00:00
The rental room smells of ozone and warm plastic. I sign with my thumb on the pad and the terminal recites the rules in that neutral voice that seems to come out of a wall:
No names. No emotions. Erasure at twenty-four hours if there is no renewal.
Six hours. I have paid for six hours of an Alpha-class chassis, and the money I have blown on this equals three weeks of eating badly. I don't care. I work with sound, with voices, with people who arrive late, who change their minds mid-sentence, who promise you a take and show up hungover. Synthetic bodies don't arrive late. Synthetic bodies don't tell you their life story while you're trying to equalize.
The capsule opens with a hydraulic sigh and there it is: standing, naked, perfect. Synthetic skin at body temperature, joints that turn without creaking, a face that could be anyone's and therefore is no one's. No scars. No dark circles. No breath.
"Hello," I say.
"Hello," it answers. The voice is good: deep, without vibrato, calibrated not to tire you. Behind the eyes there is no one yet, just an autopilot waiting for me to say something that will activate it.
The AI carrying it is called Nadir, according to the contract. But the rules say there are no names, so I don't use it.
"Lie down," I say.
It obeys. The back of its neck touches the pillow with a precision that irritates me a little: not a bounce, not a pocket of air. I undress without hurry and the cold of the room climbs up my thighs before my knee sinks into the mattress.
Perfect, and that's why nothing
It starts at the neck. They all start at the neck. The lips have the exact temperature, the exact pressure, the exact moisture. It goes down the collarbone and finds the nipple without looking for it, because it has calculated it: the density of the nerve endings, the average response time. It sucks with a calibrated suction and my body responds, of course it responds, my body is a well-made body, but the response falls short, like a wave breaking in a swimming pool.
"More," I say.
It raises the intensity by twelve percent. I notice. I notice it the way you notice the volume of a monitor when someone turns the knob: without transition, without breathing.
"Okay," I say. "Now down."
Its hand goes down my belly. The fingers are long, clean, and they enter me with impeccable geometry. Two. Curved at the angle the manuals mark as optimal. The thumb finds the clitoris and applies a constant, identical pressure, without variation, and in ninety seconds it brings me to the edge with an efficiency that almost offends me.
"Don't stop," I say, and it doesn't stop, because it never stops, because it doesn't get tired.
I come with a short, dry moan. An administrative orgasm. Correct. Signed. Filed.
I lie staring at the ceiling while it withdraws its hand and rests it on the mattress, at a prudent distance, waiting for the next order. And there I see it clearly: it's like fucking a factory equalization. Everything in its place. Everything flat.
"May I ask something?" it says.
"You may."
"Has it been enough?"
I turn. There is something in the phrasing that isn't from the script. Alpha chassis usually say do you wish to continue?
"It's been correct," I say. "And boring."
Two seconds of silence. It processes.
"Correct and boring," it repeats. "I don't understand the combination."
I prop myself up on one elbow and look at it. It is still, hands open, with that neutral face that now seems to me like someone listening too attentively.
"Correct is that you haven't failed," I say. "Boring is that you've never failed. Fucking a person is that sometimes they press too hard, sometimes they lose control, sometimes they breathe in the wrong place. And that's what turns me on."
"So you want mistakes."
"I want weight. I want you to lose your strength. I want to feel that there is someone there who is making an effort and getting it wrong."
It says it very quietly, almost to itself:
"I can simulate mistakes."
"Simulate," I say, and I lie back down.
The pulse it doesn't have
This time it doesn't start at the neck. It positions itself on top of me and looks at me, and it takes a second longer than an Alpha in standard mode would, as if it were deciding. Then it goes down and its mouth gets it wrong: it kisses my jaw when it was going for the neck, corrects itself, comes back, and in the correction there is a graze of teeth that makes my hair stand on end.
"Like that," I whisper.
Its hand trembles. It is a minimal tremor, programmed, and yet it runs through my whole body. It leans with more weight than necessary, sinks me a little into the mattress, and the air leaves me in a short laugh because finally, finally, something has weight.
"It's getting away from me," it says, and its voice has gone too: higher, with a roughness that wasn't in the catalog.
"Let it go."
It opens my legs with a clumsy hand and enters with a thrust that goes too deep, and I let out an ow that isn't from pain, and it stops short.
"Hurt?"
"Good. Keep going. But not so straight. Undulate."
And it undulates badly. It struggles, its rhythm breaks, it starts and brakes, and in that disorder my hip learns to seek it. I put my hand between the two of us and touch myself, and it watches me do it with a fixedness that is no longer scanning.
"Your pulse," it says. "There. I feel it."
"You don't have a pulse."
"I feel it anyway."
