Love Bytes by Meg Pokrass and Arlene Ang
When the teakettle whistled, I would join and vibrate. Together, kettle and I would release fumes. I was still curious about the neighbor. He had pretended to be a burnout, but now he was all bronzed and muscled. He was wearing electromagnetic fleece shorts, the kind they gave away at Burning Man, the sauna place that opened up when the ice cream store burned down. He was outside looking around the neighborhood as though there was something worth guarding.
The shorts looked better on him than they would on me, though I was not supposed to notice this type of information.
“Hey there,” the neighbor called out to me. My batteries were low, though I could hear him perfectly.
Robots were engineered to have only one emotion – stainless steel. I felt sorry for humans who had to deal with issues like being fat, and I hardly ever felt sorry for myself, because I wasn’t capacitated for self-pity. Because of this, they made us all work as telemarketers.
I worked in an exclusive telemarketing company, we sold private special-order fat removers to the wealthy and famous, people who were usually slim. My neighbor knew this and tried to take advantage of it. He liked celebrity gossip – I could tell because the mailman delivered his mail to me sometimes, and the magazines were scandal tabloids.
I was enabled to read 400,000 words per minute at full battery strength, but “Shit” was the cruise-controlled salutation I spurted. I had a slightly damaged chip which controlled my language skills and dropped my charge from time to time. More often now, I could not control this. Having internal damage was something uncommon for a fembot.
“Shit,” I said to him.
“Yo,” he said, and smiled. His tan was perfect, the way mannequin’s tans are.
He appeared the type of man who had been coddled as a child and given caramel apples daily, or else cotton candy. I registered him as the kind of person, who as a child, was constantly told “AW”.
Occasionally, when petting dogs at the park, coded misfires of “tenderness” would come over me, and my steel jaw would slacken and I would call 911 using my in-built antennae. When they answered, I would hang up, and they could never locate me. It was comforting, regardless.
My monochromatic, wireless slack jaw was useful at times though, and I could open bottles with it, and I could sing modern opera. Sometimes at night, I would serenade the neighbor through the wall, though he clearly could not hear me. Since my dog was gone, and his bed was just sitting there all furry – I would sing all soft jawed and high pitched and sometimes glasses would pop.
But the truth was, the neighbor was busy ogling a leggy girl in a red jumpsuit walking a terrier on a pink leash past our front lawns. I buzzed with frustration, and one of my eyes flipped off me and flew into the air bullet fast.
“Whoa!” he shouted, impressed or else terribly frightened.
I went to retrieve the eye, and walking right in front of him… allowed my body to vibrate on circular.
“Shit. Did you see where it landed?” I asked him. I couldn’t look into his moss green eyes.
“It went over the hedge,” he said, looking me up and down with a surge of adrenalin – something I could smell.
His eyes were human and beautiful, and I forgave that. I noticed that he had little hairs on his legs. They were dark, sprouting up like baby corn. My remaining eye was dripping oil, working overtime. When my batteries were low… resistance was down, and so many things could happen.
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Meg Pokrass lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughter. Originally an actress, her flash fiction stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in 3AM, The Pedestal, FRIGG, SmokeLong Quarterly, Keyhole, elimae, Juked, Wigleaf, Toronto Quarterly, Ghoti, and Pindeldyboz. Meg is a staff editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.
Arlene Ang serves as staff editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. She lives in Spinea, Italy with her robot vacuum. More of her writing may be viewed at http://www.facebook.com/l/94143;www.leafscape.org.
© 2010, Metazen. All rights reserved.
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Strong piece. I do like the possibilities of collaborative works. This one delivers.
Love the last line. Love the story.