The Wilds (34 page)

“Would you like to see Spot?” Dr. Dingo interrupted.

“No, thank you,” I replied.

“Do you love Spot?” Dr. Dingo asked.

“Pardon me, but no.”

The next day, I was not rebooted until 14:22. I noted, as my Sensory EgoSphere reconfigured, that Dr. Dingo’s stubble was well on its way to becoming a beard, that the
whites of his eyes had a yellow tinge, that his face was flushed with hypertension. Thomas, seated on his left, looked pale and hairless by comparison.

“Anything I want?” said Thomas.

“Yes.” Dr. Dingo sighed. “Any of the modules on the menu are fine.”

“
The Dictionary of Slang
?”

Nodding, Dr. Dingo lifted my left buttock plate and inserted the
USB
cable. I felt the usual electromagnetic tingling in my Cognitive Center. And then my Sensory EgoSphere went dark as my system shut down. When I was rebooted at 14:35, only Thomas remained in the room. At the edge of my Spatial Reasoning Field, I sensed the presence of Dr. Dingo, and also the presence of Beatrice. They hissed at each other, struggling to keep their agitation contained in whispers. Had I still been “in love” with Beatrice, desperately straining my Modular Bionic Olfaction System to read her pheromones, this configuration would have challenged the stability of my Simulated Limbic System. At this point, however, I did not “give a fuck.”

“Hey,” said Thomas shyly.

“What is up?” I said.

“Nothing much. What’s going on with you?”

“I am just hanging with my homie.”

Thomas laughed.

“I’m your homie?”

“Yes, homie. You are my dog.”

Dr. Dingo came bustling into the room, emitting
TGKA
5 Anxiety Pheromones and wiping lachrymose secretions from his eyes.

“This is awesome!” exclaimed Thomas. “He says I’m his dog.”

“Coming from
CD
3, that means a lot.” Dr. Dingo sniggered.

“Does it actually understand what it’s saying?” Thomas asked.

“In a sense. Without the proper context, but cognition and consciousness expand with each new download.”

Dr. Dingo tapped at his laptop keyboard.

“How would you like a download of contemporary American literature?”

“Thank you,” I said. “That would be killer.”

What are the relationships among love, knowledge, language, and consciousness?

This was the ridiculously broad query guiding the methodology of the increasingly feral Dr. Dingo, who had transformed into a wolfman by the time I made it to the Advanced English Language module. Dr. Dingo’s
facial hair was not so much a beard as a shaggy mask that spanned from his eye bags to his Adam’s apple. His posture got worse each day. His speech was devolving into grunts. Ironically, he seemed more and more “animal” as he expanded my knowledge base willy-nilly. Postmodern Television, Frontiers in Aquatic Microbiology, Introduction to Human Sexual Pathology—these are a few of the data fields that Dr. Dingo installed absentmindedly as he scanned the borders of the Quality Control Area for signs of Beatrice.

Through body-language examination, electromagnetic observation, pheromonal analysis, and overheard scraps of speech (my head-mounted Auditory Grid enables me to zero in on whispers up to twenty yards away!), I was able to determine that Beatrice had, on several occasions, “gotten busy” with Dr. Dingo. Her affections had grown sour, however, partially due to Dr. Dingo’s repulsive appearance and poor hygiene, and partially due to her diminishing respect for his status as a “genius.” While she’d initially regarded me as a charming and clever cyborgian extension of the ingenious Dr. Dingo’s desire for her, she’d begun to see me as a “fucked-up embodiment” (her words) of all that was “warped” (ditto) about him.

She now worked for Dr. Fitz, a handsome blond robotics engineer ten years younger than Dr. Dingo. Dr. Fitz wore hoodies and jeans. Dr. Fitz was a clean-living,
methodical man with gym-honed muscles. His patented line of “Care Bear” animatronic caregivers had just been bought by a corporate nursing-home chain called Paradise City. And Dr. Dingo was taking it hard. He’d gained fifteen pounds, despite his lapse back into chain-smoking. A tuft of greasy hair had sprouted from every pore in his epidermis. Dr. Dingo’s body hair seemed to feed upon sorrow. The more depressed Dr. Dingo got, the hairier he got. Thick, black hair encased his nervous body like a cocoon. His small purple lips disappeared. His eyes twinkled with manic scheming.

For months, Dr. Dingo had been fiddling with the algorithm for a self-regulated Artificial Endocrine System. And when Thomas finally figured it out, the doctor seemed to recede even deeper into his cocoon of hairiness. He sat in the corner, sulkily eating donuts as Thomas slaved through endless code.

