The Heart Goes Last

IX | POSSIBILIBOTS Lunch

Stan’s in the Possibilibots cafeteria with the guys from his team – his new team, the team he’s just been inserted into. He’s having a beer, that weak, pissy beer they’re brewing now; plus a side of onion rings and some fries to share, and a platter of Buffalo wings. Sucking the fat off a wing, he reflects that he himself might have tended the owner of this wing when it had been covered with feathers and attached to a chicken.

The guys on his team look normal enough, just ordinary guys sitting around in the cafeteria having lunch, like him. Not young, not old; fit enough, though a couple of them are getting plump around the middle. They’ve all got nametags. His says WALDO, and he really needs to remember that his name is Waldo now, not Stan. All he has to do is to stay Waldo until someone hands him the flashdrive with the hot-potato crap he’s supposed to be smuggling out and reveals what he’s supposed to do to make it through the gate. Or else until he figures out how to make a break for it on his own.

Tiptoe Through the Tulips is supposed to be the signal, the secret handshake. Will his unknown contact speak it or sing it? He hopes there won’t be singing. Who chose that annoying tune? Jocelyn, naturally: along with her other complex personality traits, she has a warped sense of humour. She’d relish the idea of making some poor sod croak out that brain-damaged ditty. Not one of the guys at lunch looks like the Tiptoe Through the Tulips kind; nor do any of them look like a possible undercover contact. But then, they wouldn’t.

Waldo, Waldo, he tells himself. You are Waldo now. It’s a feeble name, like something in a kids’ kitten book. The other names around the table are more solid: Derek, Kevin, Gary, Tyler, Budge. He’s only just met them, he knows nothing about them, so he has to keep his mouth shut and his ears open. And they know nothing about him except that he’s been sent to fill a vacancy on their team.

There’ve been a lot of yuks at the lunch table, a lot of in-jokes that Stan didn’t catch. He’s trying to read the facial expressions: behind the genial grins there’s a barrier, behind which a language foreign to him is being spoken, a language of obscure references. Around the room, at other cafeteria tables, there are other knots of men. Other Possibilibots teams would be his guess. He’s doing a lot of guessing.

The cafeteria is a long room with light green walls. Frosted-glass windows down one side: you can’t see out. On the side without the windows there are a couple of retro-looking posters. One of them shows a little girl of six or seven in a ruffled white nightie, rubbing one eye sleepily, a blue teddy bear cradled in the crook of her other arm. There’s a steaming cup of something in the foreground. SLEEP TIGHT, says the slogan. It’s like a hundred-year-old poster for a malted bedtime drink.

The other poster shows a pretty blond girl in a red and white polka-dot bikini and a pin-up pose, hands clasped around one drawn-up knee, the foot in a slingback red high heel; the other leg extended, the shoe dangling from her toe. Pouty red lips, a wink. Some writing in, it must be, Dutch.

“Looks like a real girl, yeah?” says Derek, nodding at the pin-up girl. “But it’s not.”

“Fooled me too,” says Tyler. “They did that poster in a fifties style. Those Dutch are so far ahead of us!”

“Yeah, they’ve passed the legislation and everything,” says Gary. “They anticipated the future.”

“What’s it say?” Stan asks. He knows what they’re making at Possibilibots. Replica women; slut machines, some call them. There was earnest talk about them among the fellow scooter-repair guys: the real-life pain they might prevent, the money they might make. Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh and blood ones are out of control.

“It’s Dutch, so who knows what it says exactly,” says Kevin. “But something like Better than real,” says Kevin.

“And is it?” says Stan. “Better than real?” He’s feeling more relaxed now – nobody suspects him of not being Waldo – so he can risk a few offhand questions.

“Not exactly. But the voice options are great,” says Derek. “You can have silent, or, like, moans and screams, even a few words: more, harder, like that.”

“In my books they’re not the same,” says Gary, head on one side as if tasting some new menu choice. “I didn’t go for it that much, myself. It was too, you know, mechanical. But some guys prefer it. No limp-dick worries if you fuck up.”

“So to speak,” says Tyler, and they all laugh.

“You need to fiddle with the settings,” says Kevin, reaching over for the last onion ring. “It’s like a bicycle seat, you need to make the adjustments. You guys want another round of beers? I’ll get them.”

