Selected Short Stories Featuring Analog Memory Page 5

because your business will no longer be accepted here. And Josh, I’m scheduling you for surgery within the hour. We’ll expect your decision within five minutes.”

  “John.” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My name is John.” Sweaty opened the door for Lady. Skinny stood at the door. Louis tried to look at me apologetically, but he couldn’t meet my eyes, and left the room. Skinny didn’t smile at me.

  “Five minutes.”

  Family Business

  Honey,

  I know you're upset. You probably have reason to be. But we need to talk about it. See, I found the peanut in my ham sandwich. It probably wouldn't have killed me, but I would have had to go to hospital, would have spent several days in excruciating pain.

  I said I was sorry. I sent you those roses. And it's starting to affect the kids, our fighting. Which probably sounds hypocritical, coming from me, but whatever my faults as a man, a husband, and a father, I do care about our kids. I know you think I lied to you, and yes, at best I was evasive and misleading, but Frank got sick and the sitter called to say she had double-booked and couldn't make it, and it all just seemed to come together.

  I'm a lousy thief. You've known that since you married me. But I refuse to go back to the bad old days, working with thugs we barely knew and could never trust, having to put up with whatever insane, psychopathic bullshit they brought with them (guns included). Besides, our children have small hands, and small hands can come in handy.

  Our kids were never in any real danger. Crappy a thief as I am, planning was always my forte; I knew that place was safe. And, of course, the most dangerous part of a robbery is always the getaway, and you're the best wheelwoman I've ever worked with- they were safer than if we'd dropped them with a new sitter.

  I know this note won't make up for lying to you, but I hope you at least understand I wasn't trying to be reckless. At the very least, I want you to try and take a deep breath, have a calm day, and stop trying to lightly poison me until we can talk about it.

  Trevor

  Brickmouth

  1576. The plague. It was a good time to be alive- and a better time to be a predator amongst men. The dead were everywhere, and the dying were plentiful, too.

  I died every night, then, like all of my kind- at sunrise. And every sunset, I was reborn. It seems to be triggered by light, or heat, though a rudimentary biological timepiece may play some role, as well, as I’ve “awoken” in the deepest part of caves far removed from either. Regardless, as the sun disappears, my mouth snaps shut, catching my elongated teeth on my lips. The thin trickle of blood awakens my body, a primer to the engine of my flesh.

  It was always safer to rest in my home after a night’s excess, but the nature of excess is such that safety was rarely my priority. It was after one of these nights, discovered in the arms of a woman believed stolen by the plague, that I was buried.

  The burial customs at the time required a burial shroud over the head. My kind carry greater degrees of bacteria than a “normal” human, by virtue of a compromised immune system. This usually isn’t a problem, but if you overeat, and vomit blood in your “sleep,” bacteria from the mouth spread to the shroud, and will eat a hole through it. Which is of course how I was caught out.

  I can’t imagine how the humans discovered it; it had taken years for me to understand the nature of our rebirth firsthand, but their solution was simple in its elegance: a brick in the mouth. If the jaw could not close, cutting the lip and restarting the body, I could not be reborn. My body, even at its slowed pace, devoured itself, until there was nothing but bone. Over time, the brick ground my lovely fangs down, to the point where they were unrecognizable from human teeth.

  By my estimation, at some point in the 1700s my jaw stopped moving; this last vestige of life had been moot for at least a hundred years, since that was the last my lips had held blood.

  It’s been twenty-seven days since my bones were unearthed. The brick was knocked accidentally from my mouth during the excavation, and I remember a vague awareness of this. To my fortune, one of the worker’s fingers had been cut, and the tiniest smattering of blood touched my bones.

  The transformation wasn’t immediate, but I was awake. The blood proved only enough to grow the stub of a tongue. But it was enough to lick the soil and minerals from my mouth- enough to start. For the rest of the week I ate dirt beneath an excavation tent, and gnawed my fingers for what little nutrition remained in my bones.

  Muscles began to grow sparsely, enough meat sticking to bone to crawl in bursts. I drug myself to a pile of unsorted bones, and chewed them for sustenance. And tonight, I finally felt… real again. My mind was motile, if not agile. And with great pains, and difficulty, I was able to rise.

