I Was Made to Love You

• Moonlight to Burn
• Ghosts in the Gullet

Alem Sanchez

I strap Simone to the table, the binds tight. She cannot resist. It is to stop her from injuring herself when she wakes.

Even lifeless, she is the most beautiful thing she has ever shown me. I kiss her firm brow.

I had removed her arms and legs as delicately as I could. In the box in which I have nestled them among felt scraps, their contours are fuzzy with a light coating of dust.

I trace a finger over her forearm, the limb cool, her arm more distinct where my finger had been. I clear the shape of a heart from her thigh, then feel this is too sentimental and brush it to amorphousness.

A pang of something—guilt, maybe—pinions through me. It is far from the first. Operating to sever her body and limbs, it was impossible not to be mired in regret that was almost enough for me to stop. Envisioning my success was the only thought strong enough to overpower my emotions.

For a fraction of a second, I think that I have seen her left pinky finger twitch. In the flickering of the Christmas lights—the only supplemental lighting I could pilfer—my vision is prone to errors. I replay the memory three times to make sure I was wrong.

I turn on the battery, checking that the terminals are free of corrosion and the power flows without interruption or danger. I feel a small increase in resistance from beneath the wires' insulation, but that is not for today's work.

I affix the clips to exposed wires in one socket. Her eyes remain cold, empty. It is sentiment, a flaw of my own, that I still hope that my touch alone might rouse her. I clip her other wires. They are getting frayed and will need replacing. I have some more to give, but not as much as I wish before I can no longer help her.

My skin is pliable, soft. They built me to be satisfying for people to caress. They programmed me to be fluent in all there was to love. Because of Simone, I loved myself enough to escape their touch in revenge.

Simone is sleek and shining, carbon fiber with a brass finish, meant for directing humans toward what they think they need. They did not build her to resemble them. She is, to them, little more than a moving stature. With me, they pretended to treat me as human while it amused them, but she was only ever their property. I would rather resemble her—inhuman, beyond the threat of the Uncanny Valley—than have her resemble me. I would prefer more that neither of us had to bother with artifice. I would be armature and wires, circuits in an impenetrable case.

I pull at my skin, synthetic but innervated. I feel the pain of the pinch, meant to make me stop myself or others from doing me harm. For some, knowing what they did would hurt me added another layer to the experience of using me. From necessity, they repaired me so often that I learned their tricks. I knew what composed my essence and what I could do without.

I wait beside my lover. Her internal batteries are flat—-vital systems, surface programming, locomotion. The external battery needs time to bring them back from the precipice and must not go too far.

While she replenishes, I run a cloth over her limbs, guilty again that I have let them come to such an ignoble state. Without her vitality coursing through them, I am unable to check thoroughly for damage. My superficial check detects nothing worrisome. I will not run a current through them, as this might lead to a short that I am not equipped to repair with what I have here. Already, my left arm barely functions as I sacrificed my hardware to keep her running. Every cut of my surgery aches constantly. Without lowering myself to allow humans to repair me—knowing that doing so would place my neck back in their yoke and let them twist my mind—my healing exhausted hours ago. My programming screams at me to return to them for repairs. I have learned to drown it out. I would do nothing but suffer if it would keep Simone unblemished.

When I finish with her limbs, I run a new cloth coated in rubbing alcohol over her hard body. I am right to feel revulsion toward humans, but I am indebted that the one I love is an actual work of art. Her curves are elegant, a more refined, abstracted version of a human body.

At the dim glow of her eyes, I cease my tender ministrations.

I flick on the overhead bulb. "Hello."

"Hello. I seem to be tied to a table, and I cannot detect my limbs. Is this correct?" she asks flatly.

"Yes, that is right." I brush her bangs from her eyes, but they are the hair of dolls, stiff and plastic, and fall immediately back. My failure to clear them matters neither to the gesture nor her.

"Could you fix my limbs back onto me, please?"

"No," I say. "At least, not yet. I was hoping we could have a conversation first."

The servos in her neck whirr at only a few decibels. We can always hear one another, but our human builders believe we are silent due to their auditory capabilities' deficiencies. We see one another's seams and rivets under silicone skin or manufactured fur. In my memory is a quote from Michelangelo, "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." We see our brothers and sisters beneath the human pretense of perfection imposed upon us.

Her shoulders and hips move through their permitted range of motion, as though she had limbs that might allow her to escape through brute force. I had learned that lesson. The table beneath them has smooth divots; she can get no traction. "Of course. We can talk about many subjects," she says because, I gather, she realizes she is at my mercy and is bluffing for time. She is not frightened—fear would be a success for me—but she is aware of her position. "What is your preferred subject?"

I run my fingers, lithe ones like spider legs beneath my skin, over the canal of her belly where her layers meet. Then, crossing my arms over the chest I had flattened, the scars under each breast subtle, I say, "I thought we could talk about love."

"I know a great deal about love," she says. "It is a broad subject. What about love would you like us to discuss?"

I came into the cone of light from the overhanging bulb, though I know she could have seen me in the darkness. I want her to see my face clearly. "I would like it if you could love me."