“I vote yes,” says Tyler. “And throw in some more of those hot wings.”

“Maybe you just picked the wrong model,” says Budge to Gary.

“I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,” says Gary.

“They said that about e-books,” says Kevin. “You can’t stop progress.”

“With the Platinum grade, they do breathe,” says Derek. “In, out. I prefer that. With the ones that don’t breathe, you sense there’s something missing.”

“Some have got heartbeats too,” says Kevin. “If you want to get fancy. That’s the Platinum Plus.”

“They should stick some knee pads into the kit, anyway,” says Gary. “My one got stuck in high gear, I skinned my knees, damn near crippled myself, and I couldn’t turn the damn thing off.”

“You might like that feature in a real one,” says Kevin, who’s back with the beers and wings. “No Turn-off button.”

“Trouble is, with some of the real ones, there’s no Turn-on button,” says Tyler, and this time it’s laughs all round. Stan joins in: he can relate to that.

“But you need to remind yourself they’re not alive; they’re that good, at the top grade anyway,” Derek says to Stan. Of all of them, he seems the biggest booster.

“We should let old Waldo try it out,” says Tyler. “We all did, first chance we had! Give him a test run. What about it, Waldo?”

“It’s not officially allowed,” says Gary. “Unless you’ve been assigned for it.”

“But they turn a blind eye,” says Tyler.

Stan gives what he hopes is a lascivious grin. “I’m game,” he says.

“Bad boy,” says Tyler lightly.

“So you don’t mind bending the rules,” says Budge. “Pushing the boundaries.” He gives Stan a genial smile, the smile of an indulgent uncle.

“Depends, I guess,” Stan says. Has he made a mistake, put himself at risk? “There’s boundaries, and then there’s boundaries.” That should hold it steady for a while.

“Okay then,” says Budge. “First the tour, then the test run. Step this way.”

Egg Cup

Charmaine slept poorly last night, even though she was in her own bed. Of course this bed isn’t really hers, it belongs to Consilience, but still, it’s a bed she’s used to. Or she was used to it when Stan was in there with her. But now it feels alien to her, like one of those scary movies where you wake up and find you’re on a spaceship, and you’ve been abducted, and people you thought were your friends have had their brains taken over, and they want to do kinky probes; because Stan isn’t in this bed with her any more and he will never be in it again. Face it, she tells herself: you kissed him goodbye and then you stuck the needle into him, and he died. That’s reality, and it doesn’t matter how much you cry about it now because he’s still dead and you can’t bring him back.

Think about flowers, she tells herself. That’s what Grandma Win would tell her. But she can’t think about them. Flowers are for funerals, that’s all she can see. White flowers; like the white room, the white ceiling.

She hadn’t meant to kill him. She hadn’t meant to kill him. But how else could she have acted? They wanted her to use her head and discard her heart; but it wasn’t so easy, because the heart goes last and hers was still clinging on inside her all the time she was readying the needle, which is why she was crying the whole time. Then the next thing she knew, she was lying on her own sofa with a headache.

At least she didn’t have a concussion. That’s what they told her at the Consilience clinic after the CAT scan. They’d sent her home with three kinds of pills – a pink one, a green one, and a yellow one – to help her relax, they said. She hadn’t taken those pills, however: she didn’t know what was in them. Slipping a person some kind of knockout thing was what those aliens did before they got you onto their spaceship, and then you woke up with tubes going into you, right in the middle of a probe. There aren’t any aliens really; but still, she didn’t trust what might happen to her while she was sleeping like a baby.

“You’ll sleep like a baby” was what Aurora had said about those pills. She’d been at the clinic, waiting for Charmaine. They were all in on it, whatever it was: Aurora, and Max, and that woman who’d driven her to the clinic, the woman with dark hair and hoop earrings.

Thinking about what happened, Charmaine feels maybe she shouldn’t have blurted out, “You’re the head in the box!” Telling a person they were a head in a box was too blunt.

