Virtual Virgin

Christophe leaned forward, his long white hair brushing the lapels of his silk designer blazer. White, of course. The nickname literally suited him. “You can’t keep the most valuable CinSim in the world at home in a closet, like a vacuum cleaner.”

Ric sipped the Bloody Mary he’d accepted, silent and forcing the other man to speak.

“I’m building a new Metropolis for it . . . her,” the mogul went on. “A modern Tower of Babel for the first silver-screen robot. Once it’s done, I’ll have the best normal and paranormal security in Vegas or the world for it. Her. But you still won’t be free to return to your modest, middle-class house and play bait for whomever you like.”

“Why don’t we ask her?” Ric said.

“Really? That would be like boosting C-3PO from the Star Wars film strip and taking his scripted words for . . . well, scripture. That golden futuristic robot is her cinematic descendant.”

“I can see that without being a damn movie buff. Where is she?”

“In the home theater, of course.”

Ric stood, waiting to be shown.

He wasn’t surprised to be led through a pair of double doors, but the semicircular 3-D surround screen that confronted them could match any installed at major national monuments. A curved single row of six lavish reclining theater seats seemed lost in the massive carpeted space.

“Lonely at the top, huh, Christophe?” Ric commented.

Then the lights came up and he saw her again. At one end seat, the Silver Zombie stood like an unused usher.

His . . . protégé? Creature? What was it . . . she, really? His responsibility, certainly.

“We need a name for her.” Ric spoke softly, as if she might hear.

“Don’t ask me. I was content with It.”

“Delilah is right. You are a heartless bastard.”

“The last individual I heard of who was hankering after a heart was a Tin Woodman not unlike my mute guest there.”

The robot was evidently voice-activated, though, because the motionless metal figure had turned to home in on Ric. She moved stiffly at first.

Ric remembered Delilah saying that the actress had to wear the clumsy plastic-wood suit of silver-bronze painted “armor” to play the robot version of her character, even when it scraped her skin and a double could have taken her place. Poor . . . what was her name? Ric wondered.

“Brigitte,” Snow mused as if answering a spoken query. “Sexy name. Pretty little Brigitte Helm. The actress was only nineteen. Just eight years later she was considered for the title role in Bride of Frankenstein. Fitting, that was, since that 1935 American film drew on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, with its invention of a mad scientist and ‘machinery’ of bubbling vials and neon. A vial shaped like a giant martini glass formed the centerpiece of the laboratory set. I imagine Delilah really enjoyed that part.”

So, Ric wondered, the Silver Zombie cocktail Delilah had concocted in Wichita was an idea whose time had finally come?

“I don’t know all these movie references,” Ric said aloud, “but I know how to put two and two together. You’re beginning to sound like Delilah, a film history buff.”

“Always was, a bit, but no. Now I’m most interested in the film’s futuristic cityscape, the gliding biplanes and bullet trains shooting along on tracks up among the skyscrapers with the Tower of Babel squatting like a gigantic horned god over the slick modern towers Las Vegas hotels have become famous for. I’ve been aching to pattern an addition to the Inferno on this film for . . . a very long time. You really must see Metropolis. Study it. Another reason you should move in here.”

“To see a movie? I don’t think so.”

Ric glanced at the gleaming metal figure beside him, standing as still as a life-size female Oscar award. Her metal carapace was anatomically correct on superheroine terms. She was a powerful female figure, far curvier than a Victoria’s Secret model in a Wonderbra but not at all caress-able.

“You’ll probably use her as the centerpiece of a recreated mad scientist’s resurrection laboratory,” Ric said. “What a waste.”

“She’s not the most scintillating conversationalist,” Christophe said with a smile, “but she was in a silent movie.”

“She spoke in your Emerald City Hotel penthouse in Wichita,” Ric reminded him.

The mogul’s pale white eyebrows lifted over the rims of his aviator sunglasses. They both knew what she’d said; apparently Ric’s reference had recalled that word to her as well.

Perfectly oval blank silver eyes seemed to bore deep into Ric’s.

“Master,” she said.

Again.

That one word gave him the creeps and drove Delilah crazy.

Christophe just smiled.

“Isn’t that . . . useful? She’s transferred her allegiance from the film’s evil genius who created her, Rotwang, to the do-gooder who re-created her in physical form in our own time. You, Montoya. At least you have a better- sounding surname. And, who knows? That one little word from her cold metal lips to your ears may save all our necks in the coming second Vegas apocalypse.”

“A ROBOT CINSIM,” Ric mused after they’d left the creature dormant again in the empty theater.

He’d returned to his seat, feeling as zombielike as . . . Brigitte . . . had acted.

“As you’ll soon see in the movie,” Christophe said, lounging in his white leather conversation pit again, “the robot was able to assume human likeness. I suspect the version you called off the screen is more of a cyborg, half machine, half human. You had to raise the dead body of the actress inside to draw the exterior likeness into being. Brigitte Helm died in 1996.”

“That recently?” Ric asked, trying to imagine a wizened, bent shell of a woman imprisoned in that eternally erect and superheroine-curvaceous body. If it didn’t mimic hard shiny metal, Ric would call it lush.

“Life expectancies have been climbing in recent decades,” Christophe noted, “especially now that vampires have joined the human race . . . or at least live side by side with humans.”

“Like you?”

“I’ll deny that false charge until the day I die.”

Christophe’s smiles, Ric observed, always seemed eerie because you could never see the expression of his eyes. The idea of Delilah accepting a kiss from those colorless lips, so like a corpse’s, and doing it on his behalf, made his skin crawl.

Some women might find that Ice King image hot, and obviously did by the legions, but not Delilah. She’d worked to free Christophe’s Brimstone Kiss–addicted groupies from their obsession. Odd what women would fall for, as odd as the absurd idea of him falling for the Silver Zombie. Time to get back on topic . . . squeezing Snow for information.

“Isn’t a cyborg a blend of human and machine,” Ric asked, “more than the mechanized body parts doctors can install now? That’s in steampunk films. Isn’t true cybernetics blending the brain and the circulatory system with machines?”

“The head and the heart. Quite a theme in Metropolis, as you’ll see.”

“I don’t need to view the film to know that the robot exterior is just an especially elaborate costume, and that the actress who wore it was an independent being.”

“But it was shaped from her body cast.”

“Still a shell. She has to be the sum of her parts, a CinSim raised inside one of her costumes for the movie, like a deep-sea diver brought to the surface.”

“Interesting point. Perhaps you should try to call the character of Maria in her human form off the screen.”

“No.” Ric stood and backed away from the lounging figure before he knew his impulses had willed him to move. “I’m not going to be responsible for multiple incarnations of that poor actress.”