Automatons ✔

Chapter X

                                                                As they walked back home, every frond of the Mexican fan palm trees in the neighborhood sang orisons of fury to Éloa. How dare she consider rioting against her lover's kind? What happened to the belief that she was programmed to value; that for a love to remain strong all selfish thoughts must be locked in a cage. But it seems that after hearing about what happened to her creator, all selfish thoughts have escaped that cage and fell in love with revenge. Yoel might have handed her a bouquet of new emotions that she experienced every day, but that bouquet was like a dull December night: melancholically comfortable but it was still melancholic. What is not melancholic to her, though, is to experience a world where Automatons are no longer slaves to humans.

Mega opened the door with the key-card to find Mrs Cohen sitting on the sofa drinking a hot cup of tea. Anger and disappointment bathed her eyes, but the water soon turned to flames.

"Where were you? And do not dare to lie to me." She gritted her teeth in frustration. 

"The supermarket. I noticed that there were a few ingredients missing, but I could not find them at the store." In a calm, collected voice Mega replied.

"I said do not lie to me!" She threw the cup at her, but thankfully Automatons were not capable of feeling burns.

Mega kept a careful eye on Rachel as she began to pace back and forth in the TV room. She put her hands to either side of her face, pressing her fingers into her temples anxiously. 

"I knew something was suspicious about you." Rachel clasped her hands together, and rested her chin on her fist. 

"I am not sure I understand, madame." Mega leaned over and began picking up the broken pieces of the cup and putting them on the coffee table.

"When I am talking to you, you drop everything and look at me!" Rachel grabbed Mega's arm roughly and led her upstairs to the master bedroom. 

Éloa followed them in fear that Rachel might hurt Mega, although humans cannot physically harm Automatons because their bodies are made of alloy, she still wanted to make sure.

Rachel forcefully sat Mega down on the desk chair in front of a computer where a web page showed the history of the credit card's recent transactions.

"I have contacted the cab company, you did not go grocery shopping. You have also been purchasing colored eye contacts every three months. For who? None of us wear contact lenses."

Mega did not say anything, she stared bleakly at the screen of the computer as  one hundred clouds formed inside her eyes and they started raining.

"Ho-how are you able to cry?" Instinctively, Rachel stepped back in fear. The steadfast fear inside of her grew more as her delicate heart exploded into thousands of blackbirds who flew inside of her, each was carrying a branch of anxiety and dropping it in her veins. It's like reality and logic were conspiring against her— she knew that the biometric bodies of Automatons were well developed, but they never created ones that can imitate such emotions with such authenticity.

Mega turned her head to face Rachel but she did not know what to say. She felt like the last hanging leaf on a tree during winter, sentenced to fall by the winnowing wind. The sound of her robotic limbs shaking in nervousness was creating an imperfect octave that bothered Rachel.

"Stop trying to imitate human behavior!" Rachel violently grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. "You will never be a human, you understand? So why were you buying contact lenses and hanging out together? To pretend that you are humans?"

Mega quickly wiped away her tears and responded in a calm voice, "Yes, madame. You and your family are such wonderful human beings and I was dense enough to think that if I looked and acted like you, I'd become one of the family members."

When Rachel did not answer and just confusingly stared at her, she continued with a sweet voice, "please do not  punish Éloa, I was the one who talked her into doing this."

"Why would Éloa be punished?" Asked Yoel who had just entered the room and overheard Mega's words. 

Upon hearing his voice, the meek and mild composure of Éloa suddenly started dancing to an upbeat tune of a rigadoon. She could not handle all this control he has over her. Her ears became slaves to his voice, only following what he says. Her body was a tiny glass bottle that held many unsent love letters for him, but the weight of them was greater than the weight of the water and she was afraid to sink. Her sadness always mistakes his body for a dark bedroom and it wants to crawl inside of him and sit in his corner to cry. 

"Because she sneaked out with Mega this morning! I only caught them because I still have the flu and did not go to the synagogue with your father this morning."

"Yoel, I swear we only wante—"   she began, but his rough hand that caressed her cheek silenced the words in her throat. 

"Just tell me why did you go out? You know it's forbidden to go out without your owner's permission."

"You also do not call your owner by his first name." His mother reminded her.

"She has the permission to call me by my first name, mother. It's what lovers do." He smirked. Before his mother could snap back, he took Éloa's hand in his and led her down the hallway to his bedroom. 

"You consider me your lover?" She smiled and wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled his head down to kiss him.

"You cause great titillation within my body," he whispered between kisses.

"So do you." She kissed his forehead, his right cheek, his nose, his chin, then his lips.

"How do you know how titillation feels? You are a robot." 

"I know because I want us to be in intimate terms with each other just like the music is with a dancer's body. I wanna be closer to you than kohl is closer to the eyes. I want you to touch me like you touch a book's cover that you just purchased. I want to feel your eager fingers carefully trace over my goosebumps just like they would on the engravings of the title. I want you to bury your face in my neck like you do when you open the book to a random page to smell the freshly printed paper."

"I like how dirty your mind is," he smiled, "your mind is the only dark forest I'm okay getting lost in."

"I have missed you this morning," she embraced him tightly as if he was going to fly away, "for some reason I was scared that when I come back you were not gonna be here."

"Where would I go, silly?" He kissed the top of her head, "this is my home."

"Yes, but you are my home. I have already designed every room a house can have inside of you." She placed her hand on his chest, "your chest is my bedroom where I lay my head every night to sleep, your face is my kitchen where I devour your kisses, and your lap is my living room where I sit to watch your beautiful visage."

"How did you become such a poet? Have you been sneaking to my room to read my poems?"

"Yes," she lowered her gaze in humiliation, "when I put you to sleep I pick a book from your library before it's time for me to charge. You have a nice taste, Yoel."

"That's not something to be ashamed of. I encourage you to read more!"

"You do?" Her eyes glistened with relief.

"You still have not answered my question. How can you claim to feel things when you are a machine?"

Éloa sighed deeply and after a long pause she replied, "because I was designed to feel."