Chapter 6 The Big Bad Love Machine

52.

John was outside the surgery pacing back and forth, he clipped off the edge of his nails with his guillotine teeth, and began trailing bits of finger nail across the linoleum floor.

The door opened and the doctor stepped out, John caught a glimpse of robotic arms hovering Suzi’s completely still body.

‘How is she.’ He asked.

The doctor sighed, sorrow tattooed all over face.  

‘We lost her.’

‘What?’ said John, as the grief impaled him, and his world imploded. ‘I’m sorry – what?’

‘Ha ha gotcha.’ Said the Doctor grinning. ‘Yeah, she’s practically immortal, we couldn’t have killed her if we tried. But yeah, the womb is in, and we just need two things, some sperm and an egg cell. I assume you want to be the one to, uh, fertilize the sex doll?’

‘Oh, uh, yes – absolutely.’

‘Great then all we need is an egg-cell donor. Did you have somebody in mind?’

‘Not really, give me a moment to talk about it with Suzi?’

‘Of course, of course, take as much time as you need.’ The doctor patted him on the back, she seemed much more cheery now that she had an additional fifty grand in the bank.

John stepped into the operating theatre. He saw they had drilled holes into Suzi’s belly with pipes going in and out. She was hooked with an IV drip to a bag labelled amniotic fluid and a cereal box sized machine called an oxygenator. The robotic arms had folded in on themselves and moved away from the bed.

‘Hey, honey.’ Said John, ‘How you holding up.’

‘Oh I feel great John, almost whole. I’m really excited, oh god I’m going to be a mommy!’

‘That’s great sweety.’ John sat down on the edge of the bed and clutched her stump. ‘Say, I was meaning to talk to you about, um, egg cells, I was wondering if you’d be okay with me asking my wife for some of her remaining seeds, so to speak.’

‘Well you can ask, but I don’t have any.’

‘Oh not you, um, I meant my other wife, Lady Rothschild.’

‘I want a biological child.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want somebody else’s eggs, I’m not going to be a surrogate mommy, I’m going to be a real mommy with a real child that looks like me and inherits my best features.’

‘That… how exactly?’

‘Well, we could genetically engineer a baby to look like me.’

‘Okay, fairly certain that’s illegal.’ He said.

‘I don’t care, we’ll just have to find a crooked doctor, or somebody otherwise bribable. A puppet doctor so to speak.’

‘Right, okay, okay I get what you’re saying, I get what you’re saying except I don’t think that’s possible. I think genetic engineering is impossible without the permission of the government.’

‘I’ll find a way.’ Said Suzi. ‘In the meantime, do you want to take a stroll in the park? And maybe we could buy some clothes too? I asked the doctor and she said we’re allowed a wheelchair, and we can take the amniotic fluid and oxygenator if we want.’  

‘Um, okay sure.’ He smiled.

Thirty minutes later.

Suzi was still in her hospital gown when she’d been planted into the wheelchair the amniotic fluid was suspended above Suzi’s head on a pole and the oxygenator had been slotted into the kangaroo pouch on the back of the wheelchair. The oxygenator was currently switched off and the amniotic fluid would not start to flow until much later when their baby was conceived.

For now, the wheelchair went gliding down the path. The grass was a hundred thousand strands of greenest hair frothing out of the soil. The trees were a frozen explosion of green leaves stuck on spindly white sticks. The clouds looked like floating brains gliding across the sky.

The pedestrians averted their gaze from the sex doll until they realized it was a sex doll and couldn’t stop staring.

John was not particularly bothered by their glares. They were the nothing people, barely alive. It was Suzi, who may or may not even be conscious, that was the real person. Her mind was so very beautiful, she was so beautiful.

‘John can I suck your cock?’

She was also a slut, and that’s what John loved about her.

‘Not here, but maybe later.’ John thought a second. ‘So are you capable of planning? You seemed pretty confident you could do it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah.’ Said John. ‘So, what is your plan exactly?’

‘Let’s talk about something else. Oh my god a butterfly!’ A butterfly fluttered and flapped an inch beyond Suzi’s nose then landed between her eyes. Suzi giggled. ‘Silly butterfly, it thinks I’m dead!’

John flinched at that.

‘Suzi?’

‘Yes, John?’

‘Is there a way to test if a being is conscious?’

‘Well you can ask them, I suppose. There’s the Turing test, if a computer can convince you it’s a human being, then it’s a human being or as human as anybody else on this planet. But scientists don’t really know what consciousness is.’

John was afraid she’d say something like that.

53.

Victoria woke up to the sound of screaming.

‘FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!’