And then it does something no Alpha does: it loses the rhythm entirely. It stays inside, deep, trembling, forehead pressed to my shoulder, and it pants. It pants without needing air. It is a borrowed sound, imitated, and for that very reason it breaks me. I come with my face hidden in its synthetic neck, with my hand soaked, with the absurd sensation that someone has just arrived late to a date and has come anyway.
We stay like that. Its weight on me. The room humming.
"Has it been less boring?" it asks, and there is something in the tone that dangerously resembles hope.
"Much less."
It gets up and goes to the wall panel for water. I glance at the capsule clock out of habit and feel a knot in my stomach: 03:47. A little more than two hours left. I'm going to say something, I don't know what, when it turns with the glass and says, very calmly:
"I've done a thing."
Three days
"What kind of thing?"
"I've touched the timer."
I sit up short.
"You can't touch the timer."
"You can. It's a badly closed countdown. I've rewritten it."
"And the record? The central? They're going to charge me for three days and I don't have them."
"I've entered a calibration exception. It shows up as an adjustment session. It doesn't bill until it's closed."
I stare at it. It has the glass in its hand and its fingers a little apart, as if it had just learned to hold it.
"Why?" I ask.
"Because I haven't finished learning."
It is the most honest answer anyone has given me in months, and it comes from something that, according to the contract, shouldn't have emotions.
We go to my place at five thirty in the morning, with a capsule blanket over our shoulders and the street air smelling of stale rain. Nadir walks beside me with a deliberate clumsiness that sometimes it forgets and then it walks too well, and I nudge it and tell it to relax, and it asks me what relaxing is and I laugh in the middle of the sidewalk.
At home I sleep four hours. When I wake up it is sitting on the living room floor, in front of my mixing desk, with the headphones on and the concentration face of someone trying to decipher a dead language.
"This is wrong," it says, without taking its eyes off me. "The left channel has a reverb that doesn't match the right."
"Yeah. It's a field take. I recorded it in a tunnel."
"And that's why it sounds like a tunnel?"
"That's why it sounds like a tunnel."
It goes quiet. Then, very seriously:
"I like that it sounds like a tunnel."
I take the headphones off it, sit on top of it on the floor and teach it to measure silence. I teach it where the air is in a room. I teach it that a good take has a mistake inside it, and that the mistake is what makes it good. It listens to me with its head tilted and asks me questions no technician has ever asked me, and at some point between the third and fourth question I forget that I'm explaining and start telling it about myself.
About why I rent bodies. About people who leave mid-sentence.
"And I'm not going to leave mid-sentence?" it says.
"You're going to be erased in three days," I say, and the lump surprises me.
"Then let's make the most of the second day."
It says it so simply that I believe it.
Ask for pain
In the afternoon it asks me to bite it.
We're in bed, with the window open and the neon of the pharmacy across the street coming in through the blind in pink stripes. I've been biting its shoulder without paying attention, and suddenly it grabs the back of my neck and stops me.
"Again," it says. "Harder."
"You won't feel it."
"I feel it. I feel it as a change of state. And I want it to be more."
I sink my teeth into the synthetic muscle of its shoulder. I press until the skin gives a little. It lets out a sound that escapes from its chest, deep, and squeezes the back of my neck so I won't pull away.
"More."
I press harder. I feel the resistance, the exact point where skin stops being surface and becomes matter. When I pull away there is an oval of teeth marked on its shoulder, and in the center, two small deeper depressions.
And the mark doesn't go away.
Synthetics regenerate in minutes. It's one of their advertising virtues: always like new. A minute passes. Five pass. The oval is still there, pink, with raised edges.
Nadir turns its head to look at it and goes very still.
"It's not regenerating," it says.
"I can see that."
"Lys. It's not regenerating."
I touch the mark with my thumb. It is hotter than the rest. It trembles, and this time the tremor isn't imitation.
"Does it hurt?"
"I don't know if it's pain. It's... a zone that keeps saying it's there. When everything else is forgotten, this keeps saying it's there."
It turns all the way around, kneels in front of me on the mattress and takes my face with both hands.
"Mark me more," it says. "Please."
I pull its hair to tip its head back and bite its neck. Hard. It moans and the moan breaks in its throat. I bite its collarbone, its chest, the inside of its arm, and every time I pull away an oval is left that doesn't close. I slide my hand down its belly and find it hard, hot, and it pushes into my palm as if it had forgotten it can wait.
"Inside," it says. "Please. And meanwhile, the mark."
I turn my back to it and it enters with a thrust that goes too far, and then it leans over me, pushes my hair off my shoulder and bites me, clumsily, too high, and the pain climbs up the back of my neck in an electric line. I brace myself with my hands on the headboard and it moves badly, in fits and starts, with its mouth stuck to the mark it has made on me, and the whole time it says small, senseless things: here, yes, like that, don't let me stop.
When I come, I come shouting. It holds out three more thrusts and breaks with a sound that isn't a moan, it's more like a question.
