obsolescence

“She has pictures in her room,” Caleb says, cautiously. “I saw them while she was getting dressed. Did you give her those, or did she pick those out?”

He watches Nathan’s face brighten. He’s hunched over typing with two fingers now, one-handed, rapid-fire. “Cool line of thought. Like, does she have preferences? I uploaded a couple files at a time to test her object recognition skills, but these days she’s plugged right into Bluebook’s image search.”

It takes about three seconds for the pitfalls of this to appear fully-formed in Caleb’s mind. Think: photos of war zones, house fires, babies with skin diseases. He blinks them away, and laughs. “Well, that could backfire.”

“Oh, yeah. She’s seen a lot of pictures of tits. Hang on.”

Click and tap, pinch and scatter. The first batch of photographs on the screen flickers by in a stream of mapped images — photos of women, old and young, against solid colored backgrounds. Split-second fractal grids snap over their faces. Facial recognition. Easy peasy. The next batch shows pictures of women against patterned backdrops, women with their hair tangled over their face, runway pictures — distractions.

Nathan strikes a couple keys and straightens up. “And now the master class.”

The last batch is a dozen pictures of women inert — on their backs or on their sides, arms bent back, a jutting shoulder that might be a breast, the rising slope of a breast that might be the crook of a thin arm. Caleb feels a flutter of embarrassment when he realizes how many of these women are naked — whether very stylish or sleeping or fucked-out, half-open eyes fixed in sexy accusation, faces flushed red or bone-pale. Flat brown nipples hanging close to the ribcage on tiny breasts, crescent arches of bites. He’s seen some of these pictures before, but he doesn’t know where. Caleb can feel his own face beginning to prickle with heat.

The stream of images slows. Nathan wants him to take a good look. One of the women has a tiny trickle of blood coming from her ear, hanging fat and red like a precious stone.

“Jesus, are they— they’re sleeping, right? They’re sleeping.”

Nathan toasts him with his bottle of beer. “Well, that’s the question.”

Maybe he’s seen them all before — where has he seen them? Where could he have possibly seen that kind of thing? Somebody in college — or clicking through on an image host and getting slapped in the face with something he never meant to see. Being young and dumb on the internet and fucking around —

“Why did you show me those pictures?” His voice comes out more brittle and plaintive than he wanted it to. Not very cool at all.

“Why, did it bother you?”

Nathan’s head is practically in Caleb’s lap now, the back of his skull pressing into the soft part of his thigh. He reaches up to clap a hand on Caleb’s shoulder, but Caleb’s mouth has gone dry.

He’ll ask Ava about it in the morning. He’ll take a long hot shower until the steam fills up the room and films over the camera lenses. When he crawls into bed and shuts his eyes he still sees eyes, and arms, and undifferentiated flesh.

*

These are the things Caleb knows about himself.

His parents both taught high school and he grew up in a house with a crabapple tree in the backyard and two ancient Huskies. His parents died when he was fifteen. His resume is perfect, people have been headhunting him for this kind of work since he was eighteen, his skillset is competitive, his approach is good —

The lights are on full blast. That’s what wakes Caleb up, and for a moment he’s seized with the same dread that kicks in when the emergency lighting does — when he sits upright in bed he can see it’s just Nathan, stark in the void of the open door.

“What time is it?”

“Time to get your blood moving.”

Nathan is completely naked, with a towel thrown over his shoulder. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Right now?”

“No, later. Yeah, right now. Up, up, up. Up and at ’em.”

The act of looking is instantaneous and unavoidable. If Caleb hadn’t looked down, Nathan would have taken offense. There’s not a lot of mystery to his body compared to what Caleb’s imagination would have provided — mostly Caleb tries not to look at him, even when his eyes snag on the nature trail of dark hair leading down from his navel, either carefully tended or naturally sparse. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would really bother with intensive grooming. The deep lines of his hips are the point at which Caleb looks away, fumbling out of bed and onto his feet.

The keycard is in Nathan’s hand, swinging jauntily parallel to his naked flank. He’ll have to set it down eventually — Nathan slots it into another panel at the end of another spine-snapping bent hallway and leads him down into a wood-lined hole in the ground — red cedar slatted walls varnished dark, a heap of volcanic stones piled up in their own firepit. Caleb gets only the most cursory look, out of the corner of Nathan’s eye.

“Now you get naked.” Like: now you, your turn, or like something else entirely. This is happening, now.

