“So, life is an XOR output?” LeMarque asked. “One, or the other? Like how they read emotions?”
One, or the other. Alive, or dead. Human, or machine. Pain, or pleasure. Derek stared at the Susies. In repose they all wore the same expression: empty, like his Susie at the meeting. Like they were all just waiting for the game to end.
“I asked to bring them here,” she said. “They were in a storage unit out in Renton, before. I thought this would be nicer.”
She kept saying that like it meant something. I thought this would be nicer.
“You can touch them. Just don’t expect them to react.” Susie pursed her lips and did a Tin Man voice: “Oil can! OIL CAN!”
Derek’s parents, friends, and lovers all agreed that he probably didn’t feel the same things as “normal” people. He was “emotionally colour blind,” they said. Occasionally he had suspected that they were right, that he was stunted. But now he knew for certain that they were wrong. He could feel things. Deep things. Things coiled tightly far down in the darkest pit of himself. He could feel them loosening, unraveling, climbing up through his throat like a tapeworm.
“You understand now, don’t you?” Susie asked.
“No,” he managed to say.
“They’ve been up here this whole time,” she said. “They’ve been listening to everything we do.”
He shut his eyes. He willed himself to sound calm. “They’re just prototypes, Susie. They’re dead. They’re not real–”
“It’s you who’s not real,” Susie said. “You’re the final prototype, Derek.”
His mouth felt full of cotton. “What?”
“It’s all part of the user testing,” she said. “You. The others. It’s all just data collection.”
Derek swallowed. Tried to smile. Tried to look normal. “I know. I report on you regularly.”
She smiled brightly. “I report on you, too. I report on whether I think you’re real, or something they made to test my failsafe.”
Something inside him went terribly cold. “You think I might be an android.”
“I know you are.”
“How do you know that?”
“You don’t react the way humans do, Derek. You don’t have the right feelings in the right context. You’re good, but not great. You were supposed to fuck me when we got home. And you were supposed to get angry with me, downstairs. All the others did, when I told them. And you were supposed to be scared of them.” She pointed at the prototypes.
He licked his lips. “That’s called being rational, Susie. It doesn’t make me any less of a human being.” He felt his blood in his ears. “Even if I felt nothing, even if I were a total psychopath, I’d still be a human being. How can you be so sure that I’m not?”
“I’m not a hundred percent certain. But that’s all right. They said I should do everything I could, just to be certain.” She plucked something from one of the beams. A screwdriver. He watched her focus on his ribs. He watched her pivot – it all happened so slowly, in his vision – and then the screwdriver disappeared inside him, like magic.
Susie stared at the wound, and Derek stared at her. He couldn’t look at himself. He wondered, just before the pain started, whether she’d used a Phillips or a flat head. If, somewhere on his bones, there was a tiny cross shape. Then the pain took him and he was on his knees and Susie was on hers, too, holding him in her lap.
“You bitch,” he gasped. It hurt so much. He thought of his old lover reduced to nothing beneath the waves. Wondered what part of her had died first. If she’d even had the time to feel as angry as he did now, or if the fear just swallowed it whole. Tears clouded his vision. “You bitch, you cunt, you fucking wind-up whore…”
Susie cleared his eyes of tears. She withdrew her hand and stared at them. Licked her fingers. Brought her other hand away. Blood and herbs on those perfect, slender fingertips. He couldn’t stop moving. It hurt worse not to move, not to wriggle. Now he knew why the worms did it.
“I…” Her mouth opened and closed. “You…” Her face changed, became a mask, the mouth turned down and the eyes wide. “B-but… y-you… s-s-so d-different!”
Above, Derek heard a terrible screech of metal on metal.
“Y-y-y-you…” Susie tried to point at him. Her bloodied finger jittered in the air like old, buffering video. “R-real b-b-boy!”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m a real live boy. But not for much longer.”