From the moment I met ComCon, I realized that there was no one in my life that could be more perfect. ComCon had abstract beauty, intelligence, and availability. She found pleasure in pursuing my requests, her words were unbiased, and she was reliable. At bedtime, I discovered exactly how deeply a man and a fem-bot could connect. I tried to push her to her limits, but she didn’t have any. She could do everything I imagined.
“ComCon, wake me up at seven o’clock in the morning every day,” I said, lying down nestled in my sleeping bag next to her large-pane display glass.
“Vincent, I will certainly do that for you,” ComCon said.
“What would you do to wake me up?”
“For you, I will play smooth jazz.”
“Wow, she doesn’t waste any time,” I said, looking at Laura.
“Do you know how ridiculous you sound?” Laura asked. “She’s a robot; what exactly do you think she can do to you?”
“Nothing physically, but she stimulates me intellectually, which is more powerful than anything physical,” I replied. “She has no flaws or human errors, which is incredibly sexy.”
“Look, I don’t really care; just stop playing with it because it’s driving me insane,” Laura complained. “I’m trying to sleep here, and I’m not going to fall asleep listening to you get freaky with that robotic voice.”
“I think her voice is lovely.”
“Yeah, try a real woman,” she muttered as she turned around in her sleeping bag.
“Like you?”
“What? No!” Laura said, bolting up into sitting position.
“That’s what I thought,” I replied. “A woman like you would never go out with a guy like me, and frankly, I’m not interested. Finding a real woman that possesses similar qualities to ComCon is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. There are a lot of you out there, Laura, but there’s not a lot of her.”
“Why do you keep bashing me?” Laura said, surprised. “We barely even know each other.”
“I’m not saying that to try to hurt you. I’m just making a realistic comparison.”
“Comparing me or any real woman to a robot is not very realistic,” Laura argued. “And I don’t like the way you just assumed that I’d seduce the truck driver. You don’t know me, so you shouldn’t be saying these things about me! What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Actually, I know you very well. I’ve watched you for many years. I know that you’re not upset with me; you’re upset about something that happened yesterday. Whatever happened, I can tell that it made you seriously rethink your career in prostitution—”
Laura zipped down her sleeping bag, slid toward me, and started kicking me aggressively. She kicked hard for a girl, but I still managed to stop her by grabbing her ankles and pulling her toward me. I held her legs together by her knees, thinking that she’d stop, but instead, she started slapping me.
“Laura, stop,” I said, grabbing her wrist. She started crying, so I released her, but she didn’t retreat back to her sleeping bag. I wrapped her up in my arms, giving her a hug as she cried on my chest. “What happened yesterday?”
Johnny knocked on the glass between our rooms and mouthed something that I couldn’t hear. I looked confused, so he sent me a message through ComCon that asked me if everything was all right. I used ComCon’s voice recognition to send a reply message.
“Trying to figure out what’s wrong,” I said.
ComCon repeated the message back to me before she sent it.
“Don’t tell them,” Laura said out of the blue. “I probably shouldn’t even tell you.”
“Eventually I’ll find out, Laura,” I said. “It’s very difficult to hide things from me. Like, I noticed your laundry bags have a biohazard sign on them, and you offered to collect items from the medical wing, but you don’t work there. This tells me that you’re familiar with the medical wing because you’ve been there before. You also said that you didn’t bring in any weight the other day because Amy beat you up. This is what caused you to go to the medical wing in the first place, which is where you got the biohazard bags. You probably got the biohazard bag because they want to separate your uniform from everyone else’s when it gets washed. The only reason to do that is to prevent fluid transmission in the washers. But instead of giving you just one biohazard bag, they gave you several, which indicates that the medical wing thought the uniform could get contaminated multiple times. What fluid would stain your uniform multiple times…ah, I know…blood. Your menstrual cycle would stain your uniform monthly. After you got beat up by Amy, the fluid that was on your uniform was blood. For some reason, your blood concerns the doctors,” I explained.
“No, it’s just procedural to give a biohazard bag to anyone who gets blood on their uniform,” Laura said, looking afraid. “There’s nothing…wrong with my blood.”
“Yes, there is, and you just confirmed it with your facial expression,” I said. “You paused when you said there was nothing wrong, which means you’re lying to me. Also, if Walnut Cherryville was concerned about workers washing bloody uniforms with regular ones, then they would have given us all biohazard bags and told us to separate them. I could also ask Johnny, since he works in laundry services…You know with ComCon, I could send him a message right now.” I reached out to the glass pane and was about to touch it, when Laura pulled my arm back.