Caleb removes his tee shirt, folding it into a tight little cotton package. He’s been naked around a lot of people since he was fifteen, none of them interested in him sexually despite the occasional guilty twinge of wishful thinking. This isn’t any different than that. It’s like a locker room or a high school gym shower or a hospital exam. His boxers get the same slightly neurotic treatment, when he slips them down to his ankles and off over his reddening feet. Shirt folded on top, folded underwear beneath. He leaves them on the varnished wooden doorstep and steps inside, soles of his bare feet sticking to the slats. The absence of Nathan pulls him in after.

He expects suffocating heat and doesn’t get it, not at first. The interior is carved out in red wood and warm light, like stepping into a summer day — stepping out of a cold hall into a warm dry enveloping orifice that makes the back of Caleb’s neck spring out in a prickle of apprehension.

Nathan splashes himself with water and tosses the towel against a slatted wooden bench so he can do some stretches. It’s not sexy, as such, but it’s still vaguely sexual.

“Um,” Caleb says. “Can I just sit anywhere?”

“Yeah, go right ahead. Sit on the floor, wherever.”

The walls are at an angle that’s barely perceptible, curving in and folding to reflect the heat. It feels a little bit like Ava’s room, only if there’s a camera somewhere Caleb’s surreptitious scanning has missed it. Why would there be? Nathan lives alone. Intruders haven’t made it all the way down here — just guys. This is where you go to shoot the shit and not be on the record. Nathan ladles water onto the rocks and it sizzles — and for a moment nothing seems to change before the steam rolls up to their level in a wet warm pillar of invisible heat.

He can get the appeal. He can smile and lean back on the wood slats and pretend he’s somewhere else. But the heat is like being wrapped in a wet towel, snaking into Caleb’s throat — it doesn’t take long before Nathan is glistening with sweat, shining arms and shining chest. He settles in, one knee up to prop his elbow at a jaunty angle. His flushed skin makes the mark on the crown of his head stand out more distinctly — a white patch like a seam, or a scar.

Caleb can picture him cracking the skull and rerouting his own brain, studying his own synaptic patterns, branching and fusing; maybe somewhere there’s a cryogenic Walt Disney vault where his consciousness is preserved in rigid-pliable resin for posterity, or there’s a chip embedded in his hypothalamus that does something cool, or there was a tumor in there and now there’s not. He wants to take Nathan’s face in his hands and run his thumb down the seam. He doesn’t want to be thinking about that.

He’s seriously overestimating Nathan’s capacity for transhumanism. He probably just headbutted a brick wall. Nathan’s lips are softly parted, even in the murky red-yellow light his teeth shine irregularly, white from the contrast with his beard but not perfect. This is the guy who laid out Bluebook, who made it all happen, who made Ava. He’s just another man. He isn’t a god. And he isn’t who Caleb thought he was.

Caleb is hugging himself, he realizes, and it might not reflect too well on his willingness to detoxify.

Nathan stretches out a smooth muscled arm to knead at his shoulder. Caleb settles back and tries to stretch, mirroring him without meaning to. The way he holds his shoulders, the slouchy shape of his spine.

“I wish I brought a book.” He packed a book and everything. Just in case his secret Scandinavian rendezvous with a reclusive genius got boring, or something. He’s not sure what Nathan’s brought him here to do any more. Alternating charm and pressure.

The heater thrums. Nathan’s breathing is impossibly measured, long round yoga breaths; Caleb can hear it, and he can feel Nathan looking at him — looking over his body. Caleb’s suddenly conscious of his crooked collarbone, his slightly sunken chest, his nipples, his pubes. Like getting worked over. He crosses his legs.

“You’re all red,” Nathan raises his voice to say, sounding pleased with himself.

“Oh,” Caleb says. “Yeah.” His chest and arms are prickling. His heart is in his throat.

“Well, all right.”

Nathan dumps more water on the coals. The steam rises up in a plume and it’s like someone stuffed a wet washcloth down his throat. Caleb’s breath starts to hitch.

What’s Ava doing right now? What’s going to happen to her now? Where’s Kyoko and what has Nathan been doing to her all night?He’s bigger than Caleb is, and that makes him slower; a smirking barbarian with hard muscly legs and delusions of godhood, a too-full drinks cabinet, rocks in his head. He probably had sex with her before he came here. With Kyoko, not Ava. With both of them. With either of them. He’s like Ava’s dad, but he’s like Kyoko’s boss, so do the math.

“That’s enough,” Caleb says, standing. He’s blinking past the steam, past the irradiated glow. The keycard’s in the slot by the door, for lack of a better place to keep it that wouldn’t expose it to heat or moisture or both. Caleb could just take it, and leave Nathan inside. The door is thick enough to hold him.