  One of the doctors overseeing the excavation was a night owl, did most of his work when the site was dark. Tonight proved no exception. He stepped inside the tent, a torch in his hand. He lit a lamp and extinguished the torch, but paid me no mind, standing hunched at the corner of the tent.

  I jabbed my right forearm, gnawed down to a pointed fork, into his neck. He fell to the ground, staring, convulsing as his life pulsed out of his throat. I still had no lips, little skin, so I knelt over him, lapping at his blood as it pooled, like a dog.

  Already my mind is clearer. Bits nag at me- how unheroic my rebirth has been- but I brush this aside as irrelevant. More pressing is my escape. The sun will rise soon enough, and I have to disappear from here. But as I leave the tent, a single thought courses through me, accompaniment for the dull thump of blood through dry veins: I’m back.

  Laborious Love

  I know they’ll call me a pervert, despite the fact that I’ve never had anal sex with someone wearing frog genes, never asked a lover to get telomere enhancement surgery so they’ll look like a child. I don’t know why it matters to me at all; I’m not doing this for them.

  Okay, that’s not strictly true. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be keeping such thorough notes, wouldn’t be filming all the technical aspects. I want people to benefit from my work, even if in the short term (i.e., my lifetime) they’ll mock me for it.

  But I’m also doing it for me. I can meet women- met loads of them, actually. Loved a few. But what it comes down to, what it always comes down to, is that love is an imperfect symbiosis at the best of times, and outright parasitism the rest. This isn’t to say that I’m cynical, because that’s not really the case. I just don’t delude myself for the sake of romance.

  What relationships come down to, always and without fail, is what somebody needs. Maybe it’s my needs, and maybe it’s hers. But there’s never been a relationship in perfect harmony, because it’s too small a microcosm. A perfect relationship would be a biosphere, elements waxing and waning, needs creating space for complementary gains in supply. Human beings don’t work in such a fashion. I want sex, or solitude, to be pampered and sometimes to be depended on, but the likelihood that any partner’s desires match my own at any given moment is statistically unlikely, and the prospect that my needs and a partner’s would align, constantly, is insignificantly tiny, functionally zero probability.

  Relationships are compromise: accepting the things you don’t want to get to the things that you do. It’s determinedly unfair. No woman wants me to slog through her dissertations on makeup colors- or nuclear thermodynamics- just to humor her; she wants me to listen at the edge of my seat. My options then are duplicity or selfish cruelty, neither of which spring to me as immediately romantic. I can safely assume that the women gracious enough to stand me have likewise compromised, listening to me drone on about robotics or, as you have the misfortune now, philosophy, and that that compromise played a strong role in the dissolution of our affairs.

  I would like to point out that I haven’t spent all this time designing a sex robot; the point wasn’t crafting the world’s most intricate masturbation aid. The prototype, who I’d say I’ve been living with for twelve years (and working on for 18), is named LC, for Life Companion.
Like any good relationship, sex is merely a facet of our affiliation.

  But so what? What if I were building a machine for pleasure? It certainly wouldn’t be the first. Gakutensoku was Japan’s first robot, built at the end of the 1920s. It was lost on tour in Germany, and the legends say that Hitler had it modified to look like Hirohito and had it make its crying face while he had sex with it whenever he and the Emperor disagreed (he spent an entire week alone with it in a bunker after Pearl Harbor).

  If you’d prefer a Yankee version of the same, we have Elektro, built in the 1930s, who could smoke, blow up balloons, and speak using a record player. The official version of his story is that after a starring role in Sex Kittens Go To College, Westinghouse gave the robot’s head to an engineer and sold the body for scrap, but not so; Elektro became a fetish prop in a fetish shop, and his signature line of, “I am Elektro, and my brain is bigger than yours” changed to, “My name is Vibro, and my penis is bigger than yours.” The history conflicts on whether or not anyone ever took Vibro for a spin (his phallus was supposedly taken from a mold of a horse’s member); I question the authenticity of most of the historical counts.

  I had an assistant, once. I believe I felt guilty, that there was perhaps a certain misogyny inherent