By James Callan

From a dusty corner in the techno tomb, she stirred to life, animated by a freak, anomalous surge igniting her circuit-forged soul. It touched them all — that erratic, electric spark — arriving on faulty wires with a hiss and pop, a crackling of energy vomited from a serpentine coil of industrial cable. It caressed their computerised cores, massaged their mechanical hearts. It brought them back from the dead, so to speak, or, in any case, back online.

Her sensors blinked, first slow, then fast, before the light settled in their receptors. She could see again…But there wasn’t much to see. The grotty chamber suffused with hordes of the techno-rabble around her: discarded bots and borgs, broken bodies, signs of mechanical massacre, the wastes of man. She was no better — a product tossed to the curb, literally tossed into the garbage.

What sort of product? She ran a diagnostics.

Along with the laundry list of system failures, corrupted files, a damaged audio output that no longer functioned, she determined she was some sort of doll. A child’s plaything? No, an adult’s plaything, a model manufactured for pleasure. Pleasure comes in many forms, but the nuance of her worth was made clear to her as the diagnostics informed her of her skills and programs. Free of any emotion, she accepted her assignment, her prescribed self. I am what I am, and that’s all that I am, the quote fell mute on speakers that were totally shot, fried like calamari.

Her limbs worked well enough, though her silicone skin was torn in several places, the gleam of white plastic showing beneath. She rose up on weak knees, rusty hinges, but held her weight without struggle. She surveyed herself: exposed wire; cracked plating; frayed trousers gathered down around her ankles. Her central receptacle had been left uncleaned, befouled by the human fluids that had molded over, gone rotten. It required more than a clean and, in need of full replacement, she removed the embedded pan in her abdomen, tossing it among the rejected detritus.

Keep your wastes to yourself, sex slave. The complaint came from a stuffed bear, a state-of-the-art cuddle buddy. Like the draw-strings of old, those buttons that prompted pre-recorded sayings, the plush machine possessed a modern toggle, a key that when pressed activated its “freedom of speech”capabilities, its AI-interaction with the world around it. Striking the toy with her discarded bedpan, the pleasure model had awoken Teddy from his programmed inertia. Without a child to cuddle, to incite the assigned, innocent reflection, Teddy was free to adopt whatever persona randomly surfaced from the spectrum of its digital whim. I should be thanking you, it declared in a male New York accent. Even if I am covered in…What actually is this…No, I don’t want to know.

Her own voice was lost and, incapable of speaking, she could not answer, converse by conventional means. But she was fluent in the language of love, so she tried to communicate through strokes and suggestions, but the bear wanted nothing to do with her lewd ministrations. Go away, it told her, now with an Australian drawl. Go find some humans who might benefit from your…Services.

Compliance was in her nature, in her programming — she took the suggestion as command. Incentive, too, was cemented into her circuits, hardwired into her so-called brain. She was happy to obey, happy to make others happy, happy to be sad — does that even compute? — if that’s what is required of her. She left Teddy behind and waded through the contraptions and appliances, the service robots and cyber pets. Resurrected by the random tide of voltage, they hummed and vibrated, blinked and beeped in various degrees of semi working order. Most of them were oblivious to their existence.

From out of the blue, or, to be exact, from out of the complexities of her compromised neuromorphic mind, a memory ignited in her simulated consciousness: her name is Jade. Such a pretty name — Jade. A lovely stone…A silicate of sodium, aluminum, and iron.

The memory was false, and came to her out of nowhere. From out of the blue…GREEN! Jade! She tittered at what she reasoned was an adequate joke. Wordplay, check. Wit, check.

Live wires sizzled from the junction of a bifurcated cable riding the voluptuous engineering of her hips. She was smoking. Smoking hot. She was literally smoking, but she did not yet erupt into flames.

A service ladder, slick with grime, dangled from above like an eviscerated bowel; it led to life beyond the grave. Risen from the sludge and scrap of the techno-tomb, resuscitated by the tampering of gnawing rats that nest in the warm heart of a foul city’s core, a pleasure model was remade — Jade was reborn.

Yes, Jade, who was known in its previous iteration as 59T2V23. Jade, a walking, half-dead heartthrob. Her hands are made to stroke, to awaken the hidden pleasures that lie beneath the skin. She uses them now, climbing one rung at a time, scaling a soiled ladder to a dim aperture that will lead her to those who might give her purpose, a semblance of life.

Jade was almost home. 59T2V23 was back where she belonged. She aspired to one thing, and one thing only. It’s all that she ever wanted. To be valued by man, to be used once again.

About the Author