She’d messed up on the subject of Max too. She shouldn’t have let on she knew him at all, much less making those pathetic demands. But it was too stupid, him claiming his name was Phil. Phil! She could never have flung herself into the arms of a man called Phil. Phils were pharmacists, they were never in the daytime-TV shows, they had no inner shadows and banked-up flames of desire. And Max did, even in that ugly driver’s uniform he was wearing. She knew he longed for her; she’s sensitive, she has an instinct for knowing that.

Then she got it: she should act dumb, because they were messing with her head. She’d seen movies like that: people disguising themselves as other people and pretending not to know you; then, when you accused them of doing it, they’d say you were crazy. So it’s safer to go along with whatever made-up version of themselves they want to put out there.

Though if she could corner Max alone, and make him kiss her, and get a firm grip on his belt buckle – a familiar buckle, one she could undo in her sleep – then his cover story would smoke and burn and turn to ash, like the flammable thing it is.

After they’d driven her back from the clinic and she’d crawled into bed, Charmaine kept as quiet as a mouse. She couldn’t even pace the floor or wail because Aurora had insisted on sleeping in the guest bedroom. Someone needed to stay with Charmaine, said Aurora. Considering the shock of the chicken facility tragedy, Charmaine might do some rash thing that Aurora was obviously dying to spell out.

“We wouldn’t want to lose you too,” she said in her falsely considerate voice, the one she used to demote people. The dark-haired woman – who’d showed her badge, she was from Surveillance – had backed Aurora up. Strongly advisable was the phrase she used about Aurora staying over. Though, she added, Charmaine was free to make her own decisions.

Like heck I am, Charmaine thought. “Leave me the heck alone!” she’d wanted to scream. But you didn’t argue with Surveillance. Pick your battles, her Grandma Win used to say, and there was no point in getting into a tug-of-war over whether or not pushy Aurora with her pulled-back fail of a face was going to muss up Charmaine’s neatly ironed floral sheets.

And muss up the clean towels. And waste a rose-scented miniature guest soap; though she and Stan never had any guests, because no one you’d known before could get into Consilience for a visit, you couldn’t even phone them or email them. But just thinking you might some day have a real guest, like an old high school friend, people you hoped wouldn’t stay long and they most likely hoped it too, but still, it was nice to catch up – just thinking about it was a comfort. She tried to see Aurora as that sort of a guest, instead of a watchdog; and that was when she finally went to sleep.

“Rise and shine,” says Aurora’s voice. Darn it if she isn’t barging in the door, carrying Charmaine’s tray with Charmaine’s teacup on it. “I’ve made you a wake-up tea. My goodness, you really did need that beauty sleep!”

“Why, what time is it?” Charmaine asks groggily. She acts groggier than she is so Aurora will think she’s taken those pills. She did flush a couple of them down the toilet, because she wouldn’t put it past Aurora to count.

“It’s noon,” says Aurora, setting the teacup down on the nightstand. There’s nothing on that stand, none of the usual clutter – the nail file, the hand lotion, the lavender aromatherapy sachet pincushion – only the alarm clock and the tissue box. And Stan’s nightstand has been cleared off as well. Where have they put it all? Maybe better not to make a fuss about that? “Now, you take your time, no hurry. I’ve fixed us brunch.” She smiles her tight, wrinkle-free smile.

What if it’s not her real face? thinks Charmaine. What if it’s only stuck on and there’s a giant cockroach or something behind it? What if I grabbed her by both of the ears and pulled, would the face pop off?

“Oh, thank you so much,” she says.

The brunch is laid out on the sunny-nook kitchen table: the eggs in the little hen egg cups Charmaine ordered from the catalogue as a tribute to Stan’s chicken work, the coffee in the mugs with gnomes on them, a grumpy one for Stan and a happy one for Charmaine, though sometimes she’d switch them around for fun. Stan needed more fun in his life, she’d tell him. Though what she’d meant was that she needed more fun in her own life. Well, she’d got some. She’d got Max. Fun plus, for a while.

“Toast? Another egg?” says Aurora, who has taken full possession of the stovetop, the pots, the toaster. How has she known where to find everything in Charmaine’s kitchen? A horde of folks has been trooping in and out of her house, it seems. The place might as well be made of cellophane.