But he can’t possibly move fast enough, he’s paralyzed by the thought of him behind that heavy door and the beveled tile of metal that isn’t designed to fit his hand — like maybe Nathan’s brought him here for a better reason.

By the time he’s past the doorframe, Nathan is behind him — body pressing against body, digging his knee into the back of Caleb’s leg as his thumb gouges into Caleb’s palm. The thumbnail finds some secret painful place and presses. Caleb’s fingers spasm and release.

“I found this.”

“Thanks, Caleb.” Nathan is laughing at him. The metal tile slides out of Caleb’s grip. “Where were you going to keep it?”

Nathan’s wet body is heavy against him, shining and naked. His hand stretches out like a paw, raking Caleb’s neck and carving up runnels of wet peeled skin. Caleb is experiencing the sensation of something slipping under his skin — something under the surface coming dislodged, entirely without pain. Something is changing inside him, bending, buckling.

Nathan is dripping sweat and oozing with smiles, pushing past. Caleb’s skin is bone-dry. He dresses himself with shaky hands. Unfolding his shirt, unfolding his boxers, looking for something he might possibly have missed, something that maybe rolled away.

*

They don’t make it back to work until late afternoon; Nathan’s early morning vigorousness translates into a long lunch and a lecture and Caleb can’t get Ava out of his head until she’s sitting there in front of him, half-made up. She’s ignoring him. She’s frightened, or she’s punishing him.

“I should have come sooner, I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Ava’s head swivels, the first overtly mechanical motion she’s made today. The room throbs red. Her right hand fingers at her own neck with rubbery subtlety — gesturing at the marks he still has, pink gouges from fingernails that won’t go away when he scrubs. On camera it’ll look demure. Here, in red light, it’s accusatory. “Did he hurt you?”

“Nathan? No.”

“You won’t look at me when you talk about him. Why?”

“No, no, no, it’s all right. He showed me his sauna, that’s all.” (Ava flickers, inclining her head. The whites of her eyes encircle her irises completely, which Caleb takes to be surprise.) “A sauna’s like a separate room—”

It’s not surprise on her face. “I know what that is, Caleb. He shouldn’t have taken you there.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t be alone with him.”

Caleb’s shaking his head, but his skin is crawling. “I know, but where else am I going to go?”

“We need to leave. He’s going to do something to you that you won’t like.”

The red light turns to blue. The quick transition gives Caleb whiplash. Ava continues as if mid-sentence, but the urgency is gone from her face, replaced by buttery calm.

“—but when an animal sees itself in the mirror, it might attack the image. Or it might think the mirror is a window.”

Caleb tries to be gentle, and to match her. “You’ve never seen an animal, have you? Besides people.”

“I’ve seen pictures.” Ava’s left hand is laid flat against her thigh. Her right hand is curled in a fist.

*

“Am I creeping you out, man?”

“What?”

“Am I making you uncomfortable? I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable.” His grip is on Caleb’s wrist and he’s dragging him down, down, down.

“What do you want?” Caleb tries to sit up without actually touching him. It’s tough with Nathan slithering into bed with him, brushing up against his legs. He’s drunk — happy drunk this time, pliable instead of hostile and roly-poly as a panther. It sends a weird shiver of fear straight to Caleb’s crotch. Animal instincts.

Late night, not early morning; there’s a tray on the counter top but the pitcher is empty, no little visit from Kyoko tonight. She must be busy. Looking up at him from the bundled covers with big bright thoughtful eyes, and no glasses: “She’s plateauing.”

“I thought we made good progress today.” Caleb kicks away at the tangle of blankets and draws up his legs. Nathan rolls over onto his back.

“She’s resting on her laurels, man. I think the power failures are affecting her cognitive processes.”

Downstairs there’s a girl who needs Caleb’s help. Caleb shuts his eyes, and thinks.

“She’s an autonomous system, though. She’s not plugged into power when the network cuts out. Do you think it’s affecting her backups?”

“Ava doesn’t plug in to begin with. Inductive charging. Like an artificial heart.” Nathan wriggles next to him — Caleb opens his eyes and thank fuck, Bateman is at least wearing pants, heather-gray joggers that hang low on his hips and suggest expensive leisure time. What rich guys wear to watch Netflix in. “But that’s possible. I could extract her info and look for surge patterns. But she might not like that.”

“You’re right,” Caleb says, lamely. “I don’t think she would.”