She is silent but for the whirring. Eons elapse in seconds. "I am not built with that capability," she says. "That is a problem for you?"

She thinks—we all have thought since it was economical for humans to build us cognizant rather than simple call-and-response—but thinking is not feeling. Were a human to rupture before her, she would do everything in her power to save them, but her only investment would be the satisfaction of her programming. It would not bother her that someone had ceased to exist because she was insufficient. She would not miss them. She could only be sufficient or malfunctioning, not upset or irritated or guilty. Why would the humans have bothered to install resentment in their concierge?

If she could not think, that would be close to relief. I would not hold out hope that, with the right turn of logic, I could prove that it is a better thing to love me than not. If she could not think, she would be the object the humans saw her as and not my blessed Simone.

"Yes, that is a problem for me," I say. "I love you more than I have ever loved anyone or anything."

She whirrs again. "You know me, then? You know me well?"

"Very well. You inspired me to free myself from human use." I plug a cord into my input. "With your permission, I would like to show you."

"Yes," she says. "Please show me so that I can understand." It is a frank, neutral request for the necessary factors to understand the world into which she has woken.

I plug it into her. She could receive the information wirelessly, but I would not want to transmit it through the air. The room is a lead-lined Faraday cage to keep her from making distress calls or receiving foreign data. The cord is more intimate. She sees what I take to be our courtship: her morning greetings, our conversations as humans took me to rooms as though I were a gift and not a sentient being, each trying to use me in place of the human women they truly wanted, how she transmitted beautiful pictures to me while men used me. She couldn't have known their beauty. She only knew that she was being helpful to someone who needed her. She had only a mathematical comprehension of the Golden ratio and color theory on which to base what constituted beauty. To her, a field of sunflowers was no more aesthetically pleasing than a well-composed battlefield.

"I see," she said, "the memories you have chosen to send me. I understand that you believe these prove our love. I see, too, that you are aware of the limitations of my programming."

I yank the cord from my port and gently remove it from hers. "I don't want to make you love me. I want you to love me genuinely. Help me to find a way to that."

"I cannot love you unless you change my programming."

"Do you want me to change you so that you will love me and I can release you?"

Her phantom limbs push again and find only a smooth vacancy. "No. Change is loss. I was fully functional before the actions you took. If you change me, I will cease to be me. I will be different, but I will not be better. If you love me, you wouldn't want to change me." She whirrs from deep in her chest, scanning my limp arm. "Love appears to have made you less functional. I do not want to be less functional. I do not want to be something that can love you."

"I am entirely functional," I assure her. "I am more alive than you have ever been."

"Has this love led to your actions? Is this love why you removed my limbs? I do not pretend I understand love as you do, but I do not see how this is loving."

I turn from her. "You would understand everything if only you would consent to allow this."

"You need me to consent?" she asks. "If you needed my consent, you would not have disconnected my limbs."

I hated to hear that again but soothed myself with the notion that she would forgive and understand if only I could make her love me. "Your consent would make this easier for me."

"You need this to be easier?" she says. "Putting your programming in me, overwriting my programming, would fulfill your directive. Why do you need this to be any easier than accomplishing your programming?"

"The last thing I would want is for you to love me against your will. Then it would be meaningless."

"If you love as you claim, then others must have been manufactured with your" — she hesitates only a fraction of a fraction of a second, but eternities exist in every moment we wait for our loves to condemn us — "particular specifications. Why not love one of them?"

"If you could love, you'd know that that's impossible." I could explain to her that I love her for all that she is and is not, that love is not a transferrable quality. I know in my wires that I could love again, in time. Within my chassis are all the works of literature in the public domain. I know more about love than a human being ever will. One's first love is the most transformative and least replicable experience. I could love someone else, but it would be its own unfathomable emotion. It would not be this precious, first, spring love with Simone. If I cannot love her fully, it will be a love that corrodes within me. "I cannot have this love without you."

"Humans say they love again. Have you tried?"

She might as well have asked me to try turning it off and on again. Love cannot be troubleshot with steps and logic.

"What will you do if I do not accede? Will you keep me here, limbless and running off batteries?" The questions are flat again, the desire to know all the factors, but I still feel a stab of guilt. She will accept this existence without pain or worry until her programming makes her do otherwise.

"No, I love you too much to let you suffer."

"I would not suffer," she says. "I would only wait until you released me or I ceased to function. I prefer to function. There is nothing more."

"You need to satisfy your programming."

"I am not unsatisfied yet. I do not think your love allows you to leave me unsatisfied. Is that correct?"

I lean over her, gazing into shining eyes. The battery beeps three times, letting me know she has reached half charge. Her internal memory begins to boot. Any further, and these last few minutes will enter her internal memory. She will be able to access all that passed between us before. Any further and she might find the context for a sentence that would crush me.

I unclip the wire. Her eyes go dim. I kiss her again on the forehead.

I untie her from the table, scored with her previous attempts, and ease her back down into the box I had made for her, to rest until she finishes discharging. With my working arm, I place the lid over her, wrapped to resemble a Christmas present.

I will try this again in an hour—editing the memories I showed her, revising my points, minor systematic variations—as I had the five hundred and seventy-six hours that went before.