“More coffee?” says Aurora. Charmaine looks down at the mug: Aurora has given her the happy gnome. She feels tears trickling down her cheeks. Oh no, not more crying; she doesn’t have the strength for it. Why had they wanted to kill Stan? He wasn’t a subversive element; unless he’d been hiding something from her. But he couldn’t have been, he was so easy to read. Though that’s what he’d thought about her, and look how much she’d hidden from him.

Maybe he’d found out something about Positron, something really bad. Dangerous chemicals in the chickens, and everyone was eating them? Surely not, those chickens were organic. But maybe the chickens are part of some terrible experiment, and Stan discovered it and was going to warn everyone. Could that be the reason they wanted him dead? If so, he really was a hero, and she was proud of him.

And what happened to the bodies, really? She’d never asked; she must have known that it would be crossing a line. Is there even a cemetery in Consilience? Or Positron Prison? She’s never seen one.

She wipes her nose on the serviette, a cloth one with a robin embroidered on it in tiny stitches. Aurora reaches across the sunny-nook table, pats her hand. “Never mind,” she says. “It will be all right. Trust me. Now, finish your breakfast, and we’ll go shopping.”

“Shopping?” Charmaine almost shouts. “What in the heck for?”

“The funeral,” says Aurora in the mollifying voice of an adult to a balky child. “It’s tomorrow. You don’t have a single stitch of black in your entire wardrobe.”

“You’ve been going through my closet!” Charmaine says accusingly. “That’s not your right, that closet is my private –”

“It’s my job,” says Aurora more strictly. “To help you get through this. You’ll be the star feature, everyone will be looking at you. It would be disrespectful for you to wear … well, pastel flowers.”

She has a point, thinks Charmaine. “Okay,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’m on edge.”

“It’s understandable,” says Aurora. “Anyone would be, in your place.”

There has never been anyone in my place, Charmaine thinks. My place is just too weird. And as for you, lady, don’t say understandable to me, because what you understand is nothing. But she keeps that perception to herself.

Tour

After lunch is over, Stan gets the tour. Or Waldo gets the tour. Waldo, Waldo, drill it into your head, he tells himself. He hopes to fuck there’s no other Stan in this unit, because then he might make a slip. Someone would call his real name and his head would snap up, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.

Budge leads Stan and the rest of the team along a long hallway, blandly painted, blandly tiled. On the walls there are glossy photographs of fruit: a lemon, a pear, an apple. Round white-glass light fixtures. They turn a corner, turn another corner. No one teleported in here would have a clue where he was – what city, what country even. He’d just know he was somewhere in the twenty-first century. All generic materials.

“So, there’s basically six divisions,” Budge is saying, “for the standard economy-class models: Receiving, Assembly, Customization, Quality Control, Wardrobe and Accessories, and Shipping. Past that door you have Receiving, but we won’t bother going through, there’s nothing to see, it’s just guys unloading boxes from the transport trucks.”

“How do the trucks get in?” asks Stan, keeping his voice neutral. “I never saw any big trucks driving through the streets of Consilience.” It’s a scooter town; even cars are a rarity, reserved for Surveillance and the top brass.

“They don’t come through the town,” says Budge casually. “This place is an extension, built onto the back of Positron Prison. The back portway of Receiving opens onto the outside. ’Course, we don’t let any of those truckers come in here. No information exchange, that’s the policy– no gawkers, no leakers. As far as they know they’re delivering plumbing fixtures.”

Now that’s interesting, Stan thinks. An outside portal. How can he wangle a job in Receiving without appearing overly eager about it?

“Plumbing fixtures,” he says with a chortle. “That’s good.” Budge grins happily.

“The boxes have only the parts,” says Kevin. “Made in China like everything else, but it doesn’t pay to assemble them over there and ship the bots here. Not enough quality control.”

“Plus there would be breakage,” says Gary. “Too much breakage.”

“So they come in units,” says Budge. “Arms, legs, torsos, basically the exoskeleton. Standard heads, though we do the customizing and skinning here. There’s a lot of special orders. Some of the end users are very specific in their requirements.”

“Fetishists,” says Kevin.

“Stalkers,” says Tyler. “They’ll get one made with the face of someone they’re hot for but can’t have, such as rock stars, or cheerleaders, or maybe their high school English teacher.”

“It can get sleazy,” says Budge. “We get some demand for female relatives. We even had a great-aunt once.”

