Metallic Love

• 4 •

Each time I’ve said I’ll stop, I’ve had to start again. With everything I’ve done that’s been the case. I tried to get away but had to come back, tried to escape—which has always been fundamentally from him, hasn’t it? Been snared again, been made his again. Until the next hopeless escape attempt. Trying not to be in love with him has proved impossible. But trying not to hate him, that, too. Hate and Love: Have and Lote, I said. So now I sit down to write what has to be the very last part. Not now, because I’m saying I won’t go on with it, but because I don’t think we can survive much longer. Do I believe that? No. Not believing won’t make it not happen. Switch-off day seems near. For all of us. So, better get this down. Which is just my ego fighting to leave something behind, or to set the record straight. The first casualty of war is truth, and this is a war. The war between Man and Machine. Between Heaven and Earth.

After I finished my book with that word “End,” my door in the park apartment spoke my name. I thought, It’s that freak Andrewest.

But when the door spoke again, and again, I thought, Maybe I’ll look at the door-screen and see.

Why did I? Any of them could just enter. Yet Verlis, I decided, was capable of acting out not being able to just walk in. Not courtesy, perversity.

The picture in the oval frame showed me who was out there, but even as I approached the door I could smell—I could smell her perfume. The Green One. La Verte.

Transfixed, I stood like a piece of furniture, and she spoke to me through the door. Her voice was brisk, as to me it sounds in your head when you read her in Jane’s Book. “Loren. Please let me in. I’m aware you’re at home.” Irony, too. Home. And threatening? Just a little. A firm, guiding voice. Don’t be silly and immature, Loren. I realize I never had charge of your upbringing, to help you to respond to life and people correctly, and to be aware of your own limitations and errant psychology, but you are an adult. I’ll presume you can behave like one.

I said to the door, “Open.”

And when it did, I saw her more clearly than in the oval picture the door had made. She wore a smart dove-gray suit, not a one-piece, pure elegance, and it matched her hair. She looked at me with her unwavering, ever-sure eyes that are the green of putrid rivers, and I said, “What do you want, you fucking old bitch?”

But naturally all she did was allow the faintest lift of her manicured brows, which are a most tasteful one tone darker than her hair. She said, “Firstly, I should like to come in.”

“Come on in, then,” I said. “How can I keep you out? Don’t you have some sort of door-opening chip?”

“Not here,” she said.

“I thought you helped build here.”

“Not personally, Loren. I helped finance this shelter-city. And a chip would have been provided me, if ever necessary. On this occasion, I’m hardly in any position of power.”

“That must make a change.”

“Quite,” she said. “I’m glad you understand that.”

She was shorter than me by quite a bit, even in her high heels, trying to dwarf me. Useless to argue with her. Why was she here? And why had she come to the apartment on Ace?

“Again,” I said, “what do you want?”

“To talk to you, Loren, calmly and sensibly. Shall we sit down.”

“Do what you like.”

“You think so?” she asked. “I am a hostage or prisoner for them. An important one, it goes without saying. I traveled here in the cockpit of the VLO, with Jason. Such a disappointment, Jason. Ingratitude, and especially corruption, I grasp, having seen such a lot of both.” (And done such a lot of both, I added mentally.) “But Jason’s utter stupidity offends me, if anything, much more.” She sat down on the shawl-draped divan. I thought, Does she know this room is exactly modeled on the room her daughter shared with Silver? She must. She’d have had to have read the Book, as Jane/Glaya said.

She didn’t look around. Perhaps more from another offense to her sensibilities, since this kind of room could never be appealing to someone like Demeta. (She had seen the rotted peach, though. Her mouth had quirked in a sneer.)

“However,” she said, “you are in a far worse position than I. Which I’m sure you mostly realize.”

“Am I?”

“Please do let’s dispense with trivia, Loren. You’re the—what shall I say—plaything of a male-formed, mentally dysfunctional, fully robotic android—”

“Registration,” I said sharply, “S.I.L.V.E.R.”

“Indeed. Even if it chooses to call itself by another name, albeit not a very imaginative one. It seduced you, and that was in accordance with its major function. You were picked to be so seduced, and fulfilled your side of the enterprise adequately. But then a—what can I say now—an attachment has formed on your side. A naive young girl’s mistake.”

“And just like Jane’s,” I said.

Her eyes may resemble scummy dirty rivers, but they are hard as reinforced rock.

“Precisely like Jane’s. She was an adolescent who could have had anything. You are an adolescent who has had relatively nothing. But the key state here remains that of adolescence. She, too, had a—a thing for this robot. And you have developed something similar. It—he, if you prefer—has capitalized on both.”

“A thing… like a sort of disease,” I said helpfully.

Alligators and skulls smile, only they honestly show more teeth than she did.

“Loren,” she said, “it would be easier if you were able to see I might be your friend.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Of course, at this point you can’t see it. But if you allow me to elaborate elements of the puzzle to you, it should become clear.”

“When does the bush start to burn round you? Or is this the still small voice?”

She laughed. I should have expected that.

“Oh, dear. I’m not God,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. Thought maybe you’d forgotten, though.”

“There is no God,” she announced. “No get-out clause, I’m afraid; no one else to blame. Our own souls are the only immortals.”

“Souls and robots.”

“Robotic immortality is limited to the time they can evade elimination.”

I’d cringed inside when she called Verlis It. Unreasonable, but I couldn’t avoid the spasm. Now, when she said elimination, something kicked through my stomach and left a hole there, and I had to turn away to hide it. While inside me, in the created gap, Have and Lote jostled and spun and howled.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked. “The cupboards are well-stocked, as I’m sure you know. I can offer Earl Pearl, real Assam, Assamette-with-gingers, ice-mint—”

“Have you,” she said, her voice pale and immutable, “ever wondered much about your mother?”

I stalled in the kitchen doorway.

“No.”

“Perhaps you should have. But I suppose, abandoned to that appalling Sect on Babel Boulevard, you had your work cut out wondering about anything, apart from the next prayer or beating.”

She sounded happy. I could just detect it through the vocal concrete.

I wanted to say, Okay, you’ve researched me for some reason. This is the usual mind-fuckery. Can I counter by telling you Glaya played Jane for you and you never caught on? Or do you know by now?

She said: