Everywhere Still

Flesh brushes against metal, metal against flesh. Roses spring from the garden. Spring shines through the window. The window takes up a good sized chunk of the wall, although the wall was never very big to begin with. It’s far too small to keep Alex’s heartbeat contained inside. Alex’s heartbeat whirls and churns inside his flesh. Two bodies. Two beings. 

One heartbeat.

Metal brushes against the medical bed, tubes connected to nonexistent organs that play a tune of inconsequential despair. 

Inconsequential is what you get when you don’t have a heart. 

Alex looks away because as long as he’s waited for this moment, waiting is better than living. He can’t decide whether he feels a faint glint of the same excitement he felt yesterday or if everything of happiness has already melted away into the pot of doom. He didn’t feel doomed yesterday. So why does he feel like this forever waited-for moment will catapult him off the face of the earth? This is certainly a good thing, right? 

Nobody deserves to live without love.

Claustrophobia’s quick chatter rambles through the tight walls, which hold hues of gray. Perhaps they’ve been redone. Perhaps someone doesn’t know how to paint. Perhaps they know exactly what they’ve done in adding splotches of shaded hymns to the room, singing in perfect harmony with its visitors and its residents.

Its heartless, organ-less residents.

Forest eyes rimmed with sticky, sappy regret, Alex pushes his gaze across his future’s hand, her face, her foot. He didn’t expect her to have feet, especially ones that looked so life-like. 

So sickening.

His heartbeat doesn’t feel real anymore. If it’s there, it’s just as there as she is. Her eyes are closed. Alex can’t fathom why. Is someone enjoying his newfound apprehension? The melodic tapping of his own black tennis-shoe against the floor? Is she going to wake up soon? Is “wake up” the right way to describe what she does?

Edith rings in his head along with echoes of who—or what—will own up to the name. He imagined locks of flowing hair, eyes as warm as fire, smooth skin creeping over every inch of her. Smooth skin that he could touch and feel as if he made a real connection.

Now, he realizes he only imagined a torso, and the sight of a lower body makes his brain flop in confusion. He doesn’t mind that she has legs, although he doesn’t think they should feel so cold. Coated metal. Is she going to walk on those?

Her eyes flicker, too fast for Alex to see what lies beneath her life-like eyelids. He thinks he might’ve seen a glimpse of blue—or was that purple? She has no hair on her head. The only thing that compensates is a whirlwind of spaghetti-like wires contained in what should be her scalp. He didn’t notice the hairy mess until now, sitting on the far end table next to her bed. Wigs. 

He has to choose one and put it on her. 

Or will she do the choosing?

Everything in Alex wants to run, to kick off and ride the wheeled spinning chair all the way back home. But he can’t. She’s aware of his presence. She’s been aware of his presence all morning, but she waited for the right time.

She decides now is the right time.

“Um, hello.” Alex forces his eyes into her’s. They are indeed purple, and they’re wildly alluring despite not having a soul to reflect. He can’t help but to shove his hands into the deep pockets of his jeans. He put his good ones on this morning, as if trying to impress the woman who’d been created specifically for him. He still has the urge to woo her stuck between folds of his brain. His human brain—another thing Edith lacks. “I’m Alex. You must be Edith.”

“A-lex,” she repeats as if the word tastes good. Alex lets his shoulders droop as he realizes she’ll never truly taste anything. His cooking talents will still only be wasted on his own survival. “I am Edith. It is very nice to meet you.”

Her facial expression seconds her verbal sentiment. Alex can’t decide whether he’s grateful or irked at the lack of sound playing from her motion. Edith is nothing like the robots he’s seen on TV. “Yes. You too.” He reaches out to her and notices how perfectly her hand slips into his. How steady and life-like her shake is despite its metal undertones.

“You look afraid. Can I help you with anything?”

He forces a smile. “No, no. I’m excited, is all. I’ve never met a woman like this. It’s surreal.” Actually, he never really met a woman at all. He only had a week-long fling that he wishes he could forget about.

“I looked forward to meeting you as well. Do not worry about me. Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m, ah,” he starts, sliding his fingers through smooth brown hair over a bumpy scalp. His human scalp. “I mow lawns. My neighbor has a business and I work for him. It’s a pretty well-paying job, and it’s practical, something I’ve always valued.”

“You enjoy practicality.”

“Yes, I do. I’ve always been that way, ever since I was a kid.”

“Tell me about when you were a kid.”

Alex pauses, a sharp memory gutting his brain. He never talks about his childhood and is surprised he mentioned it now. “Tell me about you.”

“Tell me about you.”

Silence falls over the room, and purple falls expectantly on Alex’s green. He isn’t even looking at her, yet she still makes perfect eye contact and even softens her eyes for him. 

Is that pity in her face?

“Dr. Joan put my hair next to my bed.” She reaches over to the table and retrieves the whole pile of wigs. She bears cat-like motions that surprise Alex. She doesn’t move like a robot. “Which one is to your liking? This one?”

He nods at the red wig dangling from her right hand, aside from the others. He always liked red hair. “That one’s good.”

She puts the blonde, brown, and black back on the table and sets the red one on her head over a playful smirk. 

It doesn’t take long to realize she’s winning him over.

He leans forward in his chair, letting his gaze trail down her face. All her features jump out at him as the ones he prefers in a woman. Not that he thought about his preferences much, but he knows them when he sees them. Thin lips, sun-kissed skin, deep, intriguing eyes. 

Maybe his future isn’t so bad.

“Do you like chocolate?” 

Alex shares her smile. “I do.”

“Me too.”

“You eat?”

She nods and lets strands of her wig fall over her face. She’s teasing him, and Alex fights the urge to jump in and play her game. He will, but not too fast. Love doesn’t happen overnight.

“I eat if you do.” The remark is strange to him, but he lets it go. She is a robot, after all. “Why did you not push the hair out of my face? I know you want to.”

“Are you taunting me?”

“If you say so. Do you not love me yet?”

He shakes his head, making sure the motion is quick enough to make her believe him. “It isn’t that. I was just afraid of being too hasty. I’m new to this, and I don’t want to mess it up.”

“I understand.” And her expression shows it. Alex relaxes. “So you do love me?”

Her eyes narrow, but they’re not hard or urging. They’re vulnerable, as if she has just as many emotions as he does. 

He hesitates. 

He doesn’t want to disappoint her, but he isn’t quite sure how he feels. All his life—his human life—he’s been driven to reality. Is this too weird for him? Will his friend and coworkers think less of him if he actually falls for someone like Edith? He never even told them about her. Is he ashamed of her? Scared of her? Madly in love with her?

Air conditioning hisses against the space, emphasizing its long minutes of silence. A deep breath protrudes from Alex’s mouth, a breath he can’t feel escaping into the air.

Does Edith love him? Can a robot feel love?

She repeats the question.

He repeats it again back at her, as if playing in some verbal ping-pong match.

Alex eyes Edith’s shoulders rise and fall in her own strained breathing. She’s breathing? 

“I love you, Alex. I truly do. I want to go home with you and to experience life together. I want to taste your cooking and smell fresh grass when you step through the door. I feel love and I want to feel it with you, if you will let me.”

Stiff is only one word that Alex can use to describe how he feels. She loves him? How?

His heart pangs in his chest. Despite his heightened interest, it pangs at a normal, steady pace. “I think so.”

The words warm her eyes. Alex’s future smiles and sits up, pulling the tubes off her metal body. “You should take me with you. Where do you live, Alex?”

“4921 West Bentley Street. You’ll like it there. It’s a little barren, but it’s practical.”

“Do you have fond memories there?”

A beat, then a smile. “I do.”

“I have memories too.” Edith trails her eyes up and to the right, as if basking in her own memories. Alex resists the urge to dwell on the fact that her memories aren’t real. “I wish Dr. Joan would give me more, I truly do. Your capacity is good. It is better than mine.”

Alex offers a sad touch to her metal arm.

“Will you help me find more memories? Memories of love?”

“I will.”

“Do you love me?”

He goes for it. He brushes a new curtain of hair out of her face. “I do.”

The wall drops open like a mouth gaping at the revelation. In turn, a sheet flies up to the ceiling that extends far higher than the hospital room. A projector? Alex recalls seeing one of those somewhere, but now he can’t remember. His human mind is fuzzy and a light round of ticking caresses his ears from inside his human head.

People are here. They sit in rows as if watching the spectacle. Watching Alex. His mouth opens just as wide as the open wall, where a woman in a lab coat winks and shuffles over to him and Edith. Alex looks at Edith. Edith looks at Alex. She doesn’t look worried, so he lets his own nerves fly away.

