17. The Magus

Isometimes muse that the kiss could have been the breaking point. That perhaps I should regret that kiss. If I hadn't kissed her, and she hadn't kissed me back, maybe I could have moved on. Maybe I could have gotten over her eventually and lived my life happily enough with Schrodinger (as happily as Schrodinger ever is). Perhaps I could have swerved around eons of misery I've endured. Maybe things would have turned out differently.

But I highly doubt it. Like a lobster, I am what I am. There is no changing that.

After the kiss, I would not let Eva out of my arms. She told me to let go of her but when I asked if that was an order, she blushed and shook her head. Between kisses, when Eva had to come up for air, I felt like the grin on my face was going to split me open. I wanted to explode for joy, but I stopped myself. I didn't want to die yet.

When we walked back through the zoo, I had her snug against my side, warm and real, and for the first time I felt I was truly a man. And not just any man: the happiest man on Earth. I had sought what I wanted, and I had conquered, and there I was walking with my woman by my side. No one could take her from me. And best of all, she wanted to be with me too—she would not try to escape.

She was so warm and fragile. Her delicate bones, her soft lips, the little noises of pleasure she made, the softer moans of pain as my teeth scraped over her neck. Her whispers, her sly smiles, punched me in the gut, lit my wires on fire. She was beautiful, intelligent, mysterious, fickle. I was a dead planet, without an atmosphere, without movement, without life, and she was the ocean, glimmering, violent, icy, dark at times and yet also warm, inviting, gentle—full of life. I had no need to breathe, yet I was drowning in her, while she looked on with a degree of indifference.

Yes, I could feel her holding back. She held back a piece of herself that I needed desperately. I needed all of her. But my confidence was unshakable, now that I could touch her, I could bide my time, the few months I had left. Wrest that little piece of her from her grip before I ceased to exist. I swore I'd take it with me into nothingness.

"You stick to me like a magnet," she told me.

"Maybe you are my polar opposite," I murmured against her hair.

"I don't know about that. I'd say we have our similarities."

"I can smell her on you," Schrodinger snarled, back in the bunker.

I raised my eyebrow and smirked at him, "Oh really?" I retreated to my cot to replay the day's events. Eva had gotten colder the closer we got to the lab, turning away from me, and eventually she asked me to stop touching her so much, but she never ordered me to. She let me make the choice. I knew that meant she would let me touch her again, so I did not try to push any of her boundaries. I could be patient.

Schrodinger"s face was contorted with unspent rage. White strands of electricity danced over his fingers, his hands, his arms. The other destructions turned their heads to watch us, hungry for violence. Hungrier for fear. But of course, neither Schrodinger nor I would be able to fulfill their hunger for fear. Only humans could do that.

"Pavlov," Schrodinger gritted, "Please listen to me, my brother. She's not good. She's bad. Bad, bad, bad, a hypocrite like all the rest of the humans, she's using you...I can read human minds. I read her mind. She plans to send you to your death."

In other circumstances, I may have taken offense at him insulting Eva. I may have jealousy ruminated a bit more on his revelation about reading Eva's mind—if only I could read her mind.... But I was in too good of a mood to be jealous or hostile. I only wanted to think of our kiss. "Do you think I am a fool, my brother?" I said.

"Yes," Schrodinger spat.

"Well then, perhaps I am a fool. But please leave me to it. And stay out of Eva's thoughts."

Schrodinger's electricity ebbed as I laid on my cot.

"Besides," I told him, as I stared at the ceiling, "You cannot kill that which was never alive."

Schrodinger laughed, "Yes you can."

Eva was all blushes and citrus scent when I saw her next. I held off from holding her hand until we arrived in the classroom, then I grabbed her, hauled her against me, and kissed her until she was pushing away, panting, "That's enough, more gently, gentle."

"As you wish," I murmured. I sat on the sofa and pulled her into my lap, I inhaled her scent. Breathing in, breathing out, I felt so human. So, at peace. I had no urge to destroy anything at all.

