7. The Magus

Chapter 7

Eva did not have me recycled into scrap metal, despite her claim that she would; the next day she brought me up to the lesson room as usual.

I knew she wasn't going to have me turned into scrap metal though: (1) because I wasn't made of metal, and (2) because both she and I knew that me being a ‘sick, twisted, fuck,' was no barrier to me successfully serving my purpose.

"Today," she said as we entered the lesson room, looking up at me with an artificially cheerful smile, "I don't have a plan. We are going to wing it, sort of like yesterday. So, Pavlov, what would you like to do today? Watch T.V., play a game, rea?—"

"Let me touch you," I knew what I wanted. "Or if not that, I'd like you to touch me."

Her heartbeat picked up, and I smelled the orange of her adrenaline blossom beautifully before me. I reached out, as if to embrace her, until my arms automatically stopped inches from her body because of her previous, un-rescinded order not to touch her. I luxuriated in the feel of her body heat, minutely warming the air around her. She was my sun.

She stepped away from me, and I felt cold, so I stepped forward, towards her, trying to warm myself with her heat without touching her, just as a human will warm himself by a fire without ever touching the flame.

She stepped back again. She said, "Stay away."

I could have disregarded her request because she didn't use my true name, but I complied. I dropped my arms and focused on drinking her face in with my eyes. I had a perfect memory, and I would relive every moment I had with her once I was sent back to the chambers, but even my perfect memory could not compare to the perfect reality that she was to me.

"Touch me," I said. I recalled what she had tried to teach me about the social rules humans had when dealing with each other: manners. "Please touch me," I said, "Touch me please." Manners still didn't intrinsically make sense to me, but if they got me what I wanted, then I would give them a try.

Her dark eyes widened. She said, "Wha—? You said please. Without prompting!"

"Touch me, hold my hand, please, or you can slap me again," I said. I looked into her eyes, as the movies she had made me watch had taught me, "PLEASE."

The fathomless pupils of her liquid brown eyes dilated slightly as I watched. I wanted to stroke them. Lick them. Such human, living eyes.

"Why?" Eva asked, "Why are you acting like this? Why would you want me to touch you?" I noticed tears forming in her eyes, but not falling, gravity-defying, shining, beautiful.

I did not think about her question until she said, "Answer me, Destruction #7."

But even then, I did not know how to answer. Why did I want to touch her? Why did I so enjoy smelling her and seeing her? These are questions I had never asked myself. I had never asked any questions at all—I simply responded to what was before me, like a reflex, like a biometric robot would. A passive character, acted upon by my surroundings.

After searching my circuitry, I answered honestly: "I don't know why I want to touch you or you to touch me, but it is true that I want my skin and your skin to come into contact."

Her gaze had seemed glued to mine, yet she turned her head away. She smiled a smile that looked more like a frown and fingered the locket around her neck. She said, "That's ridiculous. You're ridiculous. This whole thing is ridiculous. You don't even really HAVE skin! You have biofilm. You might have some human DNA, but you aren't even human. You aren't."

"I know," I said. I wished she would look at me again. I wanted to dive into her eyes. Drown in them. Explode into the nonexistence of black within them. She kept fingering the locket around her neck; I wanted to crush it into atoms and have her attention fully on me instead. The armory in my arms itched to get out.

"Why do I want to touch you?" I asked, in the hopes of turning her eyes back towards me. "Why do I find you so perfect?" I still didn't truly care about the ‘why' I just wanted to engage with her. She had told me that questions were engaging.

"I'm not perfect," she snorted, walking farther from me and sinking onto one of the couches. "Far from it."

"To me, you are absolutely perfect," I said, following behind her and sitting as close as I could to her without being in danger of touching her. "Though I understand that perfection is more of a subjective truth than an absolute one."

"I've clearly made you read too many philosophy books if you are talking like that. Subjective truth? Jesus. Where did you read that?"

"Kierkegaard," I said.

"Did you enjoy it?" she said.

"Enjoy what?" I said.

"Reading Kierkegaard," I said.

"No," I said. I hadn't enjoyed it or disliked it. I was indifferent to everything but her.

Eva seemed to have nothing to say to that, so I went back to the line of conversation that had kept her talking. I said, "Why do I want to touch you? Is my desire to touch you part of my programming? For what purpose do I want to touch you?"

"Oh God, what have I done?" Eva sank her head between her knees and moaned. She was wearing jeans. I wanted to see what was underneath. She said, "What have I done, what have I done?"

"What HAVE you done?" I asked. I longed to pull her into my lap.

She shot back up into a sitting position. "Nothing. I haven't done anything. It is a fluke, a coincidence—I mean you don't even have a soul—it's impossible," she said.

"I don't understand," I told her.

"You don't need to understand. You just need to be able to do your job and be done with it," she said.

"Will you let me touch you?" I asked again. "Let me hold your hand." I knelt on my knees before her as I had seen the human men in movies do, when trying to court human women. "Please," I said.