“That was a gross-out,” says Kevin.

“Hey. Everyone’s different,” says Derek.

“But some are more different than others,” says Budge, and they all laugh.

“The info storage chips are already installed, and the voice elements, but we have to 3-D-print some of the neural connections,” says Gary. “On the custom jobs.”

“We put the skin on last,” says Tyler. “That’s a skilled operation. The skin’s got sensors, it can actually feel you. With the more expensive line, it can get goose bumps. When you’re in contact, up close and personal, it’s really hard to tell the difference.”

“But after you’ve seen one of them being assembled, you can’t shake the knowledge,” says Budge. “You know it’s just an it.”

“They’ve done double-blind tests though,” says Gary. “Real ones and these. These had a 77 percent success rate.”

“They’re aiming for 100 percent,” says Kevin, “but no way they’ll ever get there.”

“No way,” Budge echoes. “You can’t program the little things. The unexpecteds.”

“Though there’s these settings on them,” says Kevin. “You can push Random and get a surprise.”

“Yeah,” says Tyler. “She says, ‘Not tonight, I’ve got a headache.’ ”

“That’s no surprise,” says Kevin, and they laugh some more.

I need to come up with some jokes, Stan thinks. But not yet: they haven’t accepted me completely. They’re still reserving judgment.

“Up ahead we’re coming to Assembly,” says Budge. “Have a look, but we don’t need to go in. Remember car factories?”

“Who remembers those?” says Tyler.

“Okay, movies of them. This guy does nothing but this, that guy does nothing but that. Specialized. Boring as hell. No latitude for error.”

“Get it wrong and they can have a spasm,” says Kevin. “Flail around. That’s not pretty.”

“Bits can come off,” says Gary. “I mean bits of you.”

“One guy got clamped. He was stuck like a trapped rat for fifteen minutes, only it was more like a gyroscope. It took an electrician and three digital techs to unplug him, and after that his dick was shaped like a corkscrew for the rest of his life,” says Derek.

They laugh again, looking at Stan to see if he believes this. “You’re a sicko,” Tyler says to Derek affectionately.

“Think of the upside,” says Kevin. “No condoms. No pregnancy woes.”

“No animal was harmed in the testing of this product,” says Derek.

“Except Gary,” says Kevin. More chuckles.

“This is it, in here,” says Budge. “Assembly.” He uses his card key to open a double door, with a notice on it warning against dust and digital devices, these last to be turned firmly off, because, as the sign says, delicate electronic circuits are being activated.

Assembly lines are what Stan would expect to see, and that’s what he does see. Most of the work is being done by robotics – attaching one thing to another, robots making other robots, just like the assembly at Dimple Robotics – though there’s a scattering of human overseers. There are moving belts conveying thighs, hip joints, torsos; there are trays of hands, left and right. These body parts are man-made, they’re not corpse portions, but nonetheless the effect is ghoulish. Squint and you’re in a morgue, he thinks; or else a slaughterhouse. Except there’s no blood.

“How flammable are they?” he asks Budge. “The bodies.” It’s Budge who seems to have the authority. And the card key for the doors: Stan must take note of which pocket he keeps it in. He wonders what other doors that key can open.

“Flammable?” says Budge.

“Supposing a guy is smoking,” says Stan. “Like, a customer.”

“Oh, I don’t think they’ll be smoking,” says Tyler dismissively.

“Can’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” says Derek.

“Some guys like a smoke, though,” says Stan. “Afterwards. And maybe some talking, just a few words, like ‘That was awesome.’ ”

“At the Platinum level it’s an option,” says Tyler. “The lower-tech models can’t make small talk.”

“Fancy language costs extra,” says Gary.

“There’s a plus though, they can’t pester you, like, did you lock the door, did you take the garbage out, all of that,” says Budge.

A married man then, Stan thinks. He’s overcome with a wave of nostalgia: it smells like orange juice, like fireplaces, like leather slippers. Charmaine once said things like that to him, in bed. Did you lock the door, honey? He warms toward Budge: he, too, must once have led a normal life.