"We still have an agenda to follow," Eva said, but did not try to escape by iron arms.

"An agenda?" I asked. I nibbled at her ear, and she shuddered. I felt like a tiger content with a belly full of prey. I felt like purring.

"Yes, more visits to the real world."

"Lobsters?" I asked, because I knew it would make her laugh.

She laughed. She said, "Maybe not today. Today, I want to show you the farmland."

"Hmm," I rubbed my cheek against her soft hair, mussing it. I noticed a bruise forming on her arm, a bruise that matched the size and shape of my hand. It was beautiful. Evidence of my claim on her. But it also reminded me that I needed to be gentle with my little human. Humans were fragile. It was not a lesson I learned well. I would bruise her again before she died. I would hurt her. I would come to regret not learning my lesson the first time.

I pointed out the bruises to Eva and apologized, as a human would. She glanced at the bruises, smiled, told me it didn't hurt, told me she would have to wear long-sleeves, and told me that this is why I had to be more careful.

The farmland seemed to be a many-storied office building, which, aside from the dirty, fogged-up windows, was completely pasted over with adverts, some filthy with the paper peeling off and some more fresh, glaringly glossy. The pictures of huge, smiling faces, scantily clad human females, and toothpastes were oddly repellant to me. There was a line of dirty trucks in the parking lot, pasted over with fresh adverts, being loaded with boxes by tired, sweaty, strangely unpleasant, acidic smelling humans. The building itself seemed to emanate the strange acid smell even more strongly than the humans.

"Do you see how they are weighing each box before loading it into the truck? That is how they avoid paying the pickers minimum wage—they pay them by the pound," Eva muttered.

I held tightly to Eva's hand. "I don't like the smell of this place," I told her, "Must we go here?"

"I want to show you what you are fighting for," Eva said, "So yeah, this is pretty important."

You want to show me what I am dying for, not what I am fighting for, I wanted to correct her. But I knew better than to say anything. Eva used to dismiss my too-precise use of the language as ‘just semantics.' She had told me that I was acting too inhuman when I corrected her minor flaws in logic, consistency, or facts. "To err is human," she used to say.

Eva handed me a visitor"s badge which she pulled from her blue cloth handbag. She hung one around her own neck as well. Then we walked in through the wide double doors without any of the humans milling about even glancing at us. Their heads were all hung low, as if in addition to the boxes they toted, they also had lead weights strapped to their backs.

I pulled Eva back. "Let's go. I've seen enough," I snarled. "This place will make you sick." The stench of the place was an object as solid and real as the cement ground beneath our feet. It smelled like disease, poison, acid, bleach, and death. Almost invisible beneath that stench, there were glimpses of the smells of tomatoes. It seemed impossible that anything would be able to grow in such a place.

Eva frowned up at me. "Don't think you can tell me what to do just because I let you kiss me," she said.

"I don't want you to get sick," I said. The thought of Eva sick with whatever I smelled on those people loading the trucks...It unscrewed me. I must always keep this woman safe, I thought, I must keep her healthy and out of harm. I must maintain her perfection. I don't know if it was a latent instinct, programmed into me at my conception or if it was a need I developed over time fully awakened by the smell of such danger, but I needed to protect her from all the world even more than I needed destruction and fear.

"Please," I begged.

"We won't be long," Eva told me.

I considered pressing the issue, making her command me. But that would destroy the illusion of equality between us, which had begun to bloom with our first kiss. To be Eva's equal, even if it was pretend, was to be a God next to my Goddess.

The space we entered was made of shades of green, bright lights, humidity, thick tomato plants hanging from the ceiling, and that awful smell. The scenery was as alien as an underwater kelp forest. Only instead of seawater around us, we swam through a stench that neither lungs nor gills could sift through.

Eva led me down an aisle of plants.

"That smell you are smelling is the smell of pesticides. Farms used to be outside until the pesticides they used started killing all the bees that used to pollinate the plants. Now that there aren"t enough bees, they have to pollinate the plants by hand, and that is more easily done with uniform plant clones, raised inside."