She took a big breath in, held it for a moment, and let it out. "My job is to get you to pass as human so that you can do your job. I know I brought this upon myself, but you are not making this any easier for me. Get up, Destruction #7, sit next to me on the couch, we are going to have a normal, human conversation," she said.

I did as she ordered.

"We are going to talk about… college. Okay? Would you like that?" she said.

"No," I said, trying to angle my head so I could catch the most scent I could from her. I said, "I would like to touch you."

"Moving on!" Eva said, rolling her eyes. "In this normal human conversation we are having, I am going to tell you about my college experience, and then you are going to tell me about your college experience.

"I got my undergraduate degree in pre-med and then I went to Oxford to study bio-artificial intelligence, and I got my PHD in bio-AI. Now Destruction Number 7, I need you to ask me why I was interested in bio-AI and also express that you are impressed by my level of education."

"Wow," I said, "you have attained a degree of education that most humans?—"

"People," Eva corrected.

"People never attain. What motivated you to study bio-AI?" I said. I wondered if she would object to me leaning over and sniffing her. Likely yes, she would and then I would be made to sit further from her, so I didn't.

Eva sighed, "I don't know. Part of it was I wanted to be with my friend who wanted to be a doctor. Part of it was I thought I could use my degree to help humanity, though now I'm not so sure anything can help humanity."

I nodded. "Can I touch you?" I asked Eva again.

"What did you study?" Eva asked.

We had gone over this multiple times: my backstory. "History. I majored in history at Nebraska State University. I studied history because I like to see how the past brought us to where we are today and because knowing the past can help prevent us from repeating our mistakes. Plus, I am hopeless at math," I said.

"Oh, but I love math, maybe you just never got the hang of it?" Eva said.

I knew what I was meant to say next, but Eva asking me what I wanted had changed something within me, and I did not want to move forward with the script I always inevitably failed at with my robotic answers. "I want you to talk," I said instead, "I want you to talk, and I want to touch you. I am empty, you know I am empty, I have nothing to say but what you tell me to. I want you to talk, I want you to fill me up with your words. Please. I want to listen to you and touch you, smell you, taste you, look at you. Please."

Eva's heart raced, and I thought she was going to send me away again, but instead she did something I never would have expected; she put her small hand on my large one.

At her touch, a bolt of electricity shot through my body with such a violent spasm that it took all my control to not shock her—I knew that if I let it, the bolt would kill her. I managed to swallow my electricity and smile at her. "Thank you," I said, and then said again as I felt that the first time did not do my gratitude justice: "Thank you, Eva."

She smelled less of adrenaline and more of sadness, when she said, "You don't have anything to thank me for."

"I do," I said. "And I am grateful." I wanted to tell Eva that I would give her anything to repay her for touching my hand as she was, but I had nothing but the clothes on my back, and those clothes weren't even truly mine. I was an object owned by the facility, as were my clothes.

"You're na?ve," Eva said.

I shrugged.

"You're just a collection of atoms, whether you are grateful or not doesn't matter," Eva said.

"You're a collection of atoms too," I pointed out.

She laughed like morning birdsong and pleasure ran through me so intensely it hurt. Her hand was still on my hand. I could feel her pulse through where her palm touched me.

When her laughter died down, I repeated, "You're a collection of atoms too," to see if that would get her to laugh again.

It didn't get her to laugh, but she did raise her eyebrows. "Why did you repeat yourself?" she asked.

"I wanted you to laugh more," I said.

She smiled, "You're cute."

"Cute?" I repeated.

"Yes, cute. You kinda remind me of a little kid," she laughed. "How absurd! But what am I saying? You are basically a little kid—you're not even a year old. I think I've been going about this the wrong way, treating you like an adult when you haven't even been a kid yet, just because you look like an adult."

She laughed again, and it sounded like the stars twinkling in the sky.

I liked that she thought I was cute, and I wanted her to keep thinking I was cute. The way she looked at me transformed me from an object to a being. She took her hand off mine to wipe the tears freely falling from her eyes, and I yearned to take that hand and hold it in my palm. I would have been happy holding her hand forever. I would be happy to atrophy, to dissolve to nothing but the stillness of a stone, as long as I could touch her, be with her.

With Eva's first death, I malfunctioned: I lost the ability to be still. Destruction was all around me, but I could not pause to admire it or lament it. When I walked past bloodied, injured, diseased people dying, screaming for somebody, anybody to help, to save them, to kill them, put them out of their misery, I did not stop to torture or treat them. When an old woman, gaunt with starvation and riddled with radiation poisoning, followed me for miles, wanting something but never asking, I just kept walking when she collapsed.

My legs moved but my brain seemed to have frozen on the single word, the single concept: Eva, Eva. There was no room in my hard drive for any other thoughts. I didn't notice when the bloated, stinking corpses became more plentiful than the living humans and I didn't notice when I stopped seeing any humans at all. Desperate, skeletal animals attacked me; I tossed them aside without looking to see if I had killed them. Plants lost their green, trees stood empty of leaves like store shelves waiting to be restocked by the dead grocery store clerks and I walked on.