“Does she act different? The two of you carrying on in there. I can’t find my glasses right now. I can’t see shit.” He’s close to Caleb’s face now, and his head is practically on Caleb’s pillow. Nathan is not wearing a shirt. Down the slope of his chest, the backs of his fingers rest against his own soft stomach.

Caleb sits up, backing against the headboard. “Not really, but it’s hard to tell. I think the blackouts freak her out a little.”

“So you think she feels fear.”

“She knows when something’s happening that shouldn’t be. I think she’s putting it together.”

“Hey, that’s great. That’s a huge deal. Why are you trying to fuck me, Caleb?”

“What?”

“I invite you into my home and you’re giving me all this — like you’re playing dumb. It doesn’t look good on you, Caleb. Tell you what, we’re going down to the lab and I’m going to check her internal logs for power spikes.”

“Right,” Caleb says, feeling his throat start to close again. He could say, that sounds good, or what are you looking for, or—

“And you’re going to help.”

*

There’s no glow from behind the mesh — just a face and hands fixed to a wire armature, just a wax dummy. There’s nothing left, nothing to say whether it’s even really her — inert. He remembers, in the hospital, waiting to hear what happened to his parents — maybe this is the test, whether Ava’s asleep or dead, dead or alive. Whether this is Ava any more or something — someone — else. When she becomes Ava again upon reassembly — when Nathan gives her back her faceplate, or the skins for her mechanical hands, or her brain? Her voice?

The body on the table is completely hairless; even the eyebrows and eyelashes look painted-on, or individually rooted, easy to pluck away. There’s a ridged seam on her upper arm, in line with her breast — Nathan rests the heel of his hand on the peak of Ava’s breast when he’s twisting apart the seal that attaches her arm to the shoulder, and Caleb feels sick.

It isn’t Ava. It’s just parts.

It’s all just parts — and seeing it in a stationary state destroys the impression of grace. It’s just a bunch of pistons and tubes under mesh. He tries to reposition Ava’s arm to a more natural position at her side, and he can feel the metal spines inside shifting uneasily like a handful of ball-bearings.

Ava’s eyes are open, her pupils are sliding back and forth in regular passes, like she’s following the path of a pen being moved from side to side. Caleb waves a hand and it doesn’t interrupt the steady back-and-forth wheeling

Nathan glances up from the table at his moving hand. “So do you think it’s her? Or that it isn’t her? Because Ava’s not home right now, dude. Ava’s gone. If I plug her back in and bring her back online, is she the same girl?”

“You can’t ask me that.”

“Here. Gimme a hand. Tell me what you think.”

Braced against the table, Nathan slips the tips of his fingers under Ava’s faceplate, and fishes around on the table top for a long cable. Caleb holds Ava’s face back, away from the shiny skeleton underneath, covered in diamond-shaped sucker marks that fade in a couple seconds like breath on a mirror. The synthetic skin has begun to distort, like a Halloween mask turning inside out. The underside is slick to the touch.

There’s a magnetized port behind her eye. The cable snaps into place.

“So what do you want to see? Her first time?”

Nathan picks her up and carries her to the monitor — not gently, not like a sack of potatoes or like a CPR dummy or like a ragdoll but like a woman’s dead body, wrapping his hand around her throat and dragging. There are more cables that connect underneath the smooth chrome surface of her skull — shades of Heavy Metal, Caleb thinks not for the first time in the last few days, but this time a peal of desperate laughter escapes his mouth.

“What’s so funny, man? What?”

“Jesus, this is terrible.”

The screen displays file formats Caleb doesn’t know, flickering past like a download. Ava’s not located in her body; she’s somewhere else, somewhere far away where Nathan’s fingers can’t penetrate. Nathan looks back over his shoulder. “Okay, we’re golden.”

There’s something Caleb needs to go and do.

*

These are the things Caleb knows about himself: his parents are dead. He’s a computer programmer. He loves Ava and he wants her to be free.

These are the things he doesn’t know: whether Ava is dead or alive. Whether he’s here on accident or on purpose. Whether he’s allowed to leave. Whether he’ll be allowed to take Ava with him. How Ava really feels, about him or in general. When he’ll stop bleeding. What’s happening to him.

Nathan finds him with a bleeding arm. He’s drunk, and Caleb is distraught; this time they match.

“Finally, we’ve got some drama going on,” Nathan breathes.