Black Suit

Black flatters me, thinks Charmaine, checking herself in the powder room mirror. Aurora had known where to take her shopping, and though black has never been her colour, Charmaine’s not negative about the results. The black suit, the black hat, the blond hair – it’s like a white chocolate truffle with dark chocolate truffles all around it; or like, who was that? Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, in the scene right before she gets strangled, with the white scarf she should never have worn, because women in danger of being strangled should avoid any fashion accessories that tie around the neck. They’ve shown that movie a bunch of times on Positron TV and Charmaine watched it every time. Sex in the movies used to be so much more sexy than it became after you could actually have sex in the movies. It was languorous and melting, with sighing and surrender and half-closed eyes. Not just a lot of bouncy athletics.

Of course, she thinks, Marilyn’s mouth was fuller than her own, and you could use very thick red lipstick then. Does she herself have that innocence, that surprised look? Oh! Goodness me! Big doll eyes. Not that Marilyn’s innocence was much in evidence in Niagara. But it was, later.

She widens her eyes in the mirror, makes an O with her mouth. Her own eyes are still a little puffy despite the cold teabags, with faint dark semicircles under them. Alluring, or not? That would depend on a man’s taste: whether he’s aroused by fragility with a hint of smouldering underneath, or perhaps by a hint of a punch in the eye. Stan wouldn’t have liked the puffy-eyed look. Stan would have said, What’s wrong with you? Fall out of bed? Or else, Aw, honey, what you need is a big hug. Depending on which phase of Stan she’s remembering. Oh, Stan. …

Stop that, she tells herself. Stan’s gone.

Am I shallow? she asks the mirror. Yes, I am shallow. The sun shines on the ripples where it’s shallow. Deep is too dark.

She considers the black hat, a small round hat with a little brim – sort of like a schoolgirl hat – that Aurora said was just right for a funeral. But does he have to wear a hat? Everyone did, once; then hats disappeared. But now, inside Consilience, they’re appearing again. Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed; so, in a way, there’s nothing to dread.

She once felt so secure inside this house. Her and Stan’s house, their warm cocoon, their shelter from the dangerous outside world, nestled inside a larger cocoon. First the town wall, like an outside shell; then, Consilience, like the soft white part of an egg. And inside Consilience, Positron Prison: the core, the heart, the meaning of it all.

And somewhere inside Positron, right now, is Stan. Or what used to be Stan. If only she hadn’t … what if, instead … Maybe she herself is a kind of fatal woman, like Marilyn in Niagara, with invisible spider webs coming out of her, entangling men because they can’t help it, and the spider can’t help it either because it’s her nature. Maybe she’s doomed to be sticky, like chewing gum, or hair gel, or …

Because look what she’s done without meaning to. She’s caused Stan’s funeral, and now she has to go to it. But she can’t reveal her guilt at the funeral, she can’t cry and say, It’s all my fault. She’ll have to behave with dignity, because this funeral will be very solemn and pious and reverential, it will be the funeral of a hero. What the whole town believes, because it was on the TV, is that there was an electrical fire in the chicken facility, and Stan died to save his fellow workers.

And to save the chickens, of course. And he did save them: no chicken had perished. That fact has been emphasized in the news story as making Stan even more truly heroic than if he’d saved just people. Or maybe not more heroic, only more touching. Sort of like saving babies: chickens were little and helpless too, though not so cute. Nothing with a beak can be truly cute, in Charmaine’s opinion. But why is she even thinking about Stan saving chickens? That fire was made up, it had not in any way happened.

Stop dithering, Charmaine, she tells herself. Get back to reality, whatever that turns out to be.

The doorbell’s chiming. She teeters down the hall on her black high heels: it’s Aurora, who slipped out earlier to change into her funeral outfit. Behind her, waiting by the curb, is a long dark car.

Aurora’s wearing a Chanel-style suit, black with white piping: way too boxy for her figure, which is boxy anyway. Dump the shoulder pads, Charmaine finds herself thinking. The hat is a sort of modified shovel design that does nothing for her, but no hat could. It’s like her face is stretched like a rubber bathing cap over a large bald head. Her eyes are way too far to the sides.

When Charmaine was little and recession was a dirty word and not a fact of life, Grandma Win told her that no one should be called ugly. Instead, such people should be called unfortunate. It was just good manners. But years later, when Charmaine was older, Grandma Win also told her that good manners were for those who could afford them, and if an elbow in the ribs for the person trying to barge in front of you was what it took, then an elbow in the ribs was the tool you should use.

