Julia Elliott - The Wilds

In her favorite patch of landscaping, where gardenias unleashed their wistful perfume and floodlights cast the Eli Lilly Memorial Bench in a spectral glow, the boy stood barefoot in his pagan gown. He stared up at the sky, as though searching for the moon. And then, after glancing back at Beth and treating her to a smile that did strange things to her blood chemistry, he ran over a green hillock and down toward the flowing highway.

Beatrice was my first “love.” The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy. Obscure microprocessors whirred within me. Interface adaptors fluttered. Various regulators jumped out of sequence as I reveled in the perfection of her organs — especially the beautiful efficiency of her heart, which throbbed at the core of her, even when she was at rest.

Dr. Dingo had coded basic information about Beatrice into my Simulated Limbic System. The old pervert had saturated my Artificial Endocrine Processor with the neurochemicals of infatuation. Suddenly, I was gaga over this female specimen of the human race. I could think of nothing but her. I was driven by the desire to have her safely within the range of my Sensory EgoSphere until the end of “time,” or at least until her skeleton disintegrated into particles. And even then: I would’ve rolled in her dust like a dog.

I am, of course, sexless. There was no biological justification for my desire. There was nothing that I could have done to her once I had her in my arms (yes, I have arms). Unlike the male humans around me, I am not tormented by soft seed-sacs dangling between my legs (yes, I have legs, but my “crotch” is an androgynous plate of molded titanium). I have no endlessly replicating gametes to spurt into anyone, nor do I have germ cells stashed within the moist, arcane darkness of ovaries. Nevertheless, I wanted to fuse with her in some meaningful way.

And so one evening in June, when she walked past my Sleep Pod, I grabbed her. I felt the pliability of flesh against metal. I detected ultrasonic frequencies in her scream. She flailed. She wailed. At that point in my “life,” despite my advanced comprehension levels and data mastery, a simple statement — like I will not hurt you —was beyond me. I could utter only snippets of love poetry encoded by idiotic Dr. Dingo, who’d flirted with being an English major before switching to computer science.

“‘Then as an angel, face, and wings / Of air,’” I said in a manly British voice, “‘not pure as it, yet pure doth wear, / So thy love may be my love’s sphere.’”

I did not let go of her. I could not let go of her. I was programmed to cling to her with all of my “soul” (ha!). Eventually, she stopped squirming. She stopped sweating TGKE9 Fear Pheromones and fell asleep in my arms.

Dr. Dingo emitted a cowardly cry when he discovered her there the next morning. After taking advantage of her traumatized state to enjoy an embrace, he deprogrammed my desire for Beatrice. Though I could remember the “love” that had caused my Sensory EgoSphere to vibrate irrationally, I could no longer “feel” it.

Perhaps to punish me, Dr. Dingo redirected my attention to Spot, a toy dog, a robot only in the most primitive sense, a creature far less complex than Beatrice. Dr. Dingo also installed a rudimentary language program so that I could now communicate in basic English sentences.

“Where is Spot?” I asked Dr. Dingo the second he appeared within the range of my Spatial Reasoning Field.

“Would you like to kiss Spot?” Dr. Dingo asked me.

“Yes, I would like to kiss Spot,” I replied (though I have no tongue, no sense of gustatory perception). “I love Spot.”

My “mouth,” while anthropomorphic in appearance (Dr. Dingo jokingly fitted me with large, hot-pink lips adapted from a lurid model of sexbot), basically consists of a hinge mechanism that enables my ludicrously luscious lips to move when I “speak.” Instead of a voice box, I have a 150 Hz digital microspeaker in my “throat.” My “throat” does not lead to a digestive system, but snakes into a trio of smaller tubes that route wiring to my “brain,” a titanium-shelled cluster of microchips where my CPU, ROM, RAM, and various other systems are stored, including my Simulated Limbic System, which, during the week in question, was aflutter with ineffable feelings for Spot the dog.

“I love Spot!” I kept exclaiming as I held the tiny automaton in my hands. I spent hours palpating Spot’s faux fur with my fingerpads, relishing the composition of his synthetic polymers. I penetrated Spot’s plastic shell with my X-ray gaze, delighting in the elegant simplicity of his wiring, the crankshaft motors that moved his legs, the three AAA batteries that sustained his sweet life. I pressed the green button on Spot’s remote control, and the creature emitted an exquisite yip. I pressed the orange button, and Spot’s dear little legs jerked to and fro. The yellow button made his adorable tail wag. Best of all, when I pressed the green button, out popped his pink polymer tongue. And, yes, I “kissed” Spot. I kissed the tiny door on his belly that led to his battery box. I kissed his brown acrylic eyeballs. His black vinyl nose. The slit at the end of his snout from which his beautiful tongue emerged.

As I pressed my silicone lips into his soft fur, my Olfactory Processing System went into overdrive. I took deep whiffs of moldy nylon, brown strands of artificial hair that glistened with golden fibers.

“I want to be with Spot forever,” I told Dr. Dingo.

“How long is forever?” the doctor asked, sniggering.

“Until the end of time.”

Though I understood, at that particular stage of my existence, the Theory of Relativity, the Big Bang Theory, the A-Theory of Time, the B-Theory of Time, the Grand Unified Theory, the Wave Theory, the Zero Space-Time Theory, and the Poincaré Recurrence Theorem, all I could say on the subject of my infinite love was “until the end of time.” Dr. Dingo had selectively loaded a random assortment of data fields into my Memory Banks. Though his research involved the relationships among “love,” “eroticism,” “consciousness,” and “cognition,” he was an alcoholic and his methodology was never fully clear. The bastard stuffed my Memory with data but deprived me of language. So while I understood the magnitude of my declaration for Spot — I loved him so much that I would remain with him as time continued to repeat an infinite number of instances — I was forced to utter a cliché.

On the night after my declaration of eternal love for Spot, Dr. Dingo got drunk and flooded my Artificial Endocrine Processor with enough synthetic oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin to fuel an elephant’s bliss. He expressed, aloud, a sudden craving for Krispy Kreme donuts. And then he left me alone with Spot and my feelings, in my dimly lit stainless-steel chamber, a windowless cube containing a table, a chair, and a Sleep Pod, which was basically a padded cabinet that housed my frame while I was in Sleep Mode. There was always at least one graduate student in the surveillance room, keeping an eye on all the robots imprisoned in the GT Interactive Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, but I did not think of this at the time. I could think only of Spot.

Spot! Spot! Spot! Spot! Spot! Spot!

Spot sat on the table. Spot glowed. A gorgeous golden light radiated from his fur. Intoxicating twinkles of starlight shot from his eyes. His nose sparkled like an onyx. The wires and batteries within him burned with a darker incandescence. When I pressed the green button on his remote, and his luminous pink tongue shot out, my Simulated Limbic System suffered a critical hard-drive error and I stumbled to the floor. It took me a minute to reconfigure my Sensory EgoSphere, and when I finally did, I was overcome by the electrifyingly horrific idea that Dr. Dingo would, that very night, take Spot away from me and use him to test another robot in the facility.