Metallic Love

After the coppers and silvers, the golds fenced. He and she. They leapt yards upwards, somersaulted and spun in the air, sprang up cliffs of nothingness and catapulted back. But again, more than this.

The golds had two fencing swords, which had slid out from their arms. I mean, out of the muscle and the skin of them. Obviously it wasn’t muscle and skin, but it looked as if it were, and the swords were simply—born out of it. And when they had grown all the way out, they sheered off, soft as snow, forming their shapes as they went, hardening, to nestle, flexed and inimitable, in the hands of what had birthed them.

No. Humans couldn’t do this. No one could mistake one of these for anything human ever again.

(I put this down as if I had lost sight of him, forgotten him. I hadn’t. I saw him, as if I saw him through their bodies. But I saw all the rest, and what they did. They were all one thing, the eight beings on the raft. And even though right then I didn’t know it, to love him now was to be in thrall to each and everyone of them.)

Last were the asterions. We were to see why. She stepped forward, and became altogether something else. Like the double voices, triple playing, extraction of clothes and weapons, but again, more than that.

The crowd in the hot night garden, in the district called Russia, made a low, primal noise.

The black woman had become, literally, a pillar of black glass. Obsidian. You could really see through her. At the pillar’s top, her lovely face, classic African, but still, and also glass, also semitransparent. Only her eyes moved. Other galaxies danced, slow and calm, in those eyes.

But then he, the asterion man, he—

The crowd shrieked in five thousand voices—pleasure and thrill, or terror?

Did I shriek, too?

I couldn’t hear if I screamed, couldn’t hear my heart. Perhaps I was dead. Perhaps we all were, and that wouldn’t be a problem now, for here the new race was. God had given up on flesh and blood. He wouldn’t fuss with a flood now, no ultimate apocalyptic quake. Now God had just made robots.

There in full view of every one of us, the asterion male changed into a dragon. He was the prehistoric demon of our dreams. Scaled and sheened and glorious, and terrible, gold-washed over jet, towering and coiling there with its head against the sky, suns streaming in its glances, fire glinting far back in its jaws.

How excellently judged.

The crowd on the brink of panic, swirling, ready to stampede (How many would die?), and all at once, everything again altered, as if some switch had been thrown inside the vast machine of the night.

No dragon. No pillar. No miracles. All gone.

Had it been an illusion? Had we collectively imagined everything we’d seen?

A kind of cooling spray of no-fire fireworks were softly detonating over our heads.

The beings from Olympus smiled upon us, all now formed in our image, only so much better.

I thought, Drugs—that’s what made it seem like that—even a robot can’t…

Normalcy was being made to break out. Not only the pretty lights, but warm rain was raining down. The crowd, contained again, scattering about, defused, giggling.

Had they made the rain, too, whoever they were, these people who had acted God, and called it The Show?

Pushing, the crowd forced me back, and I saw through the rainy, fiery air, the golden raft-boat of God-made gods flying low and away over the park. Nearly two hours had gone by. It had seemed much less. Much more.

Someone else bumped into me from behind. This time a firm hand steadied me.

“Quelle joie. This is all going a bit out of control,” he said. “I thought it might.”

I half-turned. I didn’t know him. Then I did.

“You are getting so wet,” he observed sympathetically. “And in your attractive dress. Are you with someone?”

“No,” I said.

“Well,” he said kindly, under the racket of the crowd, “perhaps I can amend that.”

He was the guy from the visual I’d seen back in the city, on the blonde’s VS. The guy with the actor’s voice, who had helped advertise META and all META’s works.

“My name’s Sharffe.”

“Loren.”

“Pleased to acquaint avec toi, ma chere.”

I don’t run to much French, but got the gist. It seemed he liked me somewhat.

We had already moved out of the worst crush, he weaving us with the knack of practice through the wet but now partying crowd, upon which little painted balloons with cans of alcohol and bags of chocolate-type candy attached, were coming down in the rain. “All free gifts courtesy of META,” he told me. “Do you want any of those?” I said, “Maybe not.” “A woman of taste,” he decided. By then we’d reached a stand of big trees and he drew me under. There was a dim-lit mesh wall with a small gate. It only looked like some private maintenance area of the gardens. Sharffe unlocked the gate by winking one eye at it. It’s true, plenty of people are partly robot, at least among the tech-protected plutocracy. He must have an eye-code booster override built in somewhere, which gives him, as it were, the keys to the city, or some of them.

The other side of the gate was a gravel path. And then a steel-brick wall. A door opened for him in this wall, too. We went through to a lot with several large cars exclusively parked.

“Mine’s that one,” he said.

I looked at his car. It was a reverse auto self-drive Orinoco Prax, glimmering gold like nail polish… or a G.O.L.D. E.R. robot.

Drunk on possible hallucinogens and desolate, unnameable emotions, Loren the Liar looked dewily from her (actually) mad eyes and told him, “What a beautiful car.”

The rain didn’t fall so fiercely here. Either there was a partial shield up over the lot, or the storm was ebbing. I glanced at him, and away. He was definitely the one from the VS news. And he was here at The Show, seemed to know all about it, and to be wealthy enough to own this vulgar vehicle.

“Shall I take you for a drive?” he asked me, winningly, aware he was quite young and sort of handsome, as well as stinking rich.

“Why me?” I innocently asked.

“Oh, I was watching you from the control center back there. We were supposed to be monitoring not only how our team performed but also the crowd, to gauge reactions, that kind of thing. But then I spotted you. I had my eyes on you quite a bit after that. Did you enjoy them, the team? What did you think?”

The team. He meant the robots. The gods.

“They were spectacular.”

“Good. That’s exactly the reaction we want.”

We walked over to the Orinoco. God, the seats were white fake fur; they’d be soft as toy Siberian tigers.

“Come for a drive,” he said. “Then dinner? I’m quite in love with you, Loren, you know—amour fou, coup de foudre—all of that. It can happen. Or don’t intelligent young women like you believe in that—love at first sight?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Quelle joie. Get in. The seats are fun. You sink for miles. Fur’s real, by the way. Don’t tell anyone.”

He could have been a psychopath. And I suppose he is, really. But in this instance, he seemed just some man pleased with himself and expecting a bonus from his bosses, therefore sexed-up and eager to take any nice- looking, half-okay pleb to bed.

How did he think anyone would look at him after—them?

How could he look at a woman, after them? Well, the car-seat fur was real. Maybe that explained quite a bit.

I didn’t hesitate, or only long enough to fuel his fire.

I’d never been a professional, a prostitute. I had sex randomly because I wanted to, and earned cash by work. Of course, it wasn’t cash I was after now.