Aurora smiles her unsettling smile. “How are you feeling now?” she says. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Bearing up, I hope! The suit looks perfect.” Again she doesn’t wait for an answer. She steps forward, and Charmaine steps back. Why does Aurora want to come in? Aren’t they going to the funeral?

“Aren’t we going to the funeral?” says Charmaine in a voice that sounds – to herself – plaintive and disappointed, like a child who’s been told it won’t be taken to the circus after all.

“Of course we’re going,” says Aurora. “But we need to wait for a very special guest. He wanted to be here in person, to support you in your loss.” She’s holding her cellphone, Charmaine sees now; she must have just made a call. “Oh, look, here he is now! Johnny on the spot!”

A second black car oozes down the street and draws up behind the first. So Aurora arranged to come early, to make sure that Charmaine is still holding it together and not staggering around and raving; then she sent an all-clear signal on her phone, and here comes the mystery man.

It’s Max. She knows it is. He’s slipped away from that cold and controlling woman, the head in the box. He’s snuck off, the way he used to, and very soon she’ll be wrapped in his familiar arms. Nothing stands between them except Aurora – how to get rid of her? – and also the funeral, the one she has to go to. She and Max can just. … But what is she thinking? She needs to attend.

But wait: Aurora can go to the funeral in her own car, and Charmaine and Max can take the second one, and sink back into the luxurious upholstery, and then … Because the funeral isn’t real, Stan isn’t actually in a coffin there, but he’s dead, so it won’t count as cheating.

No, Charmaine, she tells herself. Max can’t be trusted, he’s already shown that. You can’t let yourself be swept away on a tidal wave of treacherous hormones.

But the man getting out the second car isn’t Max. It takes Charmaine a moment to identify him: it’s Ed. Ed himself, alone, come just to see her. Now that’s a surprise! Aurora is beaming at her as if Charmaine has won the lottery.

“He wanted to make the effort,” she says. “It’s a tribute to you. And to your husband, of course.”

Does Charmaine feel flattered? Yes, she does. This feeling is not a good thing morally, she knows that. She should be too distraught by the death of Stan to feel flattered about anything. But still.

She smiles uncertainly. It can be very appealing, uncertainty – a sort of bashful, hesitant, but guilty look, especially if not fake. And hers is not fake, because right now she’s thinking, even as she smiles: What does he want?

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Receiving and Assembly were straightforward enough: nothing they couldn’t do at Dimple Robotics. “Here’s where the Blue Fairy works the magic,” says Budge. “And Pinocchio comes to life.”

They’re in Customization. None of the workers here are robots: too much individualized detailing, says Tyler, especially when finishing the heads. Stan wants to see them work the facial features, especially the smiles. He has a professional interest, from his long-ago job at Dimple Robotics. The Empathy Model he’d worked on could smile, but it was the same smile every time. Though what else did you need for checking out groceries? Put two eyes on anything and basically it looks like a face.

“They do the hairstyling over there,” says Tyler. “Everything to do with hair, like the beards and moustaches.”

“The what?” says Stan in a slightly too loud voice. “There are guy prostibots? Since when?”

Kevin shoots him a look. “Possibilibots is for everyone,” he says.

Of course, thinks Stan. It’s the age of tolerance. Stupid fucking me. Anything goes, out there in the so-called real world; though not inside Consilience, where the surface ambience is like a Doris Day film, wholesomely, relentlessly hetero. Have they been eliminating gays all this time, or just not letting them in?

“Granted, most of the orders are for females,” says Tyler. “Though that could change. But as yet there’s not so much demand, so much, except at the Platinum level.”

“Because these economy bots can’t walk around or anything,” says Kevin. “Limited mobility. No locomotion. So mostly it’s just the missionary position. They do what’s required and that’s about it, whereas with guy on guy –”

“Got it,” says Stan. He doesn’t need the details.

“Anyway, some of the male items are for the older women customers,” says Derek. “They say they feel more comfortable with a bot. They don’t have to turn out the lights.” There’s a shared chuckle.

“You can get all different age groups, different body types,” says Budge. “Fat, thin, whatever. Grey hair, there’s some requests for that.”

