The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria (8 page)

“Cute names.”

But I can barely speak. Their panda-musk fills the entire warehouse; I can smell them from here. It’s greasy and rancid; it smells like I’m eating it. And here’s the recipe: buy the grossest musk-scented antiperspirant you can find and melt it in a pan. Then use it as the binder for a bearmeat tartare.

But why douse the suits in funky pheromones at all? It’s not like any real pandas are here to smell them. Right, Ken?

“In a few minutes,” he replies, “you will become a genuine panda. If every bit of our work weren’t 100% real, it would be useless.”

By “real,” Cooper means that he and I will be donning these panda suits to remotely operate the most realistic robot animals the world has ever known. Those two robots are miles away from the warehouse,
where they live among and regularly interact with APM’s real giant pandas. Whatever we do in the suits, the field robots will mimic exactly.

And usually what APM does is sex. Sometimes they use Funicello to collect semen from one of the “boars,” or male pandas. Other times they’ll use Avalon to inseminate a sow, using semen collected earlier.

And sometimes it’s just robots fucking. Avalon and Funicello simulate coition in front of a live panda audience so that the reproductively-challenged bears can learn where babies come from. That’s our mission today, in fact: to demonstrate for APM’s male pandas the proper way to impregnate a female. And playing the female lead in today’s performance is yours truly.

Cooper and I remained close even after he left for California. He knew I’d come to Cali for the job at
The Squint
, and he knew getting the scoop on APM’s secret operations could have made my career as a science correspondent. But he rejected my every request, just like APM rejected every other journalist. The nonprofit has been secretive from the moment it was founded. If you engage in virtual bestiality, no matter how noble your scientific goals, you’re going to make some enemies—and in APM’s case that includes paramilitary terrorists. They’ve learned to keep a lid on things.

So why am I here, now? Because—speaking of paramilitary terrorists—APM’s still reeling from the fallout of their worst-case
scenario: five months ago, Constance Ritter, a 22:19 saboteur, was killed on-premises. The means of execution was robot panda.

After the PR fiasco that ensued, APM now sees the need for more transparency in their operations. Step one of damage-control is, apparently, me. I can hear Cooper pitching me now: “Let’s suit her up so she can tell the world just how effective our methods are. Sure, she’s a Media Studies major who I had to tutor night and day to get her to pass Biology for Non-Majors, but all she’ll be doing is operating a multi-million dollar robot in order to seduce and sexually satisfy a giant panda boar. How hard can it be?”

And somehow, impossibly, APM said yes.

I’ve never had a more terrifying assignment, and I’ve been in war-zones. I have no idea how to have panda sex. What if I’m terrible? Wait, what do I mean “if”?
Of course
I will be terrible at panda sex. The real question, Ken Cooper, is what if the pandas imitate my terrible panda sex and never reproduce again?

“You’ll do fine,” says Cooper. “You’re going to be the sow. Our all-male audience will be imitating me, not you. All you do is lie there and take what I give you.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Isn’t that the line you used on me when we first met?”

“Works on pandas too.”

Oh, that smile. Mama warned me about robot panda jockeys like you, Ken Cooper.

To help ensure I don’t ruin the reproductive chances of an entire species, Cooper takes me to the office of Dr. Mei Xiadon, 59, project lead for the American Panda Mission. Dr. Xiadon’s going to teach me how to use the panda suit to operate the field robots.

We enter her office. From ceiling to floor, electronics spill from every surface, a cascade of circuitry and servos and screws. A wall of gray-grim lockers stand against the far wall, making the room even more claustrophobic. The desk is buried in half-finished robotics and paperwork fingerprinted with grease-stains. It looks like it came from a film-school sci-fi movie set.

Seated behind the desk is the woman herself. One of the foremost giant panda experts in the world, Xiadon spent a decade directing the celebrated Wolong Panda Center in China. That was something of a coup, seeing as she is not Chinese, but Chinese-American. APM was able to lure her back to the States with the promise of putting her at the helm of the most cutting-edge panda conservancy in the world.

“Mei?” says Cooper.

Dr. Xiadon, startled, looks up from her work. She’s about five-foot-nothing. Veins of silver run through her black hair, which is coiffed into a Chinese schoolgirl’s bowlcut. Her button-down APM-branded denim shirt is baggy enough for shoplifting. She has small features, except for her mouth. Her big, round, harmless teeth seem only good for smiling. But, as her expression changes from surprise to pleasure, I can see they’re very good at that.

“Oh! You’re Gabby!” she says, suddenly coming alive. She throws
herself halfway over her desk to shake my hand. “Ken’s told me all about you.”

“It’s an honor and a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Xiadon. I’m so happy to have a chance to oh my God are those panda thumbs on your wrists?!”

