SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

On the ground floor, a doorwoman stopped her with an authoritative hand, asked for her name, noted her address. She took them all with her into a small room where Rosie wasn’t allowed, a room from which she came back with a snarl.

“Please take the elevator. He’ll be expecting you.”

It could have been true, but the person on the other side of the ascending gilded cage was not the one she had been expecting. The defining characteristics had remained unchanged, but the eyepatch was gone, replaced by a discreet glass eye—he was already half doll, then, even without her intervention—and the scars on the back of his fidgeting hands had healed to barely noticeable silver lines. Hard to tell whether he was happy to see her.

“Are you alone?” It was the first thing she asked, and the one that cracked his face into the smile she had always associated with his character.

“Such a predatory question for a guest to ask, Rose.” He stepped forward and unlocked the cage, but didn’t open the door. “May I ask…why the sudden visit?”

Half of her wanted to sit, relax, act friendly for old times’ sake. The other half wanted to leave as soon as possible, abandon the uptown world of polished hardwood penthouses and return to the moldy riverside, where the dust was toxic but the people were kind.

“I need your help.”

“Well, obviously.”

When had the women in her family ever remembered him with no strings attached, no favors asked? Rosie wondered, as she followed his defeated shoulders into the living room. By the large windows, he invited her to take the sofa, but chose to stay on his feet himself—she understood he needed the advantage, and gave it away, sinking into the pillows, expecting the silence to break on its own. Finally, he indicated the city.

“So how’s business on the ground?”

“Haven’t you been down?”

A headshake, a smile. “Not once this year, no. It’s too much for me—the people, the noises. I’d rather stay above ground…and get somebody else to do the shopping.”

Did he need a companion piece, too? The smell of the dead body caught up to her, and his creature comforts didn’t seem quite so interesting in comparison.

“Listen, Max…have you heard of the house of mirrors?”

“Can’t say I have.” He seemed honest, if uninterested—she’d prepared herself to see him shiver, as if he too had been one of the lady’s nocturnal visitors, as if he too had already fulfilled companion duties a robot would never be able to live up to.

“There’s a lady who lives there, and she never goes outside. She has hired me to create her…a doll. A companion piece. Life-sized, able to speak, to move, to do everything a human does, except…not human.”

Max was listening. The one eye he retained any control over was curious. His knuckles were white from gripping his sleeves at his elbows.

“I came to you in case you had any ideas.”

“I don’t know anything about dolls.” But she knew he knew where she was going, and he was bracing himself for it.

“No, but you know about machines. And you know about…”

He nodded. “You can say it.”

“…submitting. Listen, I-I can’t program a thing to speak if she wants it able to hold a conversation. I can’t make a machine do the things she wants. It’s just not possible. But I told her I would, and if I don’t, she…she’s going to flay me, I just know it.”

Max gave her nothing more than a shrug.

“Then find her someone. A slave, a submissive. With time, we could train someone.” He sat on the coffee table in front of her, elbows on his knees, a little too close, and she was again young, fascinated by this creature who would have once braved an army to keep her out of harm’s way. “Do we have time?”

“It doesn’t matter, it’s just a thought. I’m not…I’m not really going to do it.” Or was she? “What if they change their mind, what if they leave? She doesn’t want a person acting like a robot, she wants a robot acting like a person, and it’s not the sam—”

“No, it’s not, but can she tell the difference?” And his smile was different, and his face was different, and he wasn’t the most beautiful boy in the world anymore—she wouldn’t have handed him to a customer if he had been the last human standing.

“I didn’t know you were this…cunning, Max.” And when he averted his eyes, she struck again. “Spending too much time working with my family, I see.”

He gave her what seemed to be an eye roll, hard to identify by his half paralyzed orbs and his sudden, rushed movement, up and away from the sofa.

“Don’t flatter your kin. If you want help, that’s my proposal.” By the window, he calmed down again, still as a statue, as his right hand moved into the void to explain his point. “She’s not going to know if you train someone and pay them well. There are hundreds of people out there who would love to get out of the streets, and into a house with a proper roof. Besides, if she treats them well…it’s not that bad of a deal.”

She wondered if, apart from everything else, the parts she couldn’t see under his clothes, the rest she already knew about…Max had also sold his soul.

“People will do the darkest things for safety. But I don’t expect you to understand.” He ran a caring hand through her hair as he walked by the sofa, and disappeared up the stairs.

His words lingered in the back of her mind, but she pushed them aside every so often. She requested a second body from Aiden, and that time she wasn’t picky. Anything would do, and what came was a middle-aged woman, her hair a dyed shade of bright red. Anything would do , she kept telling herself, head lolling forward on the hinge of her shoulders, finding no solace even when she took the time to drag herself into the corner couch where childhood had brought her such sweet dreams.

“Have you been sleeping?” It was Theo, concerned, voice mixed with the jingle of the front door keys hanging from his fingers. Was it past closing time already?

She shook her head, closing her eyes in silent surrender. No, she hadn’t been sleeping, not at all. She felt herself being consumed by ideas, eaten inside out. That time, she opened the body. She wore gloves, and into a bag that Theo held open in his own bare hands—he could be fearless, when her motivation overflowed into him—she transferred every organ in the chest cavity. Next was the blood. She’d seen them do it in funeral homes, a pump replacing blood with embalming fluid, something to keep the tissues looking at least vaguely human while the insides became something else. It was late, but not enough to be early that time. Theo threw a blanket over her shoulders, and together, they stood and watched.

“You know, I…this isn’t how I imagined my first contact with the workforce.” He added air quotes around the final word, surely a remnant from times spent with a nouveau riche family for whom work was such a shameful word it should never be uttered on its own.

She pulled the blanket tighter around her neck and smiled against the warm wool. It was strange to think she was the same age as Theo, curious to think that they had so much more in common than she and Max ever would—and yet, she thought of him as a pupil, the next in line for the little Varadys shop. Dolls for dreamers. Did he have what it took? Did the science of doll-making, life-making, did the god complex particles run in his blood, the way they did in hers?

“Have you thought that maybe you could…take over in a few years?”

“Oh, no…” He looked displaced, all of a sudden. “…no way, I…I’m not like you. I can’t do…the things you can. You look at a problem and your mind solves it before you do, but that’s not me. I can’t do that.”