My hair grew long and matted, and I didn't feel it when chunks of it were ripped out by the dead branches of the trees I passed. My clothes rotted into rags, threads of nothingness, as I wandered through dust storms and ice storms and swamps and deserts naked without experiencing any of it.

Eventually, I reached the ocean, and I could walk no further. In an otherwise still and dead world, the waves crashing against the shore screamed at me like Eva must have screamed during her death. Agonizing. Painful. My own ineptitude. The rage exploded from me all at once, and destruction consumed my surroundings and me for a blissful moment before my atoms began reassembling agonizingly. Each time I reassembled, I destructed again and again, chasing that blissful moment of non-existence before my atoms crashed back together with more pain than an explosion. I paid no heed to the havoc I was wreaking on my surroundings, to the already dead trees turning into ash or the fire spreading inland, carried by the wind. I paid no heed to the slow spinning of night and day.

Eventually, the crater that formed around me deepened and grew until the sea filled it with cold, salty water. I welcomed the weightlessness, the suffocation. Finally, in the endless motion of the ocean, I could be still. Being swallowed up by the water's movement was enough for my body, though my brain was still frozen on that endless loop: Eva. Eva.

Eva's treatment of me changed the day after she called me cute. I knew it had changed when the chamber's door opened, and she was standing there in the light of the hallway with an expression on her face I could only describe as gentle. Gone was the brilliant smell of adrenaline and the racing heart. Her heart beat steady and strong, and her gaze on me was unwavering.

In the lesson room with the glass windows that I had come to think of as our room, her gentle expression blossomed into a full-blown smile.

She sat on one of the colorful chairs. "Destruction Number 7, sit on the beanbag chair."

I obeyed, sitting on the soft beanbag chair before her, never taking my eyes off her. She picked up a slim, orange book and opened it to the first page.

"One dish, two dishes, red dish, blue dish," she said, then turned the book around, displaying illustrations to me for a moment before turning the book back towards herself and turning the page. "Black dish, blue dish, old dish, new dish," she said and showed me the illustrations again.

I found myself sitting up and leaning forward to better look at the dish—the illustrations hardly looked like dishes, but somehow, I still knew they were dishes. It was strange. It did not compute. And the rhythmic words coming out of Eva's mouth enthralled me even more than her regular speech.

"Some are mad, and some are plaid, and some are extremely, very bad," she showed me more pictures and turned the page. "Why are they mad, plaid, and bad? I do not know. Go ask your dad."

"I don't have a dad," I said. "Who am I supposed to ask? Why are they mad, plaid, and bad?" I wanted to know the answer. It made no sense, and I saw no logic in it. They were just dishes; why would a dish ever be anything other than a simple object? Where was the objective or subjective badness in a dish? If it held food and served its purpose, how could a dish be bad? This was beyond the other books Eva had had me read. It did not compute, and my seeking to process it made me ask a question to achieve an answer. The question did something to me; wires inside me shot off at dead ends, frazzling, itching. Some small bits of my programming grew and broke, 000101101's replacing 010100101's. It was the first in what would be many small scratches in the structure of my being.

Eva grinned, "I knew this would work! I should have been teaching you like this the whole time! You are a child! And I am a genius!"

"How can a dish be extremely, very bad?" I repeated—maybe if I could only find the answer, my wires would stop hitting dead ends, and I would stop having the inexplicable itch.

"I don't know. Go ask your dad!" Eva repeated gleefully.

"I don't have a dad! Who do I ask?!" The words came out of my mouth louder than I had ever spoken before, as if volume would help calm the itch, help persuade Eva to give me an answer.

"Some are wide, some are narrow, the wide one sports a green sombrero," Eva continued, her grin widening as she dismissed my question, "Around this spot, and back to that, amusing sights are all we've got!"

My question faded to the back of my mind as Eva confronted me with more incongruities in rhyming form—why would a wide dish wear a green sombrero? At last, she closed the book with a snap.

"What did you think of that?" Eva asked.

"I want you to read it to me again," I said, "Please, again." Eva's voice engrossed me, and the strange words and pictures drew me in.

"What's your favorite part?" Eva asked.

That stumped me for a moment. My favorite part? What did it mean to have a favorite? The part I wanted to experience again the most?

"The bad dish," I said, "The extremely, very bad dish."

"Why?"

"I am like the bad dish, bad without reason, bad without logic: that is what I am."

Eva's smile drifted slightly, "No, Destruction, you are no more bad than a knife is. A knife is not at fault for stabbing—it is the person who wields the knife."

I shrugged, "Even if I am not bad, I am not good. It is all the same to me. Please read the book again."

Eva read the book to me three times more that day, each time asking me a different question afterward, each time forcing the wires within me to fire off in new combinations, causing errors within me that Eva couldn't see but must have been seeking. I thought she must be trying to break me, and I was glad. Each flaw she scratched into my software was evidence of her—her creation, in a way, as much a part of her as a part of me.