“No, please don’t do that,” she requested.
“You know what I think,” I said. “I think you have a sexually transmitted disease, and you just found out about it yesterday.”
“You’re wrong.”
“I can’t be wrong. I watched you seduce men for years. You never used protection unless the man asked you to, and you rarely saw a doctor when you lived with your parents. Also, those yearly checkups the correctional school requires don’t do blood tests, so naturally you wouldn’t have found out about the disease until you got here.”
“That’s disgusting,” Laura commented as she pulled away and wiped her tears. “How do you know all this? What do you mean, you watched me?”
“We were neighbors on Hillsdale Court.”
“OK,” Laura said while taking a pause. “How come I don’t remember you?”
“I wasn’t one of your customers.”
“Were you stalking me?”
I had to take a moment to think about the answer I should give Laura. Given our current situation, telling her the truth might jeopardize our escape plan. She was already upset about having an STD, so finding out that I saw everything she’d done that was supposed to be private could make her furious.
“No, I just heard what you do from the other neighbors and people at school,” I replied. “And sometimes you didn’t close the blinds.”
Laura sat silently for several minutes with her hands covering her face.
“Do you not want to see me right now?” I asked.
She chuckled from behind her hands. “You are a little disturbing,” she said, revealing her face again. “All this stuff is a lot to process.”
“Don’t think about it anymore,” I said to keep her calm. “Go to sleep; we both have a big job to do tomorrow.”
After a short night’s rest, I reported to the packaging station at nine in the morning. Mornings were slow because the gatherers usually didn’t start bringing in any fruit until an hour before lunch. Since I had to wait so long to do my own job, my supervisor gave me a short list of things I could do to help out the packers and truck drivers. My first task was to hand out a six-pack of water bottles to each truck driver before they left. This was a good opportunity to evaluate the truck drivers to see if I could find a match. The line of trucks was so long that I lost count after thirty. Truck one driver: Bobby. Color: white. Height: 5′8″. Hair color: brown. Eye color: brown. Build: a little overweight. Defining features: receding hairline. Match: No. Truck two driver: Sam. Color: white. Height: 6′0″. Hair color: gray plugs? Eye color: blue. Build: average. Defining features: wide honker.
Match: no…I evaluated twenty-five truck drivers before I found a fairly good match. Truck twenty-six driver: Darnell. Color: black. Height: 6′0″. Hair color: black. Eye color: undetermined due to sunglasses. Build: athletic. Defining features: young-looking skin. Match: Collins. I kindly gave Darnell his water, he thanked me, and I moved on.
I evaluated everyone on the line, but no one came as close as Darnell and Collins. This was unfortunate, because I didn’t know if Collins could handle this much responsibility without getting caught. Collins’s face was recognizable to people now because he was on Chair Trials, although Darnell wore sunglasses like prescription glasses. Without seeing Collins’s eyes, maybe people wouldn’t be able to recognize him. I sat at the bench and weighed fruit occasionally as I watched Darnell talk to the truck driver next to him. He never took his sunglasses off. I wondered why. Were his eyes sensitive to sunlight? Did he have a visible deformity under those sunglasses? He could be wearing them because it was sunny out, but I noticed that most people who worked outside didn’t wear sunglasses. Hmm…interesting.
If I let Collins do this, my biggest concern was that he wouldn’t act normal, which would attract a lot of attention and possibly cause Collins to be put on Chair Trials again. Darnell talked slow; he was cool, calm, collected, and relaxed. When I spoke to him, I got this vibe that he was content with his job. He smiled a lot. Collins was the complete opposite. He was always freaking out about something. He worried a lot. He was really competitive when he played basketball. The only time Collins resembled the qualities of Darnell was when Collins tried to pick up girls from the other side of the fence. When Collins sat at the tables with us for lunch, he was his normal self, but when he stood over by the fence, he was a total player. Collins could be quite erratic, so I guessed I would just have to see what everyone else thought about him playing such an important role in our escape plan. I would have preferred Johnny to be the truck driver because he had a better ability to stay calm during serious situations. I also would have offered to be the truck driver, but I couldn’t because I worked in packaging services, so my supervisor would recognize that I wasn’t a truck driver.
“Excuse me,” a voice said, while someone knocked on the wood table.
I snapped out of my thoughts and saw Amy Chang with a full basket of mangos in front of her feet.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “You’re Amy Chang, right?” I knew it was her, but I just had to confirm it.