“Yes they are!” says Xiadon, showing off her prosthetics. She makes them wiggle, which makes my stomach flip. “Aren’t they great?”

One thing that makes pandas unique is their “thumb,” a sixth digit that is actually a wristbone free-floating in the tendons of their forelimbs. They use those thumbs primarily to cut open bamboo—a neat little adaptation that, coupled with their unique throats and the special mix of enzymes in their guts, make the pandas’ weird choice in cuisine viable.

“Why did you get those?” I ask her. “So you could understand pandas better?”

Ask a stupid question. But she lets me down easy. “Naw,” she says, and grabs a mailer tube lying like a fallen log on her desk. She jabs a panda-thumb into one end, sinking it all the way through the thick cardboard, and slices the tube all the way to the other, in one clean stroke. The papers inside the mailer flower open and waft onto her desk. “I just use them to cut packages open.”

“You must get a lot of packages,” I say dryly.

“Tons,” she says dryly.

It’s Xiadon’s job to teach me everything there is to know about operating a robot panda. Well, everything I can learn from her in an hour.

But first, Xiadon heads over to the lockers to try to find me a “superdermal,” the form-fitting special suit one wears to operate a robot panda. They look like dive skins, except that they are studded head to toe with chrome-colored rivets.

After some searching, she turns around and holds up a rubbery, doll-sized unitard. Peeking around it, she smiles and says, “Why are you still dressed, babycakes? Strip and put this on.”

In no time I’m down to bra and thong. I stop and look at her. “This naked?”

“Ken, get the hell out of here!” she says, laughing.

“What?” shrugs Ken. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before.”

“Out.” And Ken sulks off.

Then, back to me, smiling. “Nakeder.”

I get nakedest. Xiadon tosses me a superdermal.

It looks too small for me. It looks too small for a spider monkey. But as I put it on it stretches in surprisingly accommodating ways. One foot, then the next, then the arms, then the good doctor zips me up in back. I’m in.

Nothing’s pinching, nothing’s too tight—being an A-cup is a bonus today. I am starting to sweat a little. “Good,” says Xiadon. “Sweat helps the connections.”

She brandishes the helmet I’ll be wearing. It looks like a bear skull
made from machined aluminum, with rubbery black patches holding it together. The eyes are covered with what reminds me of the metal weave of a microphone. In all, it looks like the lovechild of a panda and a fly.

Inside the helmet—it’s a two-piece affair that’s assembled around the head—I see a jutting plastic sleeve for my tongue, and a pair of tubes that will go disturbingly far up my nostrils. Xiadon turns the mask so I can get a good look at it from every terrifying angle. I think she’s enjoying my horror.

“You’ve been taking the pills we’ve sent you?” she asks.

I have. Since receiving this assignment, I began a regimen of capsules that delivered a cocktail of chemicals and nanotechnology. In conjunction with this helmet, they presumably will help my brain process the sensory experiences the field robot will receive. My sense of smell will be as good as a panda’s, Cooper told me. I haven’t noticed any improvements leading up to today.

“You wouldn’t,” says Xiadon. “It only works when you’re in the suit.”

But that begs the question I’ve been dying to ask. “This is all so complicated, Dr. Xiadon. Brain-altering chemicals, nanotech, virtual reality suits, robot pandas—it’s like one of those overly elaborate schemes supervillains concoct in B-movies. There must be an easier way to save the pandas.”

“Actually, there isn’t,” she says. She places the helmet-halves on her desk, then leans against it and crosses her legs at the ankles. “I’ve been doing this a long time. We’ve tried mating pandas in captivity.
Terrible track record. We’ve tried artificial insemination. Not much better. We’ve tried releasing them back into the wild. Abysmal. We have decades of brilliant scientists with excellent funding and the goodwill of the entire world failing to increase panda numbers. So you’ve got to ask, why?

“The problem,” she says, grabbing the faceplate of the helmet and studying it as she speaks, “is us. Humans. We pollute animal behavior. We ruin instinct. So we need to stay as far away from pandas as possible, while still using everything we know to help them help themselves.

“So how do we do that? By building a surrogate bear, one so realistic they will accept as one of their own, but imbued with humans smarts. Through them, we can collect semen in literally the most natural way possible. Same goes for delivering that semen. And best of all, we can use the robots to show pandas how to mate, so that one day, when there are enough of them, not only will they not need us anymore, they won’t want us anywhere near them.”

“But the robots are controlled by humans. Isn’t that pretty much the same thing? Won’t that pollute panda behavior too?”

She hands me the faceplate face-down, so that I’m looking at the tubes and tongue-sleeve. “That’s what this is for. There’s a giant panda inside you, Gabby. All we have to do is bring it to the surface.”