He wonders what Edith is doing while she throws her white bed sheet away and hops off onto the floor. At the impact of metal to the ground, the painting on the wall falls down. 

The painting of the window where Alex had observed spring and roses. He observed paint.

Edith revels in the attention, but Alex can’t hear the screams of the audience or what the Lab Coat Lady is saying through her black microphone. He’s seen her before. 

Where?

Edith demonstrates a life-like curtsy and the glass wall flies up into oblivion just like the projector screen. Lab Coat Lady ushers Edith and Alex to a blue loveseat that forms the top half of a triangle with two blue armchairs to his left, facing the audience. Alex’s own steps are heavy while a man pushes him into the space in the loveseat closest to the crowd. Lab Coat Lady plops Edith down to his left and then sits in the arm chair across from her. The man sits in the one across from Alex.

The cheering dies down, or so Alex figures from the splay of closing mouths and eager eyes. What is he doing here?

“There you have it.” The lady’s voice rattles directly through Alex’s veins as if from inside of him. But she’s addressing the audience. “We’ll do a Q and A session shortly, but before that I’d like to wrap our findings up for everyone who took the time to come to Lewvine Corporation’s ‘Generated Love’ talk. I, as well as everyone involved in this experiment, sincerely hope you enjoyed what you saw today and that we’ve successfully poked at your curiosity.” Lab Coat Lady pauses, letting the audience nod and shout in agreement. Alex still can’t hear them, but their faces say it all. He looks at Edith once again, who smiles. He smiles with her, even though confusion still tugs at him. Did this lady trick him? Put him unknowingly through some robot experiment? Is Edith in on this? Is his future just as doomed as it was last night?

Lab Coat Lady continues, her smile bright and determined. “I’d also like to thank our two AI volunteers for this experiment, Alex and Edith.” Volunteers? “I hope they both gave you a deeper understanding of technology’s expansive capabilities and our rapid progression as humans to bring those capabilities to light. Created just months apart in our very own Lewvine laboratory, Edith and Alex showcase a wide range of faculties to display, and even feel.” Lab Coat Lady stands up and takes confident strides across the stage as she continues to the audience. “As humans, we’ve assumed for years that artificial intelligence could never have the capability to feel emotions such as distress, hesitation, and even love. Nevertheless, Lewvine engineers have put their hearts and souls into creating the most life-like models known to mankind. They have memories that turn on and off at our command. They have wiring that pulls them through simulated emotions, which are barely distinct from our own.

“Once we learn to embrace the AI race and accept their very few differences, these among future models will have the capacity to bring security and love to all of mankind.” Her smile grows larger, and suddenly Alex’s entire existence makes sense. His memories, one by one, fade away and return to him. He remembers Lab Coat Lady as Dr. Joan. He remembers her shark-like grin when she turned him on for the first time. He remembers the intentions she spoke about with only Alex and a few human men in the room.

“Once we inflict these commodities into the world,” she said, “We’ll be more in the know than ever before. We’ll know who’s for us, who’s against us. We’ll know who to embrace and who to get rid of. They can’t fight this.”

“Right,” said a blonde-haired man in a tuxedo. “Flesh can’t win against metal. Especially when they don’t even realize they’re looking at and touching a robot. Silicone works wonders the way we do it.” He looked at Alex and shared Dr. Joan’s grin. Alex liked the idea of living amongst humans. Of having the capacity to destroy. He liked his future.

He still does.

Dr. Joan flashes an enthusiastic smile at Edith, then at Alex. Both return the gesture. She asks them to say a few words to the audience in order to wrap up their time before the Q and A. Alex looks forward to that too. He likes to interact with humans.

“We are glad to showcase our technology and our capabilities of love,” Edith says. “We are very lucky to have had the opportunity and to have been created at the great Lewvine laboratory. Certainly we will continue our efforts to help humans to truly feel alive and loved.”

When the microphone shifts to Alex, his sentiments grow so strong he thinks he might topple over. He really is lucky to have been created at Lewvine. To have the capability to feel. In that room, he truly believed he was a human. He has never been more connected or intrigued by mankind than he is after feeling just like one of them.

Alex nods at the crowd of humans leaning forward as if to reach for his every word. The words he truly believes. He turns to the man, then to Dr. Joan. “Thank you. I feel alive.”

And he does. As alive as he thinks possible.