I nodded. I thought about how soft Eva's hand was, and how I couldn't wait to press her soft body against my hard one again. I thought about how I wanted to remove her from that place. And I thought of the intoxicating taste of her, so at odds with the toxic smell around us.

Eva said, "Now you'd think that because they moved the plants inside, they would have to use fewer pesticides, but the closer quarters between the plants as well as the genetic uniformity makes them even more susceptible to the disease and insects making their way through the cracks in the old buildings they use for the farms. So now they use more pesticides than before. They need to use more pesticides every year.

"The pesticides leak out of the building and pollute the sky and the environment, and are still continuing to kill the bees, making natural pollinating plants struggle. They are poisoning the world. They are killing the world. And they are killing us."

My woman is so intelligent and so passionate, I thought. I kept myself from smiling because Eva told me that it was wrong to smile and laugh when humans were being serious.

She continued speaking, while I admired the shape of her lips. "You see, the tomatoes they pick are beautiful, perfectly round, but tasteless, and they've got next to zero nutrition thanks to the pesticides and the fact they pick them before they are ripe. You see this green tomato? Feel how hard it is. They are going to pick it tomorrow and spray it with ethylene to turn it red before it goes to the grocery store. No one knows how badly this kind of processing affects the health of the consumer, and it is next to impossible to find out because practically everything we eat is processed this way. You can't do an experiment without a control.

"But we know the people who have to spend all day here picking these tomatoes are pretty much guaranteed to get cancer. And if they have kids, they are almost guaranteed to give birth to children with birth defects," Eva was speaking rapidly and forcefully now. With her hand that was not holding mine, she fingered the golden heart locket she had hanging around her neck.

She said, "But do they care? No. Do they care that people are dying? Or babies, freaking babies are being born with webbed toes and tails?

"No, of course not! They don't give a damn about anything but their bottom-line. They claim that all the disease caused by the pesticides are just a coincidence, they say that correlation is not causation. And none of their workers can stand up to them because they pay their workers such shite that they can't afford healthcare, let alone lawyers!"

"Why don't they use androids?" I asked, stroking Eva's hand with my thumb.

"Robots are efficient but more expensive," she said, her brown eyebrows pulled into a scowl as she examined a tomato. "They require maintenance that the companies would have to pay for. They don't have to pay for the maintenance of their human employees. And politicians argue that not using robots creates more jobs. But more jobs wouldn't be needed if employees were paid fairly to begin with. There is more than enough money out there, that if it was distributed properly, families could live on a one breadwinner income and the environment wouldn't be collapsing."

Eva seemed to be expecting me to say something, but what was there to say? It was as if she expected me to care about these sick humans and to be as outraged as she was by the wealthier humans taking advantage of them. It was all meaningless to me. Finally, I settled on saying, "That's terrible."

Eva beamed.

"Terrible!" I repeated, "Really horrible!"

Clenching her fist around her locket, she said, "You see, this is just a small part of why we need to stop them. The rich want to blow their noses on Earth like a used tissue, totally not caring about the mess they leave behind. Using the money they unfairly have so they can take many of our world's precious remaining resources with them to Mars. You know they have freaking patents on the genetic material of plants that have naturally evolved for a thousand years? They only let the common people have access to sterile seeds. No one should have that much power. We need to stop them. All for one and one for all, is how it should be. If we go down, we need to take them down with us. If they go up, they need to take us up with them. We are all humans, but the rich treat the poor as if they are nothing, as if they are nothing more than objects and tools to be used and discarded when they break."

I wondered how it would feel to be entitled to life, liberty, and happiness, as it seemed Eva believed humans inherently were. If I had been created, without a preordained purpose, as humans seemed to be, would that confer in me such a degree of uncertainty that I would feel the world owed me and my kind something? It was such an illogical sentiment. Schrodinger, I knew, could feel entitled. But he had more human DNA than I had. To feel I was owed anything has been a human concept I have never been able to replicate in my programming.