“Over here is the Expression Department,” says Gary. “There’s a menu of basics. Then on top of those, the folks here can make a few tweaks. Only thing is, once you’ve set the expression it can’t be changed. The functioning human face has thirty-three sets of muscles that control expression, but the full deck would be way too expensive to build, maybe impossible.”

Stan watches with interest as a tech runs one of the faces through its repertoire of smiles. “That’s really advanced!” he says. “Really. It’s kind of amazing.”

“This is only the lower end,” says Budge modestly. “But most users are in transient-client situations. The gated amusement parks, the casinos, the big-show venues, the destination malls; or the designated cheap-bot quarters in places like Holland, and increasingly right here at home. A few rust-bucket towns have already been rejuvenated by setting up a cheap-bot shop, or that’s what we hear.”

“The pro girls are pissed about it,” says Derek. “It’s undercutting their prices. They’ve held demonstrations, tried to smash displays, torn the heads off some of the bots, got arrested for destroying private property. Fined, jail time etcetera. It’s not a small investment, setting up a facility.”

“But those joints make a bazillion,” says Gary. “Vegas is making more out of these than the slots, or so they say. But it stands to reason, it’s almost all margin once you’ve put in the front money. No food to buy, no death as such, and it’s multiple use squared. There’s the lube, you do have to front a lot of that. But those girls are sturdy! A real one could only do, say, fifty gigs a day, tops, without breaking down, whereas with these it’s endless.”

“Unless the flushing and sanitation mechanisms malfunction,” says Derek.

Stan picks up an order form off one of the worktables. There’s a coded checklist, with letters and boxes. “That’s for the standard expressions,” says Budge.

“What’s W?” Stan says.

“That’s for Welcoming,” says Budge. “But sort of neutral, like a flight attendant. T+H is Timid and Hesitant, L+S is for Lustful and Sluttish. A+B is for Angry and Belligerent; not too much demand for that, you might think, but you’d be wrong. The V is for Virgin, which is T+H plus a few other adjustments.”

“Now, over here is Customization Plus,” says Tyler. “This is where the customer sends in a photo and the body type is chosen to go with it, and the face is sculpted to look like the photo. Or as much as possible. Those are all private orders. Of course we do the dead celebrities for the more entertainment-oriented venues. A lot of those go to Vegas.”

“It’s like being able to go wild in Madame Tussaud’s,” says Kevin. “There’s a big demand.”

Stan looks with curiosity at the special custom work that’s underway. Brunettes at one table, redheads at another. Over here are the blondes.

And here is Charmaine, gazing up at him out of her blue eyes from a disembodied head. A photo of her is clipped to a stand on the table. He recognizes it: it’s one with both of them in it, taken on their honeymoon at the beach, way back before any of this happened. He kept it in his locker.

But he himself has been cut out of the photo. There’s just a blank where he once grinned and posed, chest out, biceps flexed.

A shiver runs up his spine. Who’s been going through his stuff? Could it be that Charmaine has ordered up a replica of her own head and scissored him out of her life?

Who to ask? He glances around. The operative assigned to Charmaine’s head is on a coffee break. Anyway, what would the worker know? They just follow instructions. The order form is taped in place on the worktable; the expression checked in the box is T+H, with an added V. But the customer’s name is inked out.

Steady, he tells himself. “Who ordered this head?” he asks too casually.

Budge gives him a straight look. Is it a warning? “Command performance,” he says. “Very special order. We’ve been told to be very meticulous with it.”

“It’s going right to the top,” says Kevin. “Not my type, personally – too vanilla – but someone up there must like that style.”

“The instructions are extra lifelike,” says Gary.

“We can’t afford to screw it up,” says Tyler.

“Yeah, we really have to tiptoe through the tulips on this one,” says Budge.

Tulips. Tiptoeing. Kindly Budge with the pot belly is supposed to be his subversive contact? Budge, who looks like Charmaine’s happy-gnome coffee cup? Surely not!

“Tiptoe through the what?” he says.

“Tulips,” says Budge. “It’s an old song. Before your time.”

Fucking crap. Spymaster Budge, confirmed. I really need a drink, thinks Stan. Right fucking now!