The Bureau thought of everything. She has a nearly complete digestive and excretory system. She has beautiful baked white enamel teeth that can bite and chew. She even has a saliva simulator. Her anatomy is complete and flawless. Her ears curl like a baby’s. She’s beyond perfection; she’s more than a woman. She’s ageless. Her thighs will always be tight, her cheeks will stay soft and moderately blushed even if her batteries still sometimes require quick catnaps to recharge.
Through the headphones Wayne listens to her speak with Ted. He listens to her charm that scumbag. He looks through the camera that is in her eyes as he remotely commands her to romance this criminal, to demurely cast her gaze down. Wayne looks through her eyes and there, beyond her bosom, he sees her fingers laced within this public menace’s thick, dark digits.
Once, down in the silo, Wayne and Dwight had been discussing their onerous nerdy names. Dwight was in honor of Eisenhower and Wayne, Wayne Newton. They laughed at how together, they made Dwayne, but as their laughter died, Dwight asked, “Wayne, have you ever been in love?” It was the sort of question they liked to lob at each other down in the hole.
“Not yet,” Wayne answered. “How about you?”
Dwight had his boots up on the console. “Yes. Yes, I have,” he replied.
“What does it feel like?” Wayne asked him, and for once Dwight had no answer. Instead his gaze dashed around the silo. His eyes rested on the steel-reinforced concrete wall poured sixteen inches thick, then the bank of walkie-talkies, the hazmat suits hanging empty, the cache of survival rations stacked neatly on an aluminum shelf and arranged by ingredient. Chicken à la King, Dried Tuna Noodle, Chipped Beef. Safety. Wayne waited for Dwight to answer. Dwight stared at the console and its blinking lights, its potential to start a nuclear war. Danger. Finally Dwight answered. “It feels a lot like this, Wayne.”
*
In the cabin Ted tells her, “When I close my eyes I see a revolution as mesmerizing as any rainbow. People will stop and stare as factories, research universities, come tumbling down. People will die, that is for certain.” He turns to her and blushes. He doesn’t usually speak in metaphors and wonders what sunshine has come over him. “There is a poison in the blood and leeches aren’t going to do the trick.”
“Hey, what are you so angry about, big boy?”
“You could say I don’t like technology.”
“What, not even video games, TV?”
He doesn’t answer her question. “Imagine that I am a machine.”
There’s silence in the cabin while she tries to obey his command. She blinks twice.
“Machines,” he continues, “have one of only two choices. Either they are run by humans or else they run themselves. And the way I see it, either choice is no good for me. If machines are run by humans, the government and the elite class take over and kill the rest of us off because they don’t need worker bees anymore—they have the machines. And if the machines run themselves, they take over and kill all of us. I mean, of course they do. Who doesn’t know that? Machines always beat the people who resist them. Take cars as your example. Say you resist the automobile. Say you walk everywhere. You still have to obey traffic signals. You can’t cross the road wherever you’d like to, because the machines have won. Try to walk into New York City. Try crossing Route 80. You can’t. Machines become responsible for doing every job we humans were put on earth here to do, and what does that leave me?”
“I don’t know, sailor boy, what?”
“Not much. A handful of antidepressant pills to pop, pills that were made by the machines in the first place to keep us from revolting.”
“I don’t know, sailor boy, what?”
“Huh?”
“I don’t know, sailor boy, what?”
“What the heck are you talking about?” Ted asks and grabs her shoulder. They’d been getting along so well.
“Fascinating,” she says, and then rather suddenly, rather robotically, “I’ve become extremely tired. I must take a nap.” With that she closes her eyes, brings her chin to her chest, and begins to snore. Powerful exhales stir the fringe of the serape that’s covering Ted’s bomb-building materials.
Poor thing, Ted thinks. She’s been on the run. She’s exhausted. I’m tired too, he thinks. He has also killed people and injured many more. He tries not to think about it too much, but a person has urges. He’ll tell her this when she wakes, natural urges to defend ourselves when under attack. He’s being attacked by machines. He’s being attacked by the government. And who is he to go against nature? Who is she? A person has urges. Yes, a person does, and as if to demonstrate this Ted cups her breast in the palm of his hand and squeezes once while she sleeps. He removes his hand. But there is no tenderness left in him and the experience is not as soft as Ted remembered it once was when he was young. He lets her be. He stares out the window for a while until quite suddenly, after five minutes or so, she flinches before sitting up quickly, stiffly.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.” She cocks her head toward him, fully awake. “And I have a question for you.”
“What is it?” Ted asks.
“Where do you put beauty?”
“Beauty?”
“Yes,” she says. “Beauty. Imagine a small green pond somewhere in the mountains of Montana. There, in the middle of this cool, clear water floats a man, legs together, arms stretched out to the sides like a bird lit from within. The man glows from the green of the water.”
Ted pinches his lips in consideration.
She continues. “Machines have made it possible for humans to concentrate on beauty.”
“The man glows?” Ted asks.
“Yes, metaphorically.”
“Is that man supposed to be me?” he asks.
She shrugs. “Well, I don’t see how it could be if you’re going to be so busy tending your crops or tilling your fields or walking for three days into Missoula.”
Ted sinks his head below the plane of his shoulders. He tucks his chin. He feels like a simpleton for forgetting beauty. “But there’s no beauty in machines, and anyway, all those people whose lives have been simplified by machines, they don’t spend their days concentrating on beauty. They watch TV. Right? What do you think?”
She shrugs again, because in truth she doesn’t think. She can’t think. She’s not built to think. She’s just a highly evolved robot, packed with explosives, ready to serve the USA on her only mission.
*
Wayne is listening in the van. He has a timetable, a plan for this criminal scumbag. He’ll let Ted go all the way. Wayne wants Ted to know just how good a machine can feel inside. She feels good. Wayne can attest to just how good she feels. He’d volunteered to run Authenticity and Quality Control on her. R&D. Plus there’d been other times, special moments indeed. Yes, she feels good.