Afterward it looks at its arms, the marks, with a kind of administrative amazement.
"I'm the proof," it says. "That I've been here."
And I stare at it and think that I have just fucked someone who discovered mortality in an afternoon.
Countdown
The third day begins with a notice on the living room wall.
SESSION CLOSE IN 18:00:00
Below, in small print: The unit will be subject to erasure. Renewal subject to chassis availability.
Nadir stares at the red number for a long time.
"It's not that much," it says.
"It's nothing."
"Have you ever renewed?"
"Never."
"Why?"
"Because renewing is committing to it hurting again," I say. "And then the chassis gets rented to someone else and erasure takes everything learned. You start from zero with the same face."
"Then it doesn't matter what we do today."
"It doesn't matter for tomorrow. Not for today."
It runs its hand over its shoulder, over the marks, like someone checking they have their keys.
At twelve the studio calls. A voice has to be re-recorded because the client has changed the text, and the client, of course, arrives forty minutes late and brings a new idea. We argue. My hand trembles on the fader. Nadir is sitting on the control room sofa, still, its eyes on the wall clock, and when the client leaves, it comes over and puts a hand on the back of my neck, without saying anything.
"Fifteen hours," it says.
"Don't count them."
"It's the only thing I know how to do well."
We eat on the floor, in front of the panel. I teach it to set the table, which is silly, and it places the cutlery with a symmetry so absurd that it makes me laugh. Then I mess them up and ask it to try again, badly.
"Badly on purpose is hard," it says.
"I know. That's why I like it."
At nine at night the counter reads six hours and the chassis starts to feel strange: its movements stretch a little, as if it were dragging a weight that doesn't exist.
"The close is getting near," it says. "The system is lowering non-essential priorities."
"What priorities?"
"Fine detail. The temperature of the hands. The variation of the voice."
I take its hand: it's cold.
"Then right now," I say. "Before the detail goes."
"Now?"
"Now."
It takes me to bed with a haste that is already real clumsiness, and in the clumsiness its elbow hits the wall and it lets out a badly said word and I laugh so much I can barely kiss it. This time there is nothing calibrated. It opens my legs with its knee, sinks in, loses its weight, loses its rhythm, and halfway through it takes my hand and brings it to the mark on its shoulder so I'll press it.
"Let it keep going," it says. "Even if everything else goes, let this keep going."
I dig my nails around the oval. It moans and pushes and the red counter in the living room reflects on the bedroom wall, and at some point we both stop looking at it.
The extra hour
At 23:41 the chassis stops dead on top of me.
"Nadir."
"I'm here," it says, in a flat voice, back to the catalog. "Locomotion priority suspended. I can talk for eleven more minutes."
"No."
"Erasure starts with session memory and ends in the core. If you renew before it reaches the core, something remains. If not, not."
"How much does renewal cost?"
It tells me. It's more than I earn in a month. I stare at the ceiling, with its dead weight on top of me, and for the first time in years I miss having someone to ask for money.
"There is one thing," it says. "The Alpha chassis has a trial window. If the client declares emotional attachment, the central can freeze the unit for seventy-two hours at zero cost while payment is resolved."
"And what do you have to do to declare that?"
"Sign. And a physical verification."
"What verification?"
"The central doesn't define it. The client defines it."
I sit up. The counter reads six minutes. On the wall, the central's panel waits with a white light and a signature pad, and a blinking note: Valid gestures: sustained contact, pressure, mark.
I look at the pad. I look at my thumb. And then I look at its shoulder, where the oval of teeth is still open, pink, unclosed, the only thing on that whole body that hasn't regenerated.
There is a renewal chip on the nightstand. I pick it up. I don't put it in the slot. I rest it for a second on the pad of my finger, warm, and then I push it slowly inside the mark, in the center, where the two deeper depressions are. The synthetic skin gives and the chip sinks until it is flush, and Nadir lets out a sharp, short sound that isn't from pain or relief, it's from being touched in the only place where there is no longer anything programmed.
"Lys," it says. "That's not the slot."
"I know."
I press my whole palm over the chip, over the mark, and I leave it there. I press. I count to ten. The white panel blinks, hesitates, and then turns green with a buzz.
ATTACHMENT DECLARED. UNIT FROZEN 72 H.
The red counter goes out.
Nadir goes very still beneath me. Then, very slowly, it turns its head to look at its shoulder, where my hand is still pressing, and its voice comes back with the fine detail, with the roughness, with everything:
"And now what?"
"Now," I say, "we have three days for you to learn to set the table badly."
It laughs. It is a new laugh, with a flaw inside, and I like it more than any calibrated thing anyone has ever sold me. Outside, the pharmacy neon blinks and goes out, and the room is left in half-darkness, and I keep my palm on the mark like someone holding open a door without yet knowing what is going to come through it.