27. The Magus

Chapter 27

Eva. You're so small.

You're fragile as a hummingbird egg.

You don't remember when I broke your wrist.

You don't remember that you ordered me not to touch you. You don't realize that on our wedding day, I had to trick you into rescinding that order.

You say that you're a different person. But I don't believe that.

Because I want you as badly as I wanted her.

But I don't want to hurt you, as I hurt her. I don't want to make the same mistakes again.

But I want you.

"Which one is more real?" Iago demanded.

His abrupt interruption caused me to squeeze the vial I held a fraction too tightly. A hairline fracture appeared between my fingers with a miniature noise of splintering glass. Frustration threaded through my wires. No harm was done, but his constant demands for attention did not make for easy progress.

I sat the vial down carefully in its wooden cradle and turned to him. I never tired, but I was weary. I'd never need rest, but I could see the appeal.

"Which one is more real?" he repeated, glaring at me with such a human expression on his tanned android's face.

In each of his two fists, he held a small, brown bird. Finches. As easily broken as twigs snapped underfoot. They turned their heads this way and that in jerky movements and seemed to see nothing with their shining black eyes.

"What do you mean by 'more real'? They are both real." I glanced back toward my lab table. I had agreed to tolerate Iago's inanity—and even help him with it—when he agreed to help me find Eva's DNA, but now I wondered if there was a way to escape him, at least until I had successfully recreated Eva.

Iago sighed, "No, you know what I mean. I mean, which one is alive?"

"The one on the left." I could hear its heartbeat and smell a very faint wet-leaf scent of wild fear.

Sighing, Iago broke the neck of the right bird, snapping it with his thumb as easily as a twig. Then he walked over to the window and threw both birds out of it with such force that I supposed that now neither of them was alive.

"How'd you know?" he asked, wiping his hands on his breeches.

"The heartbeat. You may be able to fool humans with your robots, but you already know that you'll never fool me."

Iago dramatically fell back in the fraying cow-skin chair he kept in my lab for such occasions. "I know. But you could humor me sometime, couldn't you? That was a pretty good effort, wasn't it?"

"It was," I agreed. "Very lifelike." I turned back towards my vials, "With your birds, we'll have eyes everywhere and no humans will be any the wiser." I paused, "Though Furies may figure it out."

"I could add a heartbeat," Iago said, "If you'd like."

"I don't care," I held the vial up to my eye again. It was taking me so long to figure out how to clone anything, despite having what was basically a microscope built in both my eyes and software that allowed me to record everything without taking notes, and a mind that never needed to sleep. Iago was so much faster at developing techniques for building robots than I was at cloning. He had made increasingly realistic robots of all species, including humans, by the time I succeeded in cloning a sea urchin. I had a whole tank full of deformed sea urchins sitting in a corner next to Barbie.

"But if I added a heartbeat, wouldn't it be practically as good as alive?"

"I don't care."

"I mean, what if I made a robot version of your Eva? I could include a heartbeat, and it would be practically the same as the original. Only this one wouldn't be so fragile. You could do all sorts of nasty things to a robot."

I cracked the vial then. The clear liquid filled with unraveled salamander DNA splashed to the floor, creating a small, dark puddle on the smooth stone.

"No," I stated simply.

"I wish you'd let me help you."

"Not happening," I said.

"I could make her so realistic. Better than the original, even. Like why even bother using human DNA? That is like building a building with structurally unsound blueprints. Everything that is flawed in us, came from the incorporation of human DNA."

"DNA is the only thing that makes us even remotely human."

"You say that like it is a good thing. You say that as if humanity is something to strive for."

"What are you trying to do if not save the humans?" I stared despondently at the puddle by my feet. I'd have to clean it up and start again.

"I don't know, Pavlov. I'm mostly bored. I don't know why I do anything I do. You know that, but if I made you an Eva?—"

"Iago. Drop it."

"Well, will you at least fuck Barbie, then?"

Barbie, upon hearing her name, sat up and smiled from the corner she was in, discarded like a forgotten mannikin. By then, at least, Iago had succeeded in getting her to keep her clothes on.

"Fuck me, master," Barbie said in the Spanish-accented fuck-me voice Iago had recently installed in her.

"Shut the fuck up, Barbie, go back to sleep," Iago ordered. Barbie stilled once again in her robotic facsimile of sleep. For a moment, I imagined a robotic Eva, slumped there instead. Eva as a dead thing that was never alive. Eva as an obedient thing, that had to listen to my every order. An Eva that loved me because she had no choice. It wouldn't be Eva. It would be a mockery of life, as Barbie was, as that bird was, as Iago and I were. It would be just another thing I would want to destroy. I'd fuck it into destruction.

I dropped a rag on the wet mess at my feet and bent to wipe up the shards of glass. I was indestructible, but I still had to do certain things by hand, as in-efficiently as a human. I shattered the sparkling shards of glass into smaller pieces in my frustration, pulverized them into shining sand.

Even once I created Eva, I would never trust myself to get too close to her. It would be too easy to accidentally crush her like a vial. Drop her, shatter her like glass.

"Will you never give up?" I said.

"Maybe I won't. I'm telling you. If you just got laid, just once?—"

"Iago." I reared up and looked down at him, my gaze steady.

He crossed his legs one way and then crossed them the other way. "You can't blame me for trying, right?"

"I can." I crossed my arms.

"Fine, fine, I only wanted to show you the bird anyway. It's great, isn't it? I'm thinking we can send birds all over the world and identify any lingering sites easily."

Eva. Please. Don't make me hurt you. I may look like a man, but you and I both know that I'm not.

I shouldn't have told you my true name.

I'm going to break you. You're going to make me break you.

And it is going to feel so good.