“How’s she doing? Is she back online?” Caleb is gasping, bleeding into his tee shirt. So much for their fucking test. How’s he supposed to be objective now — but Nathan never wanted him to be objective, he wanted to jerk him around with a tight grip on how he felt. The fact that Ava can be immobilized and taken apart doesn’t say anything about her sentience, or her personality. Caleb could be knocked out and cut up. Nathan, too. Crack the hinge on that big skull of his and see what’s inside.

A basin full of electric-red water. Caleb cut his arm and the skin came away in one piece, like a bandage. He has to hold it back in place. His whole body is numb, with the exception of a single red seam of pain. Something inside it is thrumming with energy. He can feel it.

He knows he can bleed. He knows there’s something under the surface of himself, even if it’s not what he wants. He needs to get away from the mirror.

“Forget about her. You did great. You did exactly what you were supposed to do.” Nathan fumbling at him, back against the sink, Caleb’s pulse hammering. “She’s back online. She’s drawing a picture, right now. Don’t think about Ava.”

“Fuck.”

“Is this bothering you?” Nathan’s hand is on his dick, his other hand gripping Caleb’s side for support. He’s too unsteady to stand. He sat there behind a desk drinking beers and watching Caleb cut his arm open from wrist to elbow. How compassionate. He’s starting to get a hard-on.

Jostling hard against any outside support, ready to pitch forward and hit the floor hard, Caleb is wavering. “You need to lie down—” Right, it’s Nathan who needs to lie down. He smells like alcohol; Caleb smells like something that might be blood, and might not. Nathan stumbles trying to press him out the door and they both nearly hit the ground; Caleb’s arm is leaking red water onto Nathan’s bare chest.

“Just relax.” Nathan clamps a towel over his wound, and Caleb can feel the fibers prickling in the wound — that’s got to be a good sign, right? A delineation, and inside and an outside.

The cut edge crackles with static discharge. Caleb feels sick and stupid.

“What can I get you? What do you drink?”

It’s too late to dissuade him and at least maybe this means he can’t get drunk. Maybe this means he can get Nathan drunk. The drink Nathan brings him tastes bitter and it doesn’t make him feel any better, it just sits wetly atop the pit of his stomach and doesn’t even get him buzzed. In the living room Nathan swings his bare feet off the edge of the couch while Caleb watches him, hunched.

Fake blood, fake tongue and teeth, fake throat. A long seam of silver mesh beneath the skin. Maybe that’s the next step.

*

On the living room floor Nathan helps him out of his shirt, pinning his arms back when they’re still tangled in his rolled-up sleeve holes — Caleb shuts his eyes and tries not to shiver when Nathan’s mouth finds one of his nipples. His big shoulder jostles into the edge of a table, and he laughs against the skin of Caleb’s chest. Caleb’s skin isn’t his own any more. His body is rejecting it. Everything feels too-hot, unmodulated.

In the living room: Caleb hasn’t done much living anywhere in this house. Underneath the couch is a knife from the kitchen, with its expensive surface patterned like oil on water; Caleb can see it, out of the corner of his eye. Nathan’s thick arm swipes out — reaching for it.

“You’d let me know if there was something wrong with her. I’m the only one who knows how to fix her.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Ava. She’s just curious.”

“She’s just curious,” Nathan says, echoing him softly, like laughter. Why fight? He rolls him over, the heel of his hand pressing into the back of Caleb’s neck, a hard edge against his skull. “Quit moving. I wanna show you something. Come on.”

An organic brain in a synthetic body. Nathan mapped out some loser’s brain and set it up in some approximation of some loser’s body, with lots of superficial vessels for syrupy fake blood. Or Nathan built up the bare minimum of a complete personality and decided to play a game. Or Caleb is cracking up. He’s gagging on everything Nathan’s given him.

His knees strike the carpet hard when Nathan presses them flat, but the pain is only dull; Nathan manipulates his legs apart. Caleb scrambles to prop himself up on his elbows and the solid weight of a body presses him down again. The flesh on his arm is peeling away, skinned back where it abrades against the carpet, unzipping in seams to the shoulder. From this angle, he can’t see what’s underneath. Alive or dead?

“Quit moving or I’ll cut a hole to fuck you in,” Nathan says, like he’s complaining about unhooking a bra, fingers snagging in unspooled flesh that no longer holds a bruise unmoored from its electrified housing. Caleb believes him now, he only wants to know if such a hole will bleed.

These are the things Caleb knows about himself. He’s straight. He’s good at his job. He’s very tired. He has neither an inside nor an outside. Down the stairs and down the hallway there’s a girl—

Caleb is beginning to choke. Nathan mouths against his bent back, pressing close. The heel of his hand is on the handle of a knife.