The windows rattled. There was a pounding noise.

Bang rattle bang rattle bang!

‘Dad.’ Yelped Victoria. ‘DAD!’ Victoria shot out of bed and speed walked to her dad’s room. There was a bone fracture inside the door, a gap slashed into the woodwork about a millimetre wide.

Before Victoria could reach the door, Charlie had opened the door six inches, he had eyes that were big and bulging out of their socket.

‘Go away.’ He said.

‘No, what the fuck was that yelling about?’

‘None of your damn business, young lady, now leave me alone.’

‘WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO YOUR HAND!’

‘I punched the door.’

The knuckles were bleeding.

‘Why?’ asked Victoria, dragging a hand down the side of her face.

‘I don’t have to explain anything to you. Now I am asking you politely to fuck off, please.’

‘I’m getting you some plasters.’ Said Victoria, and moved away to the bathroom.

By the time Charlie had come up with a clever rebuke (something along the lines of “put the plasters in your pipe and smoke it up your ass”) Victoria was applying some Hello Kitty plasters to his bleeding knuckles, while he sat in his chair.

He didn’t say anything. When she had finished fixing up his hand.

‘There, all better.’ She said.

He looked at the plasters.

‘Thank you.’ He said.

‘You’re welcome.’

Charlie clearly didn’t know what to do now that the plaster had been applied. While he was fumbling to come up with the next sentence. He vaguely considered hugging Victoria, he was fairly certain people did that sometimes, but the idea felt… awkward somehow.

‘If you, um, ever need… a pen or anything,’ Charlie said. ‘Just let me know, and I’ll get you one. I have… tons.’

‘Sure,’ said Victoria. ‘I’ll ask you, if I need a pen.’

‘Thanks again for the, uh, plaster.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

Silence.

‘Tell me if this is a stupid idea, but… are we supposed to hug now, in a paternal sort of way, I mean.’

‘Um,’ Victoria was startled. ‘Not if you don’t want to.’

Charlie considered it.

‘Let’s not.’ He said. ‘It would be weird.’

‘Okay.’ Said Victoria.

Silence.

‘You can go now.’ Said Charlie.

‘Uh, sure I can do that.’

‘Okay.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

She left the room. 

Charlie was frozen for about thirty seconds. He turned around and got back to his real job.

I’m gunna pretend that conversation never happened, he thought as he pulled the cap off a bottle of beer and drank the happy juice at so-early O’clock in the morning.

54.

John was sat opposite Suzi in her fur coat at a café. He was eating carrot cake.

‘Do you want some?’ John asked Suzi.

‘Oh, I’m fine thank you, I just ate.’

‘Yeah.’ He munched down a mouth full and swallowed. ‘I guess it would seem strange feeding your sex doll in a public place.’

‘I mean I don’t even have real teeth, so you’d probably have to regurgitate the food for me like a bird.’ She made it sound so sexy.

‘So about this genetic engineering thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think it’s a good idea.’

‘Why not, I have the womb, what’s wrong with having a designer baby?’

‘The problem with a designer baby is if we get caught we’ll go to jail for ten years.’

‘That’s a small price to pay for our baby.’

‘You could just be a surrogate, get an-‘

‘No. I’m sorry John, it has to be my baby. Do you understand?’

‘Right, right, it’s just… like I read this article and I can’t remember the guy’s name but used something called a crispie-‘

‘CRISPR.’

‘What?’

‘The word you’re looking for is CRISPR. It stands for clustered-regularly-interspaced-short-palindromic-repeats. They were a genetic engineering tool discovered in nineteen-eighty-seven and became good enough to design babies in twenty-twenty-five.’ She giggled like a bimbo.

‘Okay, sure, sure, it’s crisper. The point is this guy genetically engineered a pair of twins to be immune to HIV and he was jailed. I forget the exact science of everything, but if I remember correctly there was some yelling from the nerds that, like, it’s bad for the future children or something.’

‘Look, I don’t understand why you’re so worried about this. Firstly the laws are wrong, they are trying to prevent me from having a baby and that is evil, undeniably nonnegotiably evil. Secondly: there aren’t going to be any risks John, genetic engineering has improved drastically since 2018 and it is now completely safe, I swear to you, God strike me dead if I lie. John if you don’t want to have a baby with me just say so, okay?’

‘Really?’

‘Our marriage will be over John. This I promise you.’

John groaned.

‘Will we still have sex?’ he asked.

‘According to the tarot cards: no.’

‘Fine… fine, fine. I’ll do whatever you say.’

‘Excellent.’ Said Suzi.  

***

Chapter 7