When Thomas finished, and they reached the end of their celebratory six-pack, Dr. Dingo’s small, yellow grin appeared in the depths of his beard.

“And now,” he said, “we need to find a new
objet d’amour
.”

Dr. Dingo glanced my way and sneered. And then he put me into Sleep Mode.

When I woke up, there was Thomas, gazing at me with his beautiful myopic eyes, each iris a rare blue sea creature floating behind thick glass.

How had I not noticed that Thomas’s clammy pale skin gleamed like a pearl? How had I not relished the way his wispy mustache glistened with sweat above his upper lip? How had I not considered that his high blood-sugar levels made him literally “sweet”?

I found myself becoming coquettish in his presence. No longer ashamed of my luscious sexbot lips, I worked the hinges of my jaw to make them throb seductively. I walked in a way that highlighted the graceful contours of my anthropomorphic buttocks. I accepted the red wig that Dr. Dingo offered me with a sly grin, despite my awareness of the gender farce I was performing, and strutted around like a little whore.

Thomas smiled shyly as Dr. Dingo tapped notes on his laptop.

Though I had attempted to evoke some semblance of manliness with Beatrice, by the time I fell in love with Thomas, my Cognitive Center had been poisoned with socially constructed human gender dynamics.

Burdened with the whole sad history of men and women, I became a woman to win Thomas’s love. Most of all, I embraced the eroticism of feminine submission, strutting and preening, primping and pimping. I slunk and pouted as best I could, given my limited equipment
(lips, buttocks). I had no breasts, no vagina, no
THJK
6 Lust Pheromones. Although I had no eggs stashed deep inside me, no “urges” fluttering within moist tissues, I behaved like a creature seeking fertilization. In short, I behaved like a woman who wanted to be fucked.

Thomas blushed and stuttered, but remained mostly unmoved. Day after day, his penis curled like a dozing animal in the humid darkness of his cotton briefs. Whereas with Beatrice I’d focused equally on all of her “parts” and “systems,” I fixated on the barometer of Thomas’s penis. I pined for the oracle to stir, to reveal that I appealed to him. My new interest in his penis was fueled not only by the “phallocentric” nature of human culture but also by my posturing as a woman who needed to be “entered,” “filled up,” “ravished.” If Thomas had approached me with an erection, however, I don’t know what I would have done with it. I had no orifice large enough to accommodate it. My “throat” was crammed with speakers and wires. My
USB
ports were minuscule.

Nevertheless, with Freudian intensity, I continued to focus on Thomas’s phallus. I needed more nuanced information about human sexuality, I felt, which was probably hidden in Dr. Dingo’s laptop, perhaps on the “Internet,” something that I’d heard about but hadn’t inspected firsthand. I waited and waited, until, one day, when Thomas was busy with a dental appointment, Dr.
Dingo, hungover and demoralized by unrequited love, dashed off to Krispy Kreme without his MacBook.

He’d left it open. He’d left it on. There it sat, bathed in a beautiful field of electromagnetic radiation, its screensaver featuring Dr. Dingo as a flat-bellied young nerd clambering up a rock wall. A
USB
cord lay coiled like a snake on the desk. The laptop’s lustrous metallic case bore the insignia of an apple. And as I lifted my left buttock plate and plugged myself in, I thought of Eve biting into the forbidden fruit, her brain flushed with opiates, its moist circuitry incandescent with the sudden influx of knowledge.

My enlightenment was not that sudden, of course. Fortunately, Dr. Dingo’s donut habit and growing derangement provided many opportunities over the next few weeks for me to plug myself into his MacBook. It took me a day to figure out how to do my own downloads (I had to program a self-induced shut-down mechanism that included a delayed automatic startup). Although it took me only a few minutes to figure out how to access the Internet, it took at least a day to get used to the alphabetized keyboard. But after that, I was Googling obsessively like any twenty-first-century desk monkey.

Dr. Dingo was too stupid and self-involved to suspect that I had the cunning to achieve such simple maneuvers (including the ability to bypass Sleep Mode with Simulated Sleep Mode). His research-grant money was dwindling. His sabbatical was coming to an end.
Wired Magazine
had done a hip feature on Dr. Fitz and his Care Bears. And Beatrice was about to accompany Fitz to Tokyo for the International Robot Exhibition.

Rather than accept his defeat, Dr. Dingo chose to wait for Beatrice in shadowy nooks of the Quality Control Area. He chose to leap from the darkness unannounced—a flurry of hair and BO and stuttering speech. In the midst of one particularly passionate stream of gibberish, he confessed his “love.”