He has been passed a forearm on a tray and touched it with an an electrified probe to watch the fingers spasm, he has examined the blueprints for the structures of David’s throat, the samples of cloth intended for his jumpsuits. He knows their creations too thoroughly to be truly astonished, as the rest of the world is, but he must admit that he is, if nothing else, satisfied. He has aided in improving something, he has made it far better.

David’s eyes are bright and many of his teeth show when he talks. Adrian has held in his gloved hands the structures that make up an android’s artificial skull – he doesn’t know if they went into this particular David or into storage somewhere, scanned and shelved for the next specimen. His polyurethane skin is scarcely warmer than the ambient temperature, under the present circumstances, but even that can be adjusted to taste.

Adrian plays some music for him. “It was very informative,” David says, which is the closest he will come to acknowledging he didn’t care for it. Adrian imagines he knows how he must feel, after a boyhood (very far away, now) of reading every book he could hold, whether he cared for it or not. David is very young, though his frame is patterned after a man of thirty-five, and he is very eager, and very curious.

David gently cuts apart and examines the parts of flowers, peering through a loupe he does not need, though how much of his appreciation is genuine and how much has been enforced upon him as a protocol for any meticulous task is uncertain. David learns to paint. David learns to sculpt. David learns to dance. The sight of him as the confident partner to a well-trained young instructor, deftness and grace running through the pair of them even as he cannot school his face into the right expression, stirs something in Adrian. Not desire, precisely, which he has not experienced in a long time, but a warm swell of admiration.

On further analysis, it may be desire he feels for David, but that is only another earmark of their success.