It seemed Eva had finished speaking, so I leaned in and devoured her with a kiss. I held her hair tightly in my fist and pulled her against me. Her lips were perfect, so I nipped at them. The fragile column of her upturned neck called to me, so I pulled my tongue over her pulse. I knew I was being gentle, but she still moaned as if in pain. I replied with a rumbling growl.

Eventually, she sagged against me, as if she couldn"t handle anymore. For my part, all I wanted was more and more. She hugged me, pressed her forehead to my chest. She murmured, "I knew you'd understand."

I had no clue what she thought I understood, and I did not care. I kissed the top of her head and kept rumbling with pleasure. It was as if there was a motor in my chest that she had set to revving. The vibrations of it seemed to work to spread the pleasure of her deeper into my veins, lighting up every one of my wires with pleasure. I wondered why I had not seen men rumbling when they kissed women in the movies Eva had shown me. Did human males not rumble? Or was this one of the activities that Eva said she would not show me any videos of because they were meant to be kept private between a man and a woman? She had said early on I would never need to know about sex, indeed that it would be inappropriate and perhaps distracting from my mission if I did learn more about sex than its basic definition—but now I was finding my curiosity insatiable.

I breathed Eva in. Then I remembered the stench of the place.

"Are we done here?" I asked, "Let's leave. This air is not safe for you to breathe."

"There are people who are in a lot more danger of getting sick from this place than I am, we haven"t even been here an hour," she said, "Let's go look at the pickers and then we can leave."

Hand in hand, we climbed up a staircase to the second floor, where Eva said the picking was scheduled. There, between the rows of unripe tomatoes, were men and women of all ages plucking the still-hard green fruit just as Eva said there would be. But Eva could not have fully prepared me for what I was witnessing, because the bulk of what was repellent was not the sallow skin or weary looks of the pickers, but the scent of them and the sound of them. The pungent odor of sweat mingled with the pesticides. The scent of the sweat was a saccharine smell I later came to associate with that of rotten corpses. Beyond the scent, the diseased lungs in the room rattled like hundreds of rattlesnakes with varying audibility, punctuated by the percussion of coughs loud enough for even humans to hear.

"Eva, hi. Hello." One of the pickers, an older woman whose blotched face was lined with exhaustion and shiny with sweat, approached us with a weak smile on her face. Her hair was black and curly. And her breath smelled of blackness and of blood. "We haven"t seen you in a while. Mariana keeps asking about you. She's getting so big."

Eva's hand went to her locket and squeezed. She said, "Hi Sofía. I thought you were on cucumbers today."

Sofia sighed, her shoulders heaving up and down. "You know, you are always welcome to come over. Just because Caesar—he's gone doesn't mean…Who is your friend?"

"Sofia, this is Pavlov, Pavlov this is Sofia, now we really must go?—"

I shook the hand Sofia held out to me. It was sweaty, dirty, and warm. It was fragile and strong. I did not want to let go. Something about the woman called to me, like Eva called to me, but very differently. It was as if her heat had found its way inside me with the simple handshake. She was like a shirt I had never worn, but I knew would fit perfectly. A shirt tailored for me. I wanted her approval. I wanted her safe and for her to have the chance to rest, to sit. I wanted her to stop smelling as she did. I wanted her to keep me safe.

"My, you look just like my—" suddenly Sofia's eyes widened. She pulled her hand away as if I had burned her and wiped it on her dirty jeans.

"What did you do?" she said to Eva.

Eva stood with her jaw clenched, glaring with watery eyes. She still held the locket tightly in her hand.

"What did you do?" Sofia's voice broke with emotion. She started coughing crimson into a tissue already stained with dried blood. She was hacking, bending over, and all I knew how to do was watch.

"I did what I had to do," Eva's glare did not waver. "Come on Pavlov, let's go."

"Not—with—my—son you didn't!" Sofia's broken, coughing voice called after us as I ran with Eva down the stairs.