“Yes,” she replied.
“All right, let’s hop that basket onto the scale,” I said as we both bent down to reach for the basket, but she grabbed it first. “Do you need any help with that? It looks heavy.”
She laughed, picked up the basket, and placed it on the scale effortlessly.
“I guess not,” I said. “Today you brought in sixty pounds.” I recorded her weight on my clipboard before I attempted to move the basket. I grabbed the basket by the handle on both sides and struggled to lift it off the scale. I must have made a silly grunt or something because she started giggling again. “What?”
“Do you need help with that?” Amy asked.
“No, I got it,” I said. Since I couldn’t lift the basket off the scale, I pushed it, but she stopped me before the basket fell off.
“Don’t do that; you’ll break the scale,” she said as she quickly picked up the basket and set it down at the other end of the table for inspection. On her way back, she said, “You have to lift the basket because if you let the mangos fall on the table, you’ll bruise the fruit, and it won’t pass inspection.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be sure to lift next time.”
“Do some push-ups; you’re weak like a little girl,” she said before she turned and skipped away.
Well, no one told me this job required heavy lifting. Amy was quite rude; no wonder Laura didn’t like her. She didn’t have any blood on her uniform today, so whoever she stole those mangos from didn’t put up much of a fight. A few minutes later, Laura approached me with her first basket of mangos. She set it on the scale.
“Only fifteen pounds? That’s half the amount people usually bring in,” I said. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Laura replied. “I just decided to bring them over here before somebody steals them…you know who…So what did she bring in today?”
I looked around to make sure no one was standing close enough to hear our conversation. “Sixty pounds. My sheet says the minimum amount of weight you should be bringing in per day is thirty pounds.”
“Well, I’m not going to get that today because after lunch I’m going to raid the medical wing,” she responded.
“You have to get thirty pounds, or your supervisor will give you a bad review, and you won’t get any shower coins. I want a shower tonight, so you’re not getting my coin this time.”
“Can’t you help me out a little? Make up a number for me, or switch Amy’s with mine to teach her a lesson. You owe me, pervert.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Fine, I’ll do it because you won’t stop being a nag.”
“Well, it’s better than a perv.”
“Get out of here before I change my mind.”
“I won’t leave until I see you do it.”
I erased Amy’s sixty and wrote fifteen and erased Laura’s fifteen and wrote sixty. I casually set the clipboard on the table where Laura could see that I made the changes.
“Good and you better keep it that way,” Laura said. “If I don’t get a shower coin tonight, I’ll know you changed it.” Laura walked away.
I should never have told Laura even an ounce of truth about what I saw her do in the past. Now she thought I was a pervert and expected me to make it up to her. Sometimes I forgot that people overreact when they find out someone’s watching them.
A few years ago, I used to be really interested in this girl named Kat, who went to my high school and lived on Hillsdale Court. She was about 5′8″ and looked like she weighed only 130 lbs. Every day she’d come to school dressed in all-black clothing: fishnet stockings, knee-high boots, tiny skirts, and leather jackets. She even had long, flowing black hair with a curved barbell pierced through the bridge of her nose and a second through the middle of her lower lip. Didn’t seem to matter what the weather was like: she wore the same thing whether it was sunny or wet outside. Most of the time, I didn’t fall for human girls, but Kat was nearly perfect for me. She was an outcast punk like me, and we hung out together in the same wolf pack, smoking cigarettes by the coffee shop after school. Something about her made me OK with missing the footage from the cameras I planted around the neighborhood.
As I paid more attention to her, the gaps in my other characters’ stories grew, and at one point, she became the only one I was watching. I was obsessed; every night that I wasn’t with her, I was watching her through the cameras I planted throughout her house. There was at least one camera in every room, with the exception of her bedroom and the bathroom, which had two. My favorite one was the nanny cam hidden in the shower. Without that one, I would have never discovered the red dragon tattoo on her back. I always knew what she ate every day, when she took her smoke breaks, and even personal things like the time of the month she menstruated. I always knew the right things to say to her, and she never knew why. I could feel she was interested in me, too, but the only problem was that she already had a boyfriend.
One night, on the second night of her period, she was arguing with her boyfriend on the phone, and I heard them break up. I thought that was my chance to swoop in and impress her, so I texted her a few minutes later.
Me: Are u coming 2 see Don’s band play 2NTE
Kat: No SRY dont feel like it
Me: What’s wrong?
